The Plan

Because this course depends so much on the particular interests and backgrounds of those participating, any plan or schedule is a guess. We will fill it out as we go along and make changes to what’s already there. We want to walk a middle ground between organization and freedom. The plan below should give you an idea of the themes and activities we will participate in. You should use them not as a calendar of events, but as a way to begin to imagine how your own interests might relate.

This flexibility is something important to learning but usually ignored in school. Besides wanting to reintroduce it to my classes generally, this course specifically deals with themes that are quickly evolving. My plan for 2015 (the last time I thought the course) is already out of date at least in the following ways:

  • Pokemon Go did not exist then
  • ARIS, our foremost AR design platform, had fewer mechanics and was still in a very rough beta then
  • Trump was not our president
  • City on the Edge, a podcast about ABQ, did not exist then
  • Previously, this course was taught once a week.

There are more, but you get the point. Mobile place-based game design is not like Calculus which pretty much hasn’t changed in a couple hundred years. It is a perspective from which we try to understand a quickly evolving world, using tools that are changing just as quickly. There is no canon. If our work is to be honest, it must at least in some sense evolve in response to both the change in the world and to the unique experiences, skills, and interests of those who are in it.

Learning Goal 1 Be curious and take responsibility for it. The most important thing I am looking for you to do in this class is to take this skeleton of ideas as an opportunity. Infuse it with life and make it ours. A reactive stance: simply responding to assignments is not enough.

Warning 1 This will be confusing at first. Hang in there. This is a complex space and it won’t feel comfortable until we get to see things from a few angles.

Rough Outline

  1. Gain basic experience relevant to AR games and the city (weeks 1-5)
  2. Come up with ideas for our own local games (individual) and pitch to others (week 6-8)
  3. Form teams, begin R&D to realize a prototype and supporting materials (week 9-14)
  4. Wrap up and reflect (week 15-6)

In the beginning, we will dive into the subject matter, and as we become comfortable, each of you will prototype a local “game”. You will then make pitches to the other students, the shark tank, to try to gain coworkers to realize your vision. Once teams are set, the goal is to produce the most powerful experience you can in the time provided (if you make something that gets you really excited, independent studies in following semesters are always available). You will produce a working prototype of this idea:

  • Make something that can be used and run it through public playtests, and
  • produce two pieces of writing about your game
    • a Kickstarter-type page, and
    • a mock conference proposal).

In addition to these post-mortems, various other supplemental materials may be warranted on a case by case basis. The idea is to finish the semester with enough preliminary results to make specific plans for pursuing your vision, whether that be community organizing, publication, conference proposals, or seeking funding to develop your project further.

The plan below and schedule only includes 12 weeks. This allows us space to schedule trips off campus and work with community members and experts without needing to worry about missing something else. We will work together in the first couple weeks to determine these other opportunities. The assigned readings and other media are somewhat sparse. This is to give us a bare minimum of shared experience across a number of disciplines and knowledge bases relevant to our field of inquiry. It is not sufficient to produce expertise. It is expected that you will use this partial reading list as a jumping off point to finding other relevant work to inform your thinking and designs.

Part 1 – Basic Experience and Perspective

Consider the themes relevant to our work. None of us is an expert at all. Some of us may have some deep experience in some. The first few weeks, we will try to get some very basic grounding in at least most of these areas. We will explore some of the city ourselves, listen to others’ perspectives on it, and learn a bit about how to dig deeper. We will play AR games, learn how to make them, and a bit about how games can be put to interesting purposes. But our first task we be to unpack the secret of creativity (stealing), get to know each other’s ideas and relevant experiences, and learn a bit about how to work together.

Week 1 – Introductions

Take a deep breath and jump in.

This course is likely to be a pretty different place than many others, and asks you to go different places in different ways. Today’s intro should help everyone feel welcome and make sure you’re ready and willing to go further.

We will do some Official Business (TM) (course, overview, expectations, etc.).

  • Tools for coursework: Slack, G. Drive, ARIS, etc.
  • Off site work
  • Media Permissions
  • Going with the flow

And try to get to the actual work to be done. There’s a lot to learn about, and much of this will be brand new to a lot or all of you. Some of our themes:

  • Our city – what is out there and how to get involved
  • Videogames – how they work and how to make use of them
  • Game design – turns out a lot of people can do this and you don’t need to be a programmer
  • Mobile – figure out what is this ubiquitous technology good for

The work we do is at the join of these themes and the only reasonable way for newcomers to tackle something big like this in 16 short weeks is to jump right in. There’s a term that gets used a lot in the games and learning literature “performance before competence”. Classes typically get this backwards. They prepare you by having you learn how to do something and then maybe someday you will apply it. Good games and we will do the reverse. We will get involved in these areas and hopefully by the end begin to understand what’s really involved. All the hard, worthwhile work in this world works the same way. You don’t really know what it is or how to succeed until you’re there trying.

