Gaming
Gaming
Learn about games and try making your own.
SHALL WE PLAY A GAME? -- WOPR / Joshua, Wargames (1983)
Brief
Video games are an interactive medium capable of engaging their players with beautiful imagery, actively involving players in the creation of epic stories, or demonstrating complex ideas or philosophies. Games can also be massive wasters of time, they may promulgate sexist tropes and imagery, and game culture is poisoned by misogyny and sexism. For good or ill, video games are ubiquitous digital media, and the tools for creating and sharing video games are getting easier and easier to use. In this module, explore the processes and tools of game design and game programming and -- maybe -- produce your own game!
Learning Objectives
- Get to know the history, forms, and genres of video games
- Learn the fundamental concepts of game design and development
- Learn about different platforms, toolkits, and engines for making different types of games
Options and Variations
Video game history is long and complex, but worth learning about if you're interested in making games. Likewise, understanding how games are designed and programmed will give you a better sense of how the medium has evolved and how it has impacted modern culture. You could approach this module from either of those angles: learn about the history to inform a game design, or learn about game design to better understand the history. Either way, the best-case scenario is a finished game that others can play, but even a half- (or quarter-)finished game can mean a lot in terms of learning.
Many of the tools are listed below don't require significant prior knowledge or coding, and there are many more available in the Tiny Tools Directory. The history of gaming has quite a bit of literature, which you can learn about from books in our library or a visit to a retro arcade.
Suggested Tasks
- Experiment with and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the many free tools for creating video games.
- Learn about the history of key video game genres, their formal characteristics, and their applications
- Learn about the video game industry and the current climate
- Play and talk about video games which claim to have “a point” — art games, persuasive games, newsgames, etc.
- Create a “mod” for a popular board game, changing its rules or “re-skinning” its look. Play your mod with your team.
- Describe your game from the point of view of someone playing it, and sketch out the interface and/or structure of the game’s content.
- Remake one of your old games. Use a different game maker or make it a different genre. Or, simply, fix it using the knowledge you have now as opposed to when you first made it.
- Build your game iteratively: share your work in progress with your team, and tweak it based on their feedback.
Make it Meaningful
Examples
Resources and Tools
