In these lectures, I discussed the challenges and opportunities for character driven worldbuilding in the interactive medium. Students worked on writing their own short drafts for settings and characters, and then applied these ideas to designing a game space to express that.

In these lectures, I gave students the tools to look for the stories, people, and rhetoric behind our everyday world - media, architecture, games, politics, and more. Additionally, we examined our own biases and cognitive processes when we consume and interpret media to be more conscientious, deliberate, and aware of the creative work we do.

In these lectures, I discussed game economics in terms of player experience - letting what we know about who plays our games (and who we would like to play our games but aren’t yet) drive our understanding of game economy. We broke down economic areas, progression systems, and designing economic systems to solve precise problems or encourage desired behaviour.

In these lectures, students gained an understanding of how balancing tools can be used to bring design relationships in their games out of the abstract and create their own design language for balancing and iterating their games. To implement these ideas, students designed, balanced, and played a board game from scratch.