Creating a video game development course for my university - what should students learn?
- Thread starter Aerosteam
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Okay, I can tell you're winding up for a rant, but c'mon, I never said anything about not including whatever non-PC idea you want, nor anything about trying to make a game "non-offensive". Just that you should look at what you create through a critical lense to make sure you aren't sending any messages you don't mean to.Zenja said:
Good for you.
No? Natural consequence. Games getting full 1st amendment protections means that games can't be arbitrarily banned at a governmental level for their content, means games get to go wild on what they choose to show. For that matter, that slide isn't saying "games shalt be ideological propaganda", it's saying that this nebulous quality known as "politics" is inherently woven into media we create, and we should acknowledge that.
Again, who the fuck is saying politics and ideology should be a "central theme" in anything? Just have the intellectual honesty to say it's there. You cannot make a piece of media that is "non-political". It's functionally impossible.
If your game is not based on some not very widespread language, you want it to be distributable worldwide. Which means taking censorship rules outside of your country into account, think about foreign sensibilities and explain context that would be known in your domestic market.altnameJag said:
Games are more profitable the wider the reach.
I am not really sure about the politicalimplications of Tetris, but es, you should not get out of your way to avoid politics. But when your game is perceived as http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Anvilicious that will annoy customers. Even if they actually agree with the message, obviously moreso, if they don't agree. It is not necessary for that annoyance that it is a central theme. It is enough, if the politics part is perceived as unneccessarily tacked on or poorly thought out or clashing with other themes of the game or badly reasoned for or cringeworthy in itself.
To avoid this, you need immense skill, especcially as your game probably has a very diverse target group and you wand the apolitical 14-year old to not be confused and the 35 year old academic to not be bored or feel insulted.
Yes, exactly. You have to be mindful of what your game is actually portraying instead of merely what you want it to portray in order to not, well, "accidentally a hitler".Satinavian said:
Making good games is hard. Making good games with strong narratives that aren't afraid to touch on real-world symbology is very hard.
That said, some people can "perceive" anything about your game, factual or not. I mean, for some people, the simple act of having a non-white male protagonist and a white male antagonist is shoving SJW politics down their throat. *shrug*
And now, a fun aside where I navel-gave upon the politics of Tetris, the Russian game where you score points by making irregular blocks conform into a homogeneous mass, whereupon they disappear from sight and extend your playtime. Naturally, you get more points when you make larger groupings of interestingly shaped individuals conform for the greater good.[footnote]I swear to god, if anybody takes this too seriously...[/footnote]
Anywho, we've got things like the first Multi-User Dungeons gracing the nascent internet being created by a communist who wanted people to have the freedom to choose their own class, or the classic Missile Command, where you had to use nukes to stave off a larger nuclear attack. The choices are inherently political there: Do you use your limited firing rate to try and save all of your cities with a weaker defensive net? Or are you a "hard man making hard choices" and deliberately sacrifice your outlying cities to form a stronger net around your central ones. Not to mention, you can't actually win Missile Command: the realities of nuclear war prevent it. On this point, specifically, I'm not just bullshitting: Dave Theurer, the creator, had nightmares about cities being hit during and after development. It was a very disturbing topic back during the Cold War after all.
I think this needs a distinction: is this about video game development, ie. the process of creating a game from idea to storefront, or video game design, ie. about deciding what kind of game you want to make, translating the idea to gameplay mechanics, balancing them out, ironing out features etc. Because the former is a fuckload more broad and complex than the latter.
What things are included in your definition of video game development? Is it just development of the idea? Is it also knowing how to bring the idea to life, ie. the hard work of coding? Is it also making the product functional and balanced, ie. quality assurance work?
I dunno, if I went to such a course, I probably would want it to start with the very basics of creating a game, any game: basic ruleset, features, mechanics and so on.
What things are included in your definition of video game development? Is it just development of the idea? Is it also knowing how to bring the idea to life, ie. the hard work of coding? Is it also making the product functional and balanced, ie. quality assurance work?
I dunno, if I went to such a course, I probably would want it to start with the very basics of creating a game, any game: basic ruleset, features, mechanics and so on.
Sorta answered your question for me with the last sentence.bartholen said:
The basic gist of what I'm asking is "What would you want to learn in a video game development university course?". Keeping it broad for now, and depending on what anyone I ask will say I'll choose what things to focus on in the future.
I specifically put "development" in the title because that will definitely be more involved, but design will come into it at the same time. Perhaps the course will be 60% development and 40% design.
Design would be specifically video game design, not story or dialogue, more like sound, level, enemy, UI design and mechanics. Development would be teaching how to actually put the ideas in an interactive and functional environment by programming or drawing/animating depending on what it is.
