What do the students say about the course? What do they expect to get out of it? What do they find fun/boring/difficult?

I’m surprised at how difficult it’s been for me to pull together my thoughts on this topic. I know, more or less, what students say about my class. I do formal and informal student evaluations, have casual conversations with students both before and after they study with me, and I’ve even put together a group of former students who’ve agreed to serve as teaching references. But I keep getting side-tracked into thinking (and trying to write) about how to understand student reactions more generally.

I try to encourage my students to think critically about my class, and particularly about whether it meets their learning goals. I’ve never seen them go as far as Brandon Layton, who grades his classes at Full Sail, but I do believe that if I’m going to have high expectations of my students, they should also have high expectations of me. However, I sometimes worry that this attitude contributes to the transformation of students into consumers of education. How do you draw the line between being an engaged and responsive professor, and being a glorified entertainer?

My instinct has always been that it’s related to the idea of having high expectations – and the research seems to back me up. We already knew that high faculty expectations contributes to the success of women and minority students, at least in the context of a supportive learning environment*. Now new research shows that high faculty expectations, as measured both through assignment rigor and student perception, tie directly to gains in critical thinking for all students.

Fortunately for me, “high expectations” is one of the things that comes up most frequently when students talk about my class. (So I guess I’m doing something right!) Students are quite aware that my class requires an enormous amount of time and effort, and that they will be held to a high standard of thought and production. However, they generally see the work as an exciting challenge rather than a burden – “hard fun,” if you will.

I benefit from teaching an elective course in an engaging field, of course. But based on student feedback over multiple years, there are two specific things I do that seem to support the “hard fun” approach. First, students feel that projects are authentic and meaningful. The assignments are small enough for novice designers to manage, but large enough for them to develop real skills. Getting feedback in class from their peers, out of class from playtest groups, and in writing from me is also a significant motivator. Second, I try to inspire my students with a sense of identity and vision. I talk about the challenges in the field, point out unsolved problems, and refer to them as designers from day one. Together, these things seem to convey to students that their assignments are non-arbitrary, and that they are opportunities rather than obligations. Hence, fun!

The comments I treasure most are the ones that show me how I’ve changed lives. One student told me she’d joined the class because she heard it was a fun elective, and left knowing that games would be her life’s work. (She is now writing her dissertation on a game-related topic!) Another said she’d never worked so hard in her life, and that she’d be taking a new attitude toward future assignments. A third told me that in other classes she’d learned about constructivist educational theories, but that mine was the only class she’d encountered that put them into practice; although she didn’t want to continue studying games, she’d be using my classroom as a model for her own teaching.

(It’s not an accident, by the way, that all these examples are from female students. I am incredibly proud that my classes are over 50% female and over 40% international and/or minority students, in an industry where the numbers are not good on either front.)

That’s not to say that there aren’t things students dislike. I get complaints every year that we don’t do enough theory, for example; it’s a completely fair critique, but it’s a conscious trade-off given how little time I get with my students. I make a calculated bet that students will have more formal opportunities to study theory outside my classroom than to make games. They also come in with a lot more experience at reading than they do at (critical) play, so I feel more confident that they can do it on their own. If I were teaching this year, I’d be adding optional readings to the syllabus to satisfy these students – but they’d have to find the additional time to do the work, because I wouldn’t trade off any of their opportunities to design.

Students also struggle with group work. Weirdly, mentions of group work in the formal and informal evaluations are almost universally positive, but in casual conversation I hear a lot about the challenges students faced. (I also sometimes get called in to mediate problematic groups during the semester!) I try to help students work productively in teams by providing suggestions about how to split up the work of the assignment, identifying problems that teams might face, and meeting with each team at least once a month. This is still a big unsolved, though; I know that group design work is critical, but I’m definitely still figuring out strategies to help students do it in a more consistently productive way.

In my advanced class, I run every other class session as a design workshop; groups present problems they’re having and the whole class tries to help them fix them. If the group has no specific issues to bring up, we analyze their game from a particular perspective (interface design, learning theory, player motivation, etc.). Students seem to have a love-hate relationship with these sessions. They’re the thing that’s most often mentioned as a big positive AND as a big negative for my advanced class. I think the biggest thing I can do on this front is to help presenting groups keep their presentations short and focused, so that the class spends most of the time workshopping instead of listening. This probably means modeling good presentation techniques, and giving more specific guidelines for each design workshop. I’d also try having groups alternate, giving a full session to each group, instead of having multiple groups per week.

Overall, though, students love the courses. Even though I’m not teaching right now, I have students seek me out for advice because they’ve heard about my classes. It’s an incredible compliment as a teacher. I did a lot of research on pedagogy when designing my classes, and I work hard every year to improve them; it’s great to see my hard work paying off, both for my students and for me!

* See Claude Steele’s work. I came across it in What The Best College Teachers Do, which provides a useful summary.

What games do you use? What criteria do you use to choose games to analyse? To what extent do you let the students choose games? Genres – do you limit the course to particular types of games (e.g. do you use any games that are not computer games)?

