It’s funny looking back at this blog for the last year or so and finding only really terse notes about school projects and the aftermath of school projects when there is obviously so much going on in the world. The violence and darkness that surrounds us can make us feel small and disempowered, but everyone is part of history, and we all move it together. A better world is, as they say, possible. There’s so much in my research that connects history to this present moment, but it’s also a path that seems to be taking me further and further from the actual act of making games. That’s fine, but the path i’ve been going feels like it would have benefitted from a different degree than a practice degree (I will admit that the Information Science class I took was really compelling). Right now I want to make things that connect me to people rather than isolate me further, and to do that I need to keep refining and experimenting in a game making practice.
In a couple of days I’ll be teaching my own prototyping class, using the game-a-week framework made popular by Bennett Foddy and Doug Wilson. I am thinking of using it as an opportunity to make at least a temporary break with my grad school work and make some new experiments along with my students with a clean slate and low pressure. For its many strengths, DMA’s MFA (in its 2 year formation) didn’t give much breathing room for experimentation and failure in the way that I might have needed. I spent a lot of time digging in to ideas that were theorized in interesting ways but were yielding results that didn