GAME - Gaming
An introduction to the core concepts and methodologies that inform game design, development, and criticism. This course will provide students with a critical overview of each of these content areas and will demonstrate how their specific concerns intersect in the design, production, and reception of contemporary games. It will also teach students hands-on methodologies through which to translate these concepts into creative and critical praxis.
This course is designed to introduce students to the major theoretical approaches and debates that comprise game studies as an academic discipline. It will teach students how to research, evaluate, analyze, and construct persuasive arguments about games and game-related artifacts.
This course focuses on the complex question of how game designers produce balance through rules, mechanics, aesthetics, and other formal and informal gameplay elements. This course will provide students with an analytical framework to better understand how these elements are not only manifested in specific games, but how they work to simultaneously distinguish genres of games. More significantly, it will provide students with a practical methodology that will help them understand how to apply the insights gained through this analysis to their own games.
This course focuses on visual design and digital graphics for game-based applications. Designed to help students make the transition from traditional 2D drawing and illustration techniques to the types of 2D and 3D digital asset creation privileged by games and game-based applications, it provides students with hands-on experience with using industry standard software to generate sprites, UI components, textures, and other common 2D elements. It also introduces students to 3D modeling and texturing techniques, including but limited to optimization, texture mapping, and basic rigging and animation techniques.
This course will study the representative and rhetorical strategies through which computer game designers make meaning via their rhetorical choices. Multi-perspective in nature, it will also examine the discursive struggles that determine how players construct themselves as subjects in and against computer games via their rhetorical choices. This course will attempt to come to terms with the larger question of how scholars, through various forms of critical play, construct, categorize, and produce computer games as a subject of academic study.
A study of selected topics designed for nonmajors or for elective credit within a major.
This course focuses on advanced visual design and digital graphics for game-based applications, including but not limited to topics such as 3D modeling, texturing, texture mapping, animation, optimization, shaders, and particle systems. Conceived as a studio course, it provides students with hands-on experience working with a variety of digital software applications to create and optimize graphical assets for games and similar applications.
This workshop affords upper-division students the opportunity to tackle a wide variety of advanced projects on their own recognizance. It provides students working in game design and development with practical, individualized guidance in crucial aspects of the design and development process, including ideation, research, prototyping, implementation, documentation, and playtesting. Likewise, it provides students working in game criticism with instruction in the scholarly process of identifying, researching, drafting, and revising critical arguments about games and game-related issues.
An examination of world building as ludic, narrative, and spatial praxis. This course will examine how games and game-related texts create playable realities through a critical examination of historical and contemporary examples of world building across a variety of media. It will provide students practical experience with how to translate these theoretical into effective gameplay across a variety of genres of games.
Although traditionally associated with commercial ventures, entrepreneurship encompasses a wide variety of approaches that are also relevant to the creative and critical performances that intersect in the design, production, and study of games. This course will broach the theoretical and practical questions of how entrepreneurship intersects with and is implicated in the production of game and game-based endeavors. Conceived as a studio course, it is designed to teach students a hands-on methodology through which they can translate entrepreneurial approaches into real-world outcomes.
A study of selected topics designed for nonmajors or for elective credit within a major.