Description

Instructor: McGuire

Time: MR 1:10-3:50

Location: TPL 312

Course Number: CSCI 107

Settlers of Catan pieces from BoardGameGeek

A game is an aperture on strategic thought and interaction. The ideas behind board games, puzzles, and video games find applications in economics, business, biology, psychology, and politics.

Games are also art. They literally contain graphic, sculptural, and industrial design. They are beautiful mathematical constructs. Games are an interactive medium that communicates that which is inaccessible through passive forms.

Underlying disciplines as diverse as biology and art are deep, shared ideas: of a space containing design, decision, and constraints; of computation and process; and of the ultimate limits on reason and efficiency. This course reveals a surprising name for those deep ideas: computer science.

This multidisciplinary course explores games and their serious applications through design exercises and game playing. Evaluation will be based on attendance, participation, analysis assignments, and a significant final project. For the project, you will work in a group to design a new game using both traditional art media and software like Photoshop, following the principles discussed in class. Along the way you will develop an intuitive grasp of computer science concepts including heuristics, minimax, and emergence. This course is part of the Critical Reasoning and Analytical Skills Initiative.

Format: Studio / Discussion. Group work and peer evaluation.

Lab Materials Fee: $20

Prerequisites: No previous computer or gaming experience is required. Groups will need members with different skills, including: art, storytelling, stat/math analysis, creativity, leadership, technical writing, and drama.

Attendance: This course depends on group projects and discussion; I expect e-mail from you the night before if you will be absent due to illness or another emergency so that I can plan around your absence. Lateness and unexcused absenses will substantially reduce your grade.

CS Majors: This course is not open to students who have completed CS 136. If you take CS 107 and later become a CS major, you will receive elective credit for CS 107 (i.e., you will have one fewer required courses!)

Bonus: Access to the science library games collection (see below).




Project

For the project, choose a group of up to five people. Your goal is create an innovative new game using an abbreviated version of the process used by professional video game developers. Your game will not be a video game, however, because that requires person-years of software and art development. Instead your game will be some form of board or card game. I encourage you to be creative with gameplay and format. Boundary-pushing inspirations that would have been great project ideas include:

• - Pit, a real-time card game;
• - Pictionary, a game with drawing as a mechanic;
• - The Beast, an alternate reality game that dared players to really believe;
• - Fluxx, a card game where every play changes the rules;
• - board games Carcassonne and Shadows Over Camelot, in which you must cooperate to compete; and
• - Choose Your Own Wiki, a (brilliant but not too successful) progression game that grows the more it is played.

Your game should leverage the strengths of your team members. You may design your game entirely using the craft materials like pawns, grids, dice, and play money that are provided. Or, you may want to fashion your own playing pieces. If your team has programming or web development skills, you may incorporate custom software and web pages into your game as long as the implementation process doesn't overwhelm the design process or become so cumbersome that you can't easily make changes after playtests. If your team has artists, leverage their abilities to make the game beautiful. If there are writers, create an intricate backstory. Better yet, figure out how to make art or writing (or music!) central to the actual gameplay.

You will design your game by creating a design document through a series of exercises like a proposal (which must be approved by me, acting as your publisher), concept art drawing, thematic brainstorming, story writing, and gameplay analysis. The analysis process involves using probability and calculus to estimate values like how long the average game will take and the relative merit of different strategies. It is a good idea to recruit a team member with those skills. As the design document and prototypes of the game evolve, you'll run multiple playtests and alter the design accordingly.

By the end of the course, you must create at least two playable copies of your final project game, including storage boxes and rules. One copy of your game and design document will be archived for future courses. Your team keeps the other copy.

Every class session you'll submit either 2-page summaries or analyses of games that you have played for at least four hours. The proposal is written as if you had just thought up the game and were pitching it to your team. It has the same format as the proposal that you will write and refine for your own original game. The analysis explains how a game mechanism (e.g., the '7' rule in Settlers of Catan) affects gameplay. This could be, for example, a mathematical analysis of the optimality of a formula or constant, a dramatic analysis of a specific scene, or a psychological analysis of the setting elements. In all cases you should strive analyze as focussed an aspect as possible and treat it rigorously--this is what will develop your critical appreciation of games.

You may use any commercial games that you like for your assignments. The following games are specifically available to you on campus. I recommend the games on this list because they are innovative, historically important, or the best in their class.

The "Location" column indicates where you can find the game. "Schow" means on reserve in the library; "Kilis" means installed on the Windows XP machine in the 3rd floor CS lab; "Lab" means in the Graphics Lab, by appointment with me. "Web" games and downloads are linked; most are bookmarked under FireFox on Kilis as well.

Read about a game online at boardgamegeek.com or Wikipedia before checking it out from reserve so that you can arrange ahead of time with a group of friends to play with you. Subject to time constraints, Science Librarian Jodi Psoter has volunteered to join in on multiplayer games in the library. You can play games in the library or take them elsewhere.

There are three Nintendo DS Lite handheld consoles at Schow for you to check out on 24-hour reserve. These can play DS and GBA games. You should use the DS for only three days total during the course (you can use your own DS or GBA with the provided games to avoid this restriction.)

Available from the Library:

• A theory of fun for game design
• Game Developer Magazine Archives (on CD)
• The game design reader
• Unit operations: an approach to videogame criticism
• Better game characters by design : a psychological approach
• Half-real: video games between real rules and fictional worlds
• Rules of play
• From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: gender and computer games
• Game design: theory & practice
• Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on game design
• Introduction to game development
• Patterns in Game Design

• Playthisthing
• Gamasutra
• The Ludologist
• The Escapist
• Mobygames
• John Carmack's Blog
• Raph Koster's Blog
• New Gamer
• Wikipedia
• BoardGame Geek
• Blues News
• Slashdot Games
• Penny Arcade
• Fun Motion
• The Art of Computer Game Design
• 2006 IGF Winners
• GameTunnel 2006 Games of the Year

• Penny Arcade $10,000 Scholarship
• GDC Scholarships and Volunteer Program (Free GDC Trip)
• SIGGRAPH Volunteer Program (Free SIGGRAPH Trip)
• Games 4 Girls Competition ($1000/team member)
• Independent Games Festival (Up to $20,000)
• Slamdance Guerilla Gamemaker Competion