More Slides About Game Design

Last week I had the pleasure of giving another guest lecture for Roxana Hadad's awesome online Game Design & Development course for  Year 10 students in the UK (they'd be freshmen in the American HS system). Last year I gave a talk to her students about genre, but this year I decided to change it up a bit seeing as genre isn't necessarily the most useful construct in actually designing games. Instead I presented the idea of approaching game design as an inquiry process (using the term inquiry loosely). If you click the image below, you can download my slides for the talk as a .pdf.

Sometime later this week I'll try to post some content explaining what each slide was about, although hopefully many of them are self explanatory. I should also note that I've got a ton of screen shots in here, and I continue to borrow Valve's TF2 fonts for these presentations. If anyone has a better attribution for something than the ones I've provided, do let me know.

Talking genre in games

A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to give a guest lecture in Roxana Hadad's online course on game design. The topic was genre in video games, and the (arguably) ambitious title of my presentation was Exploding Genre in Games. I've attached the presentation (as a .ppt) below. Click to download in .ppt. The exploding head came out of a Google image search, apologies for not having a better cite. I should mention two things about it:

1. The fonts and chalkboard are borrowed from TF2. I'm not sure if that's entirely legal, but if Valve takes notice of it for some reason at least I'll have made an impression before asking them for a job ;)
2. I used Dan Kline's taxonomy in this talk and took a pass at modifying it based on some issues I had around classifying some games. In the process, I kind of butchered the placement of the games Roxana's students are currently playing and a core feature of the chart (Platformers are misplaced), apologies Dan.

I'd love to talk through the core ideas from the lecture here and I've also had a bunch of other thoughts on the matter that deserve mention, but I'm going to post on them at a later date. If I start trying to write them down now I'll never get this post up, and it's almost two weeks late as is. In other news, the dissertation proceeds apace.

Click to read more ...