plush bunnyisms
Some random impressions from today’s grueling grading process you can find on Twitter here, here, and here.
Finally finished grading end-of-term exams for the Game Design freshmen course “Dramatic Structure & Story Development,” barring possible adjustments and score normalization. For tomorrow, end-of-term exams for the sophomore course “Ethical & Social Aspects” lie in wait to pounce on me.
Next time not every student in my class has been provided with a computer in time, I will send Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, to the IT department and have him replace the broadband connection in their office with a fax machine for a certain time, at a fixed exchange rate of 24 hours for each handwritten end-of-term exam I have to grade. I think that’s fair.
If you have something valuable to add or some interesting point to discuss, I’ll be looking forward to meeting you at Mastodon!
Murphy’s Law of Grading: If the number of participants is high enough, even the most remote and bizarre interpretation of a given assignment will, without fail, occur at least once.
Dramatic Structure and Storytelling? Wasn’t that the module which we used to have as a game design draft + 15 minute pitch in front of Steffen Rühl? I really enjoyed writing that, although for some reason, I could only come up with decent ideas when I decided to write the entire essay in english.
Something like that, indeed, but carried out differently. Besides loads of brutal theory (hehe), one of the things we did in that module was sketching ideas for games in group work sessions, then pitch & discuss each group’s idea with regard to central idea, theme, and dramatic potential, and then have the whole class develop the most promising idea further, without actually building it. (The latter was done, albeit based on a different game idea, with Prof. Breitlauch in the “Narration” module.)
Oh, I see. Guess I like last year’s approach better, since that allowed us to listen to over 24 entirely different stories, placed in different genres and gameplay mechanics. Was pretty interesting to listen to this whole pool of creativity.
That may be but it was the “Dramatic Structure & Story Development” module, not the “Narration/Storytelling” module :-)
Focusing, in other words, on the story’s “wiring,” not on its contents.
Oh we did that in the dramaturgy module (2.1). As for narration, we had a test with a rough location setting provided and should develop a game story based on that. Basically, the task said: Imagine there’s a desert with 50 symmetrically aligned concrete domes sticking out of the sand somewhere, now develop a story based on that.
Slight misunderstanding? “Dramatic Structure & Story Development” == 2.1 == »Dramaturgie/Konzeption« …
That’s what I thought – incorrect?
No, it’s correct. I just got confused for a moment if we were actually talking about the same module.
Finally, I finished grading the last batch of end-of-term exams, a seemingly interminable process. As far as I can tell, I was unusually mild and merciful—so maybe those students who didn’t show up (and for whom, incidentally, I’ll have to design a whole new test from scratch in April), might want to tremble in advance before my vast, unarticulated wrath.