I have 120+ game prototypes to play!

If you are wondering what happened to that guy who said he was going to teach a new course at the University of California at San Diego about games and culture, and even started a blog about it that abruptly stopped, I'm happy to report that I'm teaching that class right now.

I apologize for disappearing from my blog, but my workload got unexpectedly larger. Shortly before the start of the term, I was asked if I would be willing to teach the class twice, which meant I would be lecturing every day. I visualized my paycheck getting larger and neglected to think about how tiring this would be. I now have nearly 400 students. By the end of the term (this Friday), my students will have written more than 1000 essays on game-related subjects. I assigned a team game-design project and now the department's office is filled with more than 120 game prototypes. (Fortunately, I have 12 teaching assistants to help me sort through them. They are a fantastic group of grad students.)

This has been a crazy but exhilarating quarter. All told, I will have delivered about 50 lectures on topics such as Huizinga's theories about play; Caillois' taxonomy of games; games and gender; social behavior in alternate realities; gaming subcultures; games as art; the effects of competition; "serious games"; and the debate over video games and violence. I worried about not having enough material for the course and I soon realize there's so much more I won't have time to talk about.

My students have been enthusiastic, and became especially engaged when we began the game-design project, and I have to say (in my proud parent voice) that they did an incredible job coming up with some very clever ways to model real-world systems (the assignment focused on modes of representation, so there were no abstract games). I played a student's party-oriented card game this afternoon that was a cross between Werewolf and TV's "Survivor" -- fun and amazingly well thought-out. It needed much more development, of course (the students only had a few weeks to work on the project), but it included some ingenious ideas that I would love to see in a published game. I will be documenting the projects in photographs and will post some picture on this blog in a couple of weeks.

In addition to the course reader, I assigned Stefan Fatsis' book about Scrabble players, "Word Freak," and McKenzie Wark's fascinating but difficult "Gamer Theory," which has divided the students into those who hate the book and those who love it. For first-year college students, they are tackling it bravely.

We also have had some great guest speakers, including a "Jeopardy!" champion, a video game designer and producer, and a competitive salsa dancer. We've had competitions and contests in which student win games (including What's It to Ya? -- thanks, Mike Petty!) and other prizes. We are in the middle of a Scrabble tournament in which the top prize is an iPod. I showed three game-related films outside of class for extra credit (the thriller "The Game"; the Donkey Kong documentary "The King of Kong"; and a terrific film about girls basketball, "The Heart of the Game"). I suppose I am teaching the course I wish I could have taken when I was an undergraduate.

One of the best things about this job is that I have been able to play games with my students and teaching assistants (and occasionally other faculty) during my office hours and justify it as research. I love to introduce them to games beyond Monopoly, Clue, and Sorry, and have had students and TAs rush to buy their own copies of Mission: Red Planet, Settlers, Hey! That's My Fish, Chrononauts and other games we have played. I'm doing my best to spread the goodness around.

Most important, students have been telling me that this course has changed the way they think about games. They still play them for enjoyment, but they also able to view them as a mode of cultural expression worthy of critical analysis. They have learned how to think about a game in terms of its structure and mechanics and interpret its cultural meaning. As a college instructor, those are the kinds of things that I find the most gratifying.

When the course finally is over, I will return to this blog and write more about my experiences. Thanks for reading!