I'd say a good introduction to game design would be to hand out or have people think of games everyone knows like Monopoly, Backgammon, Pac-Man, Super Mario, chess, poker and other playing card games, and deconstruct them to make them think on how they're balanced and what the core elements are.Aerosteam said:
Ooooh, I second that. Getting into the nitty-gritty of how and why other games are put together, how games change between early, middle, and late stages, and recognizing assumptions that aren't actually based on anything would help immensely. (Like house rules vs actual rules in Monopoly. Raise your hand if you ever used the property auction)
You could also do a compare/contrast between similar looking games to see what makes them different.
You could also do a compare/contrast between similar looking games to see what makes them different.
For example, if you were to compare Monopoly to The Farming Game[footnote]regional example[/footnote], you find two games where you roll dice to move around squares on a board, buy properties, have random cards that alter the outcome, and you win by having the most money. Their superficially similar. However, once you look at the actual mechanics, you'd see that Monopoly has a negative economy and win condition (you win by taking all of your opponents money and knocking them out of the game), while The Farming Game has a positive economy (first person to a set sum of cash+property wins and you don't generally take anything from other players. You can theoretically make bad investments and have enough bad luck to get knocked out of the game, but I've never seen it). In essence, Monopoly is an MMA fight where one person eventually pulls a knife, while The Farming Game is a race.
Simply due to how you generate income.
Simply due to how you generate income.
That doesn't mean that it is political, it means it has a message. There is a difference. A game CAN have a lot of messages. But that is different from having a lot of politics. Political does refer to ideologies. A message would mean that games are expressive, not political. Games can be political but it isn't a pre-requisite. How is Rayman political? X-Com? Crash Bandicoot? Mario? I could go on for quite a while.altnameJag said:
I don't agree that politics are woven into media. I think people look at art and relate it to THEIR ideologies and blame the game for them doing so. Thus, they are injecting THEIR politics into the game. The game doesnt have them unless you put them in there to advertise them. Some games do in fact have politics in them, some don't. Forza simply isn't political. Earthbound is.
The slide is political and what they are saying is political. And they are saying that they intend to promote the ideology that all games shalt be political. An ideology I am annoyed by.
Then lets break out the obvious Pong. Tell me how that is political?
Zenja said:
The powers that be don't care about anything other than promoting an agenda, and games being interactive makes for a pretty effective delivery system. They figure we're all just a bunch of dumb, programmable kids, and sadly their assumption is acurate far too often. Even when it isn't, most people are too powerless and non-influential to make a difference anyways.
I made another thread about vocal minorities being critical of big publishers, and the consensus is that it's basically an exercise in futility. Same could be said in this case.
This is rather negative but also rather sound advice. General skills are more useful whether you want to make games or something else. The second perhaps rather negative but also sound advice is that you should be very careful with what people on the internet recommend.Here Comes Tomorrow said:
I followed a course in game development at my university. It was basically a gameflavoured introduction to c# and object-oriented programming. I didn't follow the entire programme attached to that course but I know various people who do. It is mostly a computer science programme with some gameflavoured projects and courses on things like concurrency and graphics. I think that is the best way. By the computer science students I know I have been told that general skill in programming, understanding of databases, the basics of how computers and their most important components work and theory about logic, complexity and linear algebra is far more useful than learning specific tools. According to many, a good programmer should not have to know a specific language but should be able to pick up languages he doesn't know in a short timeframe.
Now I don't know how large your course will be (do you have ECTS in schotland? How many hours do students theoretically spend on your course?) but I suppose there won't be time for all of that. I would mostly focus on usable skills like programming in a general purpose language like C++ or something like it. The best way to learn such a thing is to be told to make something with it and learn how to find out things for yourself. (when programming, I found, google is your best friend) If the course is 5 ECTS (140 expected workhours) I would expect your students to be able to make tetris by the end of it. Telling them to make tetris would make for a good project. It did for me.
I participated in a game design curriculum in NYU last summer, it was very interesting. It's actually pretty easy to setup a crash course on game development as long as you focus on the basics.
Focus on simple and easy-to-develop platforms. Good examples are Ren'Py, Construct 2, Game Maker, Fungus in Unity. Scratch is amazing for teaching programming. Most of all, Twine is a great beginner's tool kit because the whole platform is in HTML, and people who know Twine inside-out can create some crazy interesting stuff with it (if you haven't seen "Forgotten," then you're in for a treat -- https://sophiapark.itch.io/forgotten ).
Assign games and game design readings, too. Students should learn what makes a game "work" and what doesn't, why levels are designed the way they are, etc. Understanding how games are designed and why unlocks the skills people need to become good game developers.
Don't focus on the politics discussion above. It's a high-level concern that isn't really going to come up much. You'll find most people will walk into the class wanting to learn about game development, not games criticism.
