Ludotronics
The fall/winter term 2024/2025 is approaching, and with it a new batch of freshwo:men.
For the blurb of my book, I wrote that Ludotronics is designed to support “junior and senior year BA or MA students in game design programs, as well as novice indie developers and those in the early stages of their game design career.” If you’re not familiar with the involved academic parlance, a “junior year BA” is a student in their third year of a bachelor degree program, and a “senior year BA” a student in their fourth (and final) year, i.e., the exam term. (Caveat: that’s how these are called in the U.S. educational system; for other English-speaking countries, your mileage may vary.)
That’s why, unfortunately, I can’t just go and straight off use my book for first-year lectures. Certainly, I can use it as a roadmap to where I want my student to go—but it leaves at least one matter of educational importance unanswered that I have to negotiate with myself each year anew.
If I want to maximize understanding, I should start my first term lectures with those subject that are easier to understand and work my way up to the more challenging concepts. That’s the approach that is usually taken, and the most promising to boot—especially with a mixed student body whose basic knowledge on game design-related matters overlaps but is by no means identical, thanks to specialization (game design, game art, game engineering).
However, right in the second term, they’re thrown into their first term projects to build actual games! So if I want to maximize practicability instead, I should teach everything straight from A to Z as it would occur during the actual design and development process. Doing that would shift some rather difficult topics right to the front, liable to be detrimental to understanding.
Obviously, you can’t maximize both understanding and practicability.
A university, even a university of applied sciences, is an institute of higher learning, not a place of vocational training. That’s an important distinction. At a university, students are responsible for specializing further within their fields and learning and honing their skills individually and autonomously to a much higher degree than elsewhere. Also, they have to learn how to research and analyze and write scientifically—a Bachelor of Arts or a Bachelor of Science, not to forget, are academic degrees! Thus, maximizing practicability is out of the question. But understanding and scientific rigor can’t be maximized either for a program like game design, which is not known for funneling graduates into, say, academic careers!
Thus, each year—based on the experiences I made in the year before and how the first round of term projects turned out—I shuffle things around a bit to try and find a better balance.
Add to that new developments in the field that happen all the time and need to be accommodated, as a process that will never stop. But hey! Teaching at a university—a real privilege—and delivering the same lectures with the same slide sets year after year after year would not only be terribly irresponsible, but the most boringest thing I can imagine.
If you have something valuable to add or some interesting point to discuss, I’ll be looking forward to meeting you at Mastodon!