The first warning is that it can be scary to jump right in. But know that this course is a safe place. You are not judged by what you know or do before we begin but the extent to which your curiosity and effort propel you once we begin. When confused, ask each other questions, and follow your hearts. We are all in this together.

We will begin by getting situated with names, signed up for various services, and some light brainstorming discussions about ABQ and games.

Tuesday
Read/Watch/Listen

Discuss

  • Business
  • Expectations
  • Tools
  • ABQ

Decide

  • What AR games to play first

Thursday
Read/Watch/Listen

  • Introduction in Albuquerque: A city at the end of the world by V.B. Price

Discuss

  • Slack and any of the other tech for class
  • Unclear business
  • Hopes and dreams

Play

  • AR game chosen last time – Pokemon Go and Los Duendes

Week 2 – Games in Places

This week, we will extend our understanding of games, and make connections back to place and Albuquerque.

Tuesday
Read/watch/listen

  • Introduction in Albuquerque: A city at the end of the world by V.B. Price (If you missed it)
  • Jane McGonigal: Gaming can make a better world
  • Jim Gee (pronounced like the letter “g”): Games and Education
  • “Hello” and “In the Beginning, There is the Designer” in The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses by Jesse Schell
  • Find and read an article online about the meanings of Pokemon Go.

Discuss

  • Price’s 9 themes as lenses for ABQ
  • Games and Learning (McGonigal and Gee)
  • How games work (Schell)
  • Examples of relevant games, classes, etc.
  • Going to the Veterans’ Memorial next Tuesday?

Do

  • Add the article to our database (Title, Author, Publication, etc.) along with a short analysis of major points.

Thursday

Read/watch/listen

  • Read the reviews of Pokemon articles, and develop ideas, questions for discussion. If Pokemon Go is the Archetype of AR games, what can its design, play and meaning imply about this genre? What questions should we address together?
  • “The Experience Rises out of a Game” in The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses by Jesse Schell

Discuss

  • Pokemon Go and its meanings related to place
  • Any remaining details for Thursday
  • Brainstorm about how/where to explore ABQ
  • Create activity for Tuesday’s trip, likely using siftr.

Do

  • Place-Issue Response, a brainstorm about how an issue that comes up in Pokemon Go relates to one of the 9 frameworks for the city V.B. Price lists for his book on p. 8. Make a copy of the template, then fill it out and title the page and the file. Send the link to Slack when you’re done and ready for others to read (maybe in a new channel?)
  • Start a discussion about the meanings of Pokemon Go on Slack. Pose questions, develop ideas, make connections.

Week 3 – Into Albuquerque

This week we will focus on how we get to know Albuquerque. V.B. Price’s book and The City on the edge podcast will give us a bit of shared background to ground our future discussions and ideas. One great hope I have is that we can begin exploring not only the space of ideas about the city, but the city itself. This is something you need to bring to the game though. Getting out there, seeing things, talking to people, this is the first bit of independent work that will come to represent the semester. We may be traveling as a group or on our own this week.

Tuesday
Read/watch/listen

  • Beginning through chapter 4 of Albuquerque: City at the end of the world by V.B.Price
  • Episode 6 of City on the Edge – Newcomers

Do

  • Go to Albuquerque Veterans’ Memorial
  • Use others’ place-issue responses to discuss issues and places via Slack. Start thinking about the connections between reflection and action. For any of these important issues, what could a “game” do? How might the features of AR help other people get to know a new place, or a new way of seeing a place they think they already know?

Thursday

Discuss

  • Reflect on and brainstorm around issues brought up before and what we saw and did at the Veterans’ Memorial.
  • Places and themes from reading and podcast, how they connect to each other, our interests.

Do

  • Use Slack to get this discussion started. Combine ideas, come up with new ones, take them to other places.

Week 4 – Issues, Places, Themes and Variations

This is our last introductory week, a time where we gather up some of the threads from the previous three, anything else that may be simmering, and unpack the secrets of creativity: stealing.

Tuesday
Read/watch/listen

Discuss

  • Overview of major themes in the history of ABQ.
  • Consolidate brainstormed lists of possible places, issues, and themes that might guide our designs.
  • Discuss Price’s ideas and perspectives.

Thursday
Read/watch/listen

Kirby Ferguson

More (optional) on Everything is a Remix

Do

  • We will meet at Zimmermann Library and play Zimm
  • Make use of Slack to post ideas, ask questions, follow up, brainstorm, make plans, etc. (before class). Right now, it’s a ghost town.

Part 2 – Tools and Procedures

Now that we have some basic and common experience thinking about games, place, and learning, it’s time to dig into what will eventually become your projects. We will spend some time getting acquainted with software and methods for pursuing a design as a group. We will also spend some time researching, brainstorming, pitching, and arriving at teams and plans.

