Teaching Game Design to Teach Interaction Design
Teaching Game Design to Teach Interaction Design
All educators seek the magic trinity of attention, comprehension, and retention. For interaction design educators, the struggle to achieve these goals is even greater. Hopeful designers enter the field with lofty aspirations, yet they still need to learn the fundamental principles of design and build the core skills of an interaction designer. While keeping design students engaged is undoubtedly a challenge, there is a medium that allows students to internalize the fundamentals of design by experiencing them. Games. Games have become ubiquitous in our culture. They are inherently engaging. Some are good and some are… not. By teaching design students how to design games, educators expose their students to the basics of interaction design in ways that the students can experience themselves. Concepts like affordance, skill building, storytelling, and emotion become real rather than just conceptual. Altering the parameters of their games helps students feel the effect these concepts have on their games. This method has the potential to improve interaction design education across the board by ensuring that design graduates have internalized the fundamentals by the time they are ready to enter the field. What’s more, any design educator can learn to teach interaction design by teaching their students how to design games. After all, it’s fun!
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Teaching Game Design to Teach Interaction Design
- 1. Teaching Game Design to Teach Interaction Design Let’s Play @cwodtke | cwodtke@eleganthack.com www.eleganthack.com CHRISTINA WODTKE
- 2. I teach at CCA I use game design to teach Interaction design
- 3. You may think Game design is all about fancy equipment and softare
- 4. Let’s make a game Exercise via Brenda Romero
- 5. Draw a path
- 6. Create a way to move • Dice roll • Answer a trivia question • Everyone moves • Person behind moves • Roshambo • Card draw • Pass, but gain currency • Physical skill
- 7. Design Conflict • Speed people up • Slow people down • Extra turn • Lose a turn • Swap places • Block
- 8. Add anything you need to make it playable 3 minutes
- 9. Playtest
- 10. You won! You made a game. Was that so hard? Was it fun?
- 11. Sure I worked at Zynga… but I worked on platform! I was nerveous teaching game design too…
- 12. It all started with Story Time Studio 1: Story that is….
- 14. Students made pop-up books, exploring how to use interaction for emotional effect…
- 15. Students made Interactive Fiction, exploring dystopias
- 16. IF software will teach you about interaction flows
- 17. And IF teaches you how to consider story in space over time
- 18. Interaction Design and Game Design are Fraternal twins First video game 1958
- 19. Shared Knowledge You need the same skills for both
- 20. AFFORDANCES (signifiers) Things that look pushable, get pushed. Things that look pullable, get pulled.
- 21. AFFORDANCES Buttons that look pushable, get pushed
- 22. But check out these affordances
- 23. Feedback
- 25. Alphabear won’t embarrass me socially
- 27. Harry Potter Years 1-4 on Ipad Direct Manipulation Harry Potter Years 5-7 on Ipad Virtual Controller
- 28. Concept Models to Communicate to team
- 29. Architecture concept model Architecture concept model
- 30. How areas of site interlock Via Andrew Hinton @inkblurt Consider conceptual models over sitemaps
- 31. Stone Librande’s One Page Designs are concept models (Spore)
- 34. The IA of Minecraft
- 35. The IA of Kingdom Rush
- 36. Same but better Playtesting, Prototyping, and RITE done Right
- 37. A game is unknowable until it is played
- 38. Board games are HUGE!
- 41. More iteration
- 42. Different & New Ideas Look to Game Design to stretch us in new directions and explore difficult topics
- 45. CAMP Context, Architecture, Mechanics, Poetics
- 46. Luck and skill
- 49. continuums
- 50. Art?
- 54. Culture
- 57. Ecology
- 58. Craft
- 59. Empathy
- 60. You learn when you care
- 61. They will save the world
- 62. And have fun doing it
- 63. Required Reading for Educators
Editor's Notes
- Compare the keyboard buttons you can feel and push, to the hyper-flat keyboad. What is nicer to use? Is the ipad keyboard enough?
- Compare the keyboard buttons you can feel and push, to the hyper-flat keyboad. What is nicer to use? Is the ipad keyboard enough?
- On twitter, when you post you get feedback so you know your tweet went out. on Facebook, they show the link preview as soon as you add it, so you know all is workign (and can preview0 Your new status is always posted on top, to let you know its there. Discuss: do you need a message? Is it enough it always shows? What if technology doesn’t allow it to be on top (more recent, etc) Should you force it there to make sure user knows its posted?