Focus on simple and easy-to-develop platforms. Good examples are Ren'Py, Construct 2, Game Maker, Fungus in Unity. Scratch is amazing for teaching programming. Most of all, Twine is a great beginner's tool kit because the whole platform is in HTML, and people who know Twine inside-out can create some crazy interesting stuff with it (if you haven't seen "Forgotten," then you're in for a treat -- https://sophiapark.itch.io/forgotten ).
Assign games and game design readings, too. Students should learn what makes a game "work" and what doesn't, why levels are designed the way they are, etc. Understanding how games are designed and why unlocks the skills people need to become good game developers.
Don't focus on the politics discussion above. It's a high-level concern that isn't really going to come up much. You'll find most people will walk into the class wanting to learn about game development, not games criticism.
EDIT:
I'm not saying Forza is going to turn people into reckless drivers, but the ideology is undeniably there. I mean, why do you think Earthbound has politics but Forza doesn't?
Yes, most games have messages. Messages based on ideas, an "ideological message", if you will. Never played Ray man, but X-Com has you juggling the demands of donor nations while selling alien parts and questionable technology to whomever has enough money to keep your vitally-important, world-saving organization afloat, because Capitalism. I don't remember much of Crash Bandicoot, but Mario has an plumber everyman rescusing perpetually endangered female royalty while eating various plant life that makes him more powerful in a game where collecting wealth literally adds to how long you stay alive.Zenja said:
Not "shalt be", but "are". It's inescapable. Forza's taking realistic cars, driving them around recklessly, and saying the best driver is the one that goes the fastest is the best. The Horizon side series has the player getting money and completing objectives by doing blatantly illegal things.
I'm not saying Forza is going to turn people into reckless drivers, but the ideology is undeniably there. I mean, why do you think Earthbound has politics but Forza doesn't?
Competition is fun and the person with the highest score is the winner. What? I never said these ideologies were blatant, just that they exist. Don't mistake basic status quo as "non-political".
Because Earthbound actually makes direct comments and has lots of subtext relating to views on Capitalism and Socialism. Some have commented on subtext relating to immigration and other stuff. Drug use has a few nods thrown at it in the game as well.altnameJag said:
Forza is racing a car. You can give me some Ricky Bobby speil about "if you're not first you're last" all you want but that is you injecting that in because it is your views. Fastest car is the winner (or best) is the perameters of the game, not politics.
Again, that isn't politics. That isn't even a message. That is the victory conditions and a subjective statement about competition.
That literally isn't what political means. The actual definition of political is:
1. relating to the government or the public affairs of a country.
2. relating to the ideas or strategies of a particular party or group in politics.
3. interested in or active in politics.
The folks at GDC aren't using that definition. *shrug* Hell, 99% of the games people complain about being "political" don't fit those definitions. Gone Home certainly doesn't.Zenja said:
I am pretty sure that GDC IS using the word as it is defined and are talking about social affairs in society today. I would hope so anyways as then people are just talking nonsense. What good is a vocabulary if you don't use it properly? This is the problem with ignorance running rampant and being celebrated in society today.
If they arent using a word correctly, then why would you think their logic is sound?
Assuming they are in fact using the word correctly, "public affairs of a country" is a really broad brush. However, it still doesn't touch every game - nor should it. Bioware's recent press surrounding their games makes their political. I don't know if Andromeda is political in its design (probably is) but it could quite easily run into political territory because it has made design decisions based on public affairs in popular gaming culture. They have even made press releases talking about how they changed their game to support certain views in society. Which would put it into political territory.
If they arent using a word correctly, then why would you think their logic is sound?
Assuming they are in fact using the word correctly, "public affairs of a country" is a really broad brush. However, it still doesn't touch every game - nor should it. Bioware's recent press surrounding their games makes their political. I don't know if Andromeda is political in its design (probably is) but it could quite easily run into political territory because it has made design decisions based on public affairs in popular gaming culture. They have even made press releases talking about how they changed their game to support certain views in society. Which would put it into political territory.
Thanks to everyone who suggested things to teach the students. Kinda wished the thread didn't get derailed but I should've expected that to be honest.
About the political stuff... the course will focus on the how, not the what. I'm not going to tell them what they should make or what it should be like. More like whatever game they want to make, they'll be taught how to do it.
About the political stuff... the course will focus on the how, not the what. I'm not going to tell them what they should make or what it should be like. More like whatever game they want to make, they'll be taught how to do it.
My fault. I brought up that GDC presentation, and look where that got us.Aerosteam said:
The way I see it, you need to make decisions. Decisions based on the simple idea of "what will make my game project better?" If you want to tell a political message with your game, fine, that's your choice. But you should NEVER decide who works on a project based on political reasons. The moment you start hiring based on "diversity quotas", your game's going to shit.