Although I have an idea of what we will be working on each week, this is where our actual needs will begin to depend on the ideas, skills, and experiences of those present. We will be flexible in what we devote our time to and how.

Week 5 – Intro to ARIS

This week we begin to look at actually making games. I will show you the basics of ARIS, an AR game design tool I am especially involved with. While doing the technical stuff on one side, we can also keep our game design and place discussions going in the background. We will also develop and decide among possible resources for digging further into place.

Goals

  • Discuss your variations from last week
  • ARIS 101 workshop
  • What is AR?
  • Brainstorm what resources to use to further dig into place

Do

OR

  • A variation on another exhibit/trip/book/etc. (link to your prior in the template).

Tuesday

  • ARIS 101 Workshop

Do

  • Remix Assignment

Thursday

  • What is AR?

Read

Look up information about ARIS, projects, community, tutorials

Do

  • Questions about ARIS

Week 6 – Recreating Walks with Scrum, Learning about Games for Homework

This week we will combine our knowledge of ARIS, experience of local places, existing games, and the remix mentality to practice making something new and real. We will do this using a version of a method known in the software industry as Scrum, so as to begin to learn ways of working together that are more flexible for small teams and easy to do when it is hard to meet in person.

We will be practicing design processes without worrying about what becomes of the products.

On the back burner, we’ll read and discuss about the proposition of using videogames for real world purposes, a topic we have not been to since week 1.

Tuesday

Read/Watch/Listen

  • How to do Things with Videogames Introduction and any 1 chapter.
  • Revisit “The Experience Rises out of a Game” in The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses by Jesse Schell

Do

  • Document your chapter in How to do Things with Videogames (copy a template in Drive, post link in Slack, update spreadsheet)
  • Make something for fun in ARIS or with another tool. It doesn’t even have to be digital. It should relate to a local place or a theme you have identified, and be playable in 5 minutes or less. Bring this to class Tuesday, ready to have others try it. Keep it little. 5 objects max. More details in the template. Make a copy, yaddah, yaddah.

In class

  • Look at each others’ designs
  • Combine designs into new group designs
  • Share chapters
  • Learn about Scrum

Thursday

Watch /read

  • The Game Layer on Top of the World by Seth Priebatsch
  • Each group member pick one of the following chapters from Schell: 7, 8, 9, 15. Every group member read Chapter 23.

Do

  • Make a comment/suggestion on others’ groups designs
  • Work with your new group to find a common understanding of your design and where to go with it, and share ideas from the chapters in Schell (or Bogost) that feel relevant.

In Class

  • Use Scrum to add to group designs

Week 7 – Practice development, Shark Tank

We will practice the work of designing together across in-class and out of class experiences. Using what we have learned about teamwork, AR design, and places, in the second half of the week, we will have pitches for big group projects and award the best with fake money. This is not the same as, but may help with deciding which to go forward with.

Tuesday

In class

  • Try group games
  • Discuss possibilities for things to hide and unhide
  • Discuss some uses of games and how they might fit a local context.

Listen/read

Do

  • Using a design board, design documents of some kind, continue Scrum between sessions. Each group needs to share summary of what they worked on between Thursday and Tuesday, a list of tasks that were created, moved.

Thursday

In Class

  • Give pitches
  • Ask questions about each other’s pitches
  • Award winners with fake money
  • Produce short lists of questions to address in proposals

Do

Produce a 3 min. pitch and proposal about a possible team project.

Week 8 – Pick teams & Fall Break

It can be tricky business to pick ideas and form teams. That we do so quickly is perhaps more important than what teams we pick. The idea is to get started after Tuesday’s class, if not before. We will also include a bit of formal game design readings to give you a leg up on your design work.

** Tuesday**

In Class

  • Try to decide ideas and form teams.

Read

A bit of formal game design theory. My hope is this will help you think about all the internal pieces of your projects in terms of their outcomes through their use.

  • [Mechanics, Dynamics, and Aesthetics] by Hunicke,
  • The Designer Creates an Experience in The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses by Jesse Schell
  • Chapter 4 The Game Consists of Elements in Schell (note: begins on p. 39, there is a missing page from the ToC in the shared pdf).

Do

  • Use the time before Tuesday to get as close to teams as you can get. Use both Slack and Google docs to read, comment, and remix each others’ proposal ideas.
  • Address questions posed by class as an addendum to your proposal.

Part 3 – Production

This third part of the course is where all the real work gets done. Hopefully attentiveness to ideas in the first half have led you to a place where you understand your interests, see a crack to exploit, know a potential, and have a team that is ready to learn to work together. Part 3 is the world you do as a team in and outside of class to produce that vision.

