The Curriculum: Preface and Goals
I knew that when I blocked out this column, what I wanted to do was create a game design curriculum from "blue sky" standards. In other words, I wanted to do what every game designer wants to do, and make a perfect scenario with no kowtowing to such limitations as resource availability or practical economic feasibility whatsoever.
However, acknowledging that all game design is in fact about intentional limitations, what I decided on was a core program that remains its own discipline but pulls individual courses from other fields as much as possible. This was both out of a desire for my effort to have some utility and to avoid a lot of reinvention of the wheel that goes on in some programs. I do believe that, while game design is distinctly its own discipline, it is related to many others and benefits greatly from their instruction.
What you're going to see here is a degree that has a lot of:
- Math. It's a universal language, it is in fact your friend and if you don't learn to like it, you'd better find another line of work.
- Practical application. This is a sticking point for many university programs, but in game design the raw fact is that there are still a lot of things you can't learn without doing. The saving grace for academics is that keyword learn; this isn't specifically training (that's what internships and co-ops are for, and you do them on your own time), it's just another kind of learning, instruction and research. You'll see below that I've included two full years of eight credits each devoted to this: Applied Game Design, which is intended to be a solo project taken from start to finish (and scaled accordingly), and a Capstone year in Applied Game Development, which should be undertaken as a team. And finally ...
- Electives. Ultimately what makes a person unique as a game designer is their influences. I believe that game design has enough in common with art that it needs a strong degree of flexibility to flourish. This is also, of course, a min-maxing opportunity, and allows students to further refine their degree according to what genre of games they wish to specialize in initially.
* Either (but not both) of these semesters can potentially be replaced by a co-op position as a game designer or a game development internship. Ideally the co-op position would be concurrent with a previous or following summer internship to get maximum exposure time to a title in progress.
** What I mean here is effectively "game studies" or "games and society" or some form of rigorous cultural study looking at the intersection of games and modern society - what they signify, who they impact, etc. I do think that this course should be designed and instructed by a philosophy professor specializing in ethics, preferably one who knows a lot of Kant, but that last is my own personal bias.
***I've seen courses called this in many places, but to be specific, this should be a course taught by a literature professor specifically about novels, how they are structured, and involve long papers of in-depth literary analysis. The position this holds is intended to provide a study of storytelling hybridized with the philosophical discipline of presenting an organized analytical argument.
