Equality Game, Anxiety Attack, and Misfortune: A Pedagogical Post-Mortem on Engines, Modding, and the Importance of Player Experience

Setting The Stage

The Designing Persuasive Games course presently uses Ian Bogost's Persuasive Games book (Bogost, 2010) as its primary text. Sections of Flannagan's Critical Play (Flanagan, 2009) and a number of articles on game design serve as supplemental texts. I like to begin the class with an activity I borrow from a former instructor in which we play Gonzalo Frasca's game September 12th, (Frasca, 2003) and read an interview with Noam Chomsky discussing the aftermath of the September 11th attacks in 2001. Both the game and the interview with Chomsky present the same thesis: a broken logic drives post 9/11 conflicts and that violence begets more violence. By engaging with the same thesis, expressed first by game mechanics and second in written form, students begin to understand how procedural rhetoric works.

We then read Bogost's work and discuss it in seminar. All three iterations of the course have included this text as our primary theoretical source as it is the most prolific and thorough text on the subject. We explore the examples provided in the book, playing the games whenever possible (a handful of games described in the text are no longer hosted online or are rare games for the Atari), and seeking out additional examples of persuasive games. Students are then asked to design a persuasive game of their own. This project represents a significant portion of their final grade and involves the following milestones: a written proposal (500 words), a research poster presentation, a paper (analogue) prototype, a digital prototype, and a playtesting session. While the written proposal and final game are for me, the other milestones present opportunities for students to explore their proposed game in meaningful ways with their peers.