the 2nd semester class is the critical analysis of games – not in a critical cultural way, but a loook at basic game design elements and applying them to games – watching what others do (in games) before students have to do themselves in the sophomore class. We will have chapters left from our books from the first semester clsas too.
i think we’re going to use Jeannie Novak’s Game Development Essentials and Mia Consolvo’s Cheating
the Novak book has 6 or so chapters on topics i want to cover, has exapmles from lots of games, and has questions to help guide hte freshmen as they read thru the book. It’s not a book that activiely promotes their own development but tries to get htem to think about how design concepts are played out in teh games available on the market today. That’s what i want for this class.
The consalvo book I still need to read more of to be sure but i want us to have a topic to discuss, to get them to think about some issues related to games, about the social aspects of player behavior, and about all the different ways words can be defined.
Totally off topic – i wrote this post the day Bob Novak (tv commentator) hit a pedestrian. A lot of the zemantia story recommendations (based on Jeannie Novak’s name) are about that incident – i think it’s funny
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