A Course as a Game, Awesome!

Introduction:

Let’s start off by talking about how excited I am about how Game Design II is being run; I am a huge proponent of bringing games into the class room. I strongly believe that this course will be a blast to participate in. One of the reasons I am really excited is because I am looking towards doing a masters focusing in on Serious Games and Education. I will be watching this class closely and taking plenty of notes that I can reference in the future.

This course is formatted as a game where we the students create our characters and enter the world know as the “classroom” where we will have to complete quests, slay monsters and craft wondrous creations in order to gain fame and fortune in the form of experience on the long path to our ultimate goal of being a Game Design God.

Details:

We each get to create a basic character, which includes a name, class, and a set of skills that embodies the character.

There are 20 levels that we can earn as we gain more experience, each of these levels has a title that our character will carry with them as a badge of honour. As we level up we also can acquire additional skills for our character.

There are a total of 19 (currently) different tasks we can complete in order to earn experience for our characters.

We are required to form a guild

Issues:

Any new idea is not without growing pains and there are some here from reading over the course design.

I am concerned that the experience is not any kind of mathematical function for increasing progress, the numbers are intelligently, but almost randomly picked.

I am also concerned with how many experience items are weighted, and while I understand that some kind system is required, I do not believe weighted experience is always the best option. I would prefer using an approach where the goal for each task is more clearly defined which would remove uncertainty from some of the tasks. Now some of the tasks are well suited to weighted experience; for example the final game design presentation.

I would also like to see more diversity in the ways to earn experience and to have more options, where players have multiple ways to reach the max level much like in most Massively multiplayer Online Role Playing Games.

Conclusion:

Overall I think this course is going to be a good test case and a lot will be learned and changed as the course goes on. I am really looking forward to this course and it is going to be a fun ride.