Game Education Summit North America

A common difficulty with students in game development programs is the desire to focus on the "fun stuff," such as the characters, story, and atmosphere of a game, rather than the "hard stuff," primarily innovation and experimentation with game mechanics, systems design, and interactivity. This paper describes the implementation of an undergraduate course in rapid digital prototyping intended to improve the level of innovation, risk-taking, and experimentation among students at a beginning or intermediate level in game development. Students in the course individually created and shared one digital game a week for nine weeks, and only returned to and refined their most promising idea in the last month of the course. The course expands on the constraints, methods, and lessons learned of the Experimental Gameplay Project, particularly the initial version followed by four graduate students at Carnegie Mellon University in 2005, by adapting those methods for up to thirty undergraduate students, particularly those with little to no programming experience.

This paper examines the usefulness and direction of the newly-implemented course in Rapid Prototyping. Topics discussed include: the usefulness of failure (and the examination of kinds of failure) as a powerful teaching tool, particularly for iterative design processes; the advantages and disadvantages of individual rather than team-based prototyping; advantages and disadvantages of "coded from scratch", engine-based, and paper or analog prototyping; the ways in which rapid prototyping methods are adapted to traditional and informal classroom settings; and how students in the course are able to move more successfully into advanced production or research-based game development courses and labs. This paper also discusses the changing role of industry members in the game education process, primarily by examining the involvment of four game designers from the Dallas-based studio Zynga with Friends in the design and teaching of the course.

This paper concludes with a detailed postmortem on the successes and failures of the Rapid Prototyping course as implemented in Spring 2011, as well as lessons learned for future planned iterations of the course in Fall 2011 and Spring 2012.