Computing Reviews
Today's Issue Hot Topics Search Browse Recommended My Account Log In
Review Help
Search
Pedagogy of game design
Michael John.YouTube,00:47:27,published onAug 2, 2016,Stanford,https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-zGo_Ovhro.Type:Video
Date Reviewed: Mar 21 2017

Should video game design, or for that matter any sort of software design, be taught by a practitioner or an academic? The academic will have an organized and abstract understanding of the design process, which makes sense but is very different from what designers and developers actually do. The practitioner will understand life in the trenches of software development, but his or her knowledge is more likely embedded in a collection of war stories that might be entertaining but are very difficult to learn from.

This video is part of an interactive media and games seminar offered at Stanford University. It is just over 45 minutes long and the speaker is Michael John, a 20-year veteran of the video game industry--who recently began teaching--sharing his insights on both teaching and video game design in a talk titled “The pedagogy of game design.” John is in the process of transitioning between being a game designer and being an academic who teaches game design. As he wrestles with this transition, we get a glimpse into his practitioner insights as they evolve into pedagogical content. These glimpses often provide amazing insights, which would be of great interest to both future game designers and their teachers. Sadly, this wonderful content is often obscured by poor production quality.

At one point, the speaker showed a book that he uses to teach video game design on a projected PowerPoint slide. He said the title and author too fast and the book title was unreadable on the slide. Further, none of this information was provided on the slide in a clearer, more readable font. So, the viewer just missed this, as many important points were missed, due to the video quality. Not only was the video itself rather poor, but the audio was uneven, and the camera direction as it goes back and forth between the speaker and the slides could have been much better. You can’t hear the questions the students ask. And the demo with a game controller is completely lost on the viewer due to poor video quality.

Nonetheless, despite its production weaknesses, this video would be of interest to video game players, game designers, and academics who teach game design. However, due to the unique glimpse it reveals in John’s evolution, a lot of the key ideas are not presented as well as they could be, which is to say that John is a better game designer than academic lecturer although he does show great promise. More advanced game designers might get more out of it because they already have exposure to the key ideas. And anyone who teaches video game design would very definitely benefit from viewing it both for the evolving insights and for the evolving pedagogy. In another decade, John’s pedagogy will be polished and the important insights may well be lost.

Reviewer:  J. M. Artz Review #: CR145131 (1707-0482)
Bookmark and Share
  Featured Reviewer  
 
Games (I.2.1 ... )
 
 
Games (K.8.0 ... )
 
 
Gaming (I.6.8 ... )
 
Would you recommend this review?
yes
no
Other reviews under "Games": Date
How computers play chess
Levy D. (ed), Newborn M., Computer Science Press, Inc., New York, NY, 1991. Type: Book (9780716782391)
Oct 1 1991
Computer chess
Pachman L., Kühnmund V., Routledge&Kegan Paul Ltd., London, UK, 1986. Type: Book (9789780710097859)
Oct 1 1987
Sums of games born on Days 2 and 3
Moews D. Theoretical Computer Science 91(1): 119-128, 1991. Type: Article
Feb 1 1993
more...

E-Mail This Printer-Friendly
Send Your Comments
Contact Us
Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.   Copyright 1999-2024 ThinkLoud®
Terms of Use
| Privacy Policy