I have occasionally thought that pursuing an advanced degree is a bit like playing a game… a massive, cumbersome, complex game. Maybe that’s a sign I think about games too much Recently, I had a rude awakening regarding the structure of this game I’m playing: they changed the rules on me. Rather, the rules […]
“It’s not a mistake, it’s an iteration. I’m a game designer — everything I say is a prototype.”
- Brenda Brathwaite
[Warning: Rant Forthcoming] The extra credit assignment I posted last week was a mysteriously unqualified failure. Not a single student submitted a ruleset. When discussing this with Brenda, we were both scratching our heads to try and understand why no one bothered even to submit a half-assed idea. All I asked for was two typed […]
This challenge is for students in Brenda’s current Game Design Criticism and Analysis class, but if any non-SCAD readers feel particularly inspired, you’re welcome to post your ideas to this topic.
Task: Reinvent Chess
Description: For this project, you must write a ruleset for a new board game that only uses chess paraphernalia. This is not a […]
Hot on the heels of a most successful conference were the awards for Entelechy, SCAD’s annual interactive design and game development departmental showcase and competition. It is open to all students at SCAD to submit their best work in a variety of categories, including: digital game, character modeling, concept art, environment/level design, paper/board game, card […]
Today I head out for Atlanta to visit the SCAD campus there and attend GDX - the Game Developer’s Exchange, SCAD’s own micro-game developer conference. I very much enjoyed the conference last year — meeting interesting and unique people like Don Daglow, Marc Mencher, and Davey Jackson. This year we have an equally impressive crowd […]
An unusual group project I worked on last quarter produced an interesting board game, and today the postmortem goes up on GameCareerGuide. This is the second postmortem I have written for GCG — the first was for Cowboy Cave, and if you read the two you’ll notice more than a little difference in the described […]
Yesterday, in my role as Teaching Assistant to Brenda for this quarter’s section of Game Design Criticism & Analysis, I supervised a student play session of Carcassonne. I noticed some interesting dynamics emerge between the players…
While not a trading game, Carcassonne incorporates a fair amount of diplomacy and interplayer negotiation. The tiles are the core […]
The other day I was present during a workshop in one of Brenda’s courses, in which students have to design a game using six object selected from the aptly-named “Box of Crap:” a largely random collection of dice, toys, and miscellaneous junk on the order of the sort you’d find in a vending machine or […]
[Republished from my thesis blog. See the previous example for more info.]
One possibility I have considered for the enactment of my game is placing players in the position of the evildoer.
I mentioned in a previous post the McDonald’s Flash game, in which players play as corporate magnates shepherding a simplified McDonalds corporation. The objective […]