[game_edu] Summer course: Game Analysis & Design

[Ian Schreiber]

Hi everyone,

It's taken awhile to get everything ready (such is the hazard of working with 
third-party courseware) but for those of you who have asked me if I'm running 
another game design course this summer as a follow-up to the last two years, I'm 
finally ready to announce this summer's project.

I'm working with co-instructor Sebastian Sohn this summer to deliver a course on 
the analysis and design of board games, card games, and other non-digital / 
tabletop play experiences.

Why tabletop games? Because many instructors and game designers agree that these 
are ideal introductory teaching tools for the core concepts of design; without 
programming, art and audio adding extra development time and taking away focus 
from game design, students are free to spend all of their time exploring design 
itself. (As I tell my students: "If you can't design a decent board game, what 
makes you think you'll be able to design a great video game, when video games 
are orders of magnitude more complex?")

This presents a problem for some instructors who may want to teach in this way, 
but are unfamiliar with the wide variety of these games: card games, economic 
simulations, resource management games, war games, risk management games, 
collectible games, story-based and combat-based role playing games, cooperative 
games, and many more. As an instructor, it helps greatly to have a variety of 
games to draw from for class examples, and it also helps to be aware of the 
vastness of this space in order to design appropriate assignments and offer 
assistance to students on their designs. What about instructors who do not have 
this experience, and don't have several years to immerse themselves? How can you 
"ramp up" quickly?

This course is the solution. We're offering a ten-week non-digital boot camp to 
get you familiar with the major games and genres in the contemporary non-digital 
space. We will also examine lessons that can be carried over directly to video 
game design, and we'll offer sample class assignments that you can use right out 
of the box.

We start next Monday (June 27) and run for ten weeks. Each week contains two 
live lectures taught online on Monday and Wednesday, and a "lab" where we will 
play some online versions of the board games we've been discussing on Friday. 
All meetings are one hour, starting at 6pm PDT / 7pm MDT / 8pm CDT / 9pm EDT.

We are charging $225 per seat in the course, to cover our courseware costs and 
our time. We think this is a great deal - an intensive workshop of this nature 
would normally set you back 5 to 10 times as much, but since this is our initial 
offering (a "beta test" if you will) we are offering this for as little as we 
can get away with. Space is limited - one of the benefits of this course will be 
a small class size with plenty of individual attention.

For more details, system requirements, and to sign up, please visit our course 
page at:
http://www.wiziq.com/course/548-Game-Analysis-and-Design

If you have any questions about the course, feel free to contact me off-list.

Thanks,
- Ian
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