In previous semesters, I’ve tried to give teams as much time as possible to work on their designs. But this time, I’d like to consider moving the design finales to around week 12/13. The main reason: by the time we get to the end of the semester, no one cares anymore. You forget about your work the same day you finish it. And the large amount of time just adds pressure. A small prototype is appropriate for this course.

Instead, we will have at the end, some further reflection and light research, public sharing, and maybe some playful design activities.

Week 9 – First Scrum Together

This is a work week. In your newly formed groups, we will run through two scrum-sprint sessions. The idea is not so much to generate game content, but to plan your work and understand the scope of your design. I will ask each team to work towards a proposal and to identify key aspects of their design and questions to address.

For Next Week

  • Continue work in your groups. Document your progress for me in this first week of independent work.
  • Begin to figure out how your new team is going to work together. Meet at least once outside class and make a list of elements necessary to research, articulate, and complete your design.

Watch

Week 10 – Project Proposals and Feedback

In Class

Each design will get 3 minutes to present and two minutes for Q&A. The point is to get some peer feedback so your perspective on your work is not too narrow. This is another area where the conceptual framework we’ve been building (about how games work, what mobile has to offer, how to dig into our surroundings, what other media and projects address the same issues, etc.) can be employed to consider specific design choices or understand and improve processes. Giving useful feedback is hard, and to a lesser extent, it is hard to rethink your idea once you’ve built momentum towards production. In all of the projects I’ve seen, each would have been better off to have produced less content of higher quality or which is more thought through.

The week will have time for teams to work together as well as to have one-on-one discussions with me about their ambitions and any technical support we might need.

Week 11 – Check In and Playtest

You’ve all had a bit of time to dig into your projects now. Time to think carefully about how we get to the end of the semester. We will make a plan for the last few weeks and get all the ducks in a row about what you need to produce and how you get there.

Each group should have a small amount of playable content ready for this week that we can try out on campus, something they can put in front of others and see how it goes.

It is also a good time to be making plans for the end of the semester. Here’s the list of all the products you are responsible for in the course of producing your project. More on each of these here.

  • Your design board
  • Design docs
  • Conference Proposal/Post-Mortem
  • Kickstarter AKA Design Showcase
  • Press Kit (well, you don’t need to do anything for this. I just need a couple pieces of media from your Kickstarter to use elsewhere)

Note that the following weeks are loosely structured. I will try to give prescient feedback through what you share. It is your responsibility to share early and often with me and the other students in class. Use Slack. Come to office hours. Ask to add agenda to our class meetings ahead of time so we can be prepared to work on specific issues while we are together.

Listen

Week 12 – Live Playtest

This week you will have the chance to get feedback on your game’s progress from me and from members of other teams, hopefully in the actual settings where you game is designed to be played. We will meet at a relevant location to play them, and may need to extend this work if there are many locaitons.

Have a fifteen minute demo ready. We will rotate in groups so that each group gets feedback from another and from me. Since the place is only relevant to one group, the others will need to find more generic ways to demo. If specific places would be helpful for other teams, the following two weeks should provide opportunities, but they should be scheduled in advance.

For Next Week

Create a rough draft of your Kickstarter and Conference Proposals. Make tough decisions about what you have time to work on and what you need to cut out. Use your design docs and design boards to help make and show this work.

In class, we will assess progress and you will get feedback about the work that remains. We will spend the remaining time looking at problems/questions/progress in the necessary details for your auxiliary products.

Part 4 – Reflection and Refinement

Whew, all the really hard work of game design is mostly done. We did that early so there was some actual time in the semester for reflection of what it was you tried to do and what you experienced along the way. We will have some public events and final products to aim for, but in general, the idea is to look back on what we tried to do and see what it meant. It is also a time to imagine the future. What if we had this to do over again? What do we know about learning and place that we didn’t before/ In what ways have we grown closer to our city?

Week 13 – Make a Game For Next Year

In Class

If we don’t find another place to go…let’s take a break from the grind of your projects to use our technical skills on a brand new project.

Suggested Themes: Rename the Pit, Find Wolves, Pokemon

For Next Week

Use our design activity as a way to reflect on the play experience in your design. In what ways did you balance content delivery with the act of playing the game? What would you change now?

Week 14 – Turkey

Rough Draft of Paper and Kickstarter due 11/23

We will have practice talks this week. If there is time, we may be able to work on specific issues and bugs with games for next week’s public talks and public playtest.

Week 15 – Feedback on Games/Written Materials

You’re never as ready for the public as you think. So this week we will take the time to run through each others’ game demos and auxiliary products in preparation for the public events. Take notes on what goes wrong and what shows promise.

For Next Week

Work on your public talks, fix your games, and get those auxiliary documents together.

Week 16 – Games Showcase

In this final week, you will show off your completed games. We will invite the general public to hear about and play or demo our games.

Before Finals Week

Finalize your Kickstarter and Conference Proposals. Final drafts of anything to be considered for a grade in this class are due 12/8.

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