For my introductory course, I put together a list of 70+ games that students can choose to analyze. The list includes both digital and non-digital games, single-player and multi-player games, commercially successful games and indie efforts. It’s light on mobile and social options because I haven’t taught this course since 2009, but I’ll definitely fix that next time I update the list. I’ll probably also add some of the better games for change / games for health efforts, even though I encourage my students to focus on understanding good game design before they try to do anything tricky with it.

The first criterion for a game getting on the list is whether I’ve played it. I feel it’s very important for me to be fluent enough to help my students understand and analyze the games they’re engaging with, especially if they raise issues that might come up in class discussion. Even if I haven’t finished a particular game, I will put it on the list if I know what it’s doing in terms of design and can help guide my students through the analysis process.

The second criterion is that the game must be innovative or excellent or both. Yes, there’s a lot to be learned from critiquing bad games, but I have so little time with my students that I can’t countenance giving them anything that’s less than awesome.

The third criterion is that the game should either be available in our game research lab, free to play online, or both. Since I used to be in charge of game ordering for the lab, this was never a problem! But before I realized that this was an issue, I found that students gravitated toward the games with the lowest barriers to play. Once I started ensuring that all the games were equally available in the lab, I got a much more diverse set of game analyses from the students.

Only then do we get down to the horse-trading details of what goes on the list and what gets dropped. I try to think about curating the list as a whole, creating balance between different types of play, different scales of time commitment, different narratives and social relationships and visual styles. Students will play 15 of the 70 games on the list, and I want to up the odds that their particular 15-game spread will be a useful long-term part of their game education.

If students want to analyze a game that isn’t on the list, they have to run it by me before they write their analysis. They have to make a brief case to me for why it’s a game worth analyzing, and I have to be able to play the game before grades come due. Assuming both those things go smoothly – and in the past, they always have – they can go ahead with whatever game they’ve picked. I’ve actually encountered some neat games this way, like Zak & Wiki, and put the best of them onto the list for future classes to analyze.

In my advanced class, I’m not the only one assigning games. I help students come up with lists of reference points for their projects, many of which are games – but they also contribute games, and so do their peers who did not choose to take the advanced class. Unlike in the introductory course, I encourage students to seek out play experiences that will directly inform their design, even if it’s because the game in question does something badly. I do try to keep up with all the games my students play, but it’s typical for my advanced classes to play things before I do, and then “assign” me to play them so I can make my class discussion as useful as possible. It’s a pretty great arrangement; I love it when my students challenge me, and they always do!

What do the students read (or watch) to learn theory or methods of analysis?

My classes are a bit unusual on this front, because I have a dual obligation to my students. I have to teach them how to analyze and design games, but I also have to connect what they’re learning to theories of education, psychology, communication and more.

In some ways, teaching my students to analyze games is the easy part. Students’ experience with game play varies wildly, but almost none of them have done game analysis before. That means they’ve got no bad habits to unlearn, and I’m not boring half the class while I go over the basics with the other half. I give them lots of concrete examples to work from, both during class and as handouts. It also helps that my students are already thinking about how games can express ideas or points of view; in fact, if I have any problems, it’s usually with students who are overly literal about how games mean what they mean.

Most of the game design readings come from The Game Design Reader, since I prefer to work from (relatively) primary sources. I make it clear that these readings will give them the tools they need to understand how games function – but that they have to connect it to the other readings for the course, and to ideas that they may have encountered in their other classes. For the theoretical part of the class, I have them read one book (Gee’s What Video Games Have To Teach Us ….) and a whole bunch of scholarly articles on everything from constructivism to associative networks to social persuasion. My students’ non-game backgrounds vary wildly – some are cognitive scientists, some are communication students, some are educators, some are none of the above – so I try to keep the readings diverse and the emphasis on applying it to games.

I try to keep readings under 75 pages per week. This is partly because the class already has so much work, but it’s also partly because I want students to process what they’re learning deeply. I want them to connect their ideas to the games they’re playing and the games they’re making. I also want them to be able to follow up on things they think are neat and bring them back to the class. Almost every class session, I end up recommending books, academic papers, or games to play – ones that come out of our group discussion and address specific issues the students are having. I want my students to go out and figure out their own theoretical perspectives, ones that include things I wasn’t able to bring into the course or even things I’m not yet aware of. As long as they’re analyzing the games in a rigorous and theoretically grounded way, I call it a win.

Finally, I ask students to use their (mandatory) play-testing as a form of game analysis. What reactions did they get from the play-testers? What did they observe during play? What game design decisions might have caused what they saw? What could they change and re-test to see what happened? I run in-class play-test sessions in which I model helpful behaviors for observation – the hardest thing is usually for the designers to keep their mouths shut and not tell the players how to play! I also require students to document and analyze at least one out-of-class play-test session for each game design assignment. This helps enormously with getting students to think about specific game design decisions and their concrete impact on play. It’s also very helpful at getting students to see the difference between meaning that’s encoded in the rules of the game, meaning that’s produced during every game session, and meaning that’s produced during a particular play session.

On a personal note, my favorite “reading” is this video; I use it to help students understand player freedom and the diversity of choices that players can make even within a relatively constrained game!