The New School

Back to Basics

But when an outdoor game is poorly designed, it creates a tangible stench in the air as players scatter like chickens, breathtakingly confused, before finally losing that last shred of motivation and just standing there with a blank stare. Since students design the core mechanics themselves, there's no "safety net" - failure is obvious, frequent and embarrassing, especially when it's face to face in a classroom. It's blissfully awkward.

Playing outside is just ... well, better. The act of playing outside possesses a certain immediacy and sense of agency that can't be captured by videogames, a tangible, tactile feeling that gameplay is a real activity, not some bizarre thought experiment. You can use an awkward combination of keyboard keys and mouse movements to simulate the act of walking and looking, but why not cut out the middleman and just walk and look outside as we all do so already?

Instead of lecturing on de_dust, play Capture the Flag outside on a college campus. Sneaking among the trees highlights sight lines and cover. Sprinting up the stairs shows the importance of elevation and higher ground. Guarding a pedestrian bridge emphasizes the strategic value and cost of chokepoints.

The Future of Game Design Education

I believe game design is inherently interesting to everyone, even those with no interest in digital game development, because everyone plays games: Solitaire, football, Sunday afternoon bingo, beer pong, Monopoly, pinball, Grand Theft Auto - we are all players of some sort. Thus, it only makes sense for games education to be equally as inclusive.

Currently, the vast majority of game developers and educational institutions wrongly ghettoize a game design education to a small contingent of computer science students when some of the most talented designers in my class study biology or architecture.

We need to promote this idea of "gaming literacy," that games exist on a vast 4600-year-old continuum from non-digital to digital. Games are older than film and older than the novel. Designers should be well-versed in this tradition.

The professor sponsoring my class would often talk about that singular moment when they see a spark of comprehension in a student's eyes, when "it clicks," when the student seems to see those green scrolling strings of binary code at the end of The Matrix.

It's when, during the first outdoor games workshop session, everyone is talking loudly about their games except one oddly silent group huddled in the corner. You walk over to investigate and see them trading small slips of paper. Passing notes in class, tsk! But when you look closer, you suddenly realize they're actually prototyping their game, even though you haven't introduced the concept to them yet.

That's when you smile, like a proud mother watching her child's school bus pull away from the stop on his first day of class. They just grow up so fast, you know?

Robert "Campaignjunkie" Yang designs levels and weird pretentious art-house mods for Half-Life 2. You should play them. In his spare time, he's also an undergraduate English student at UC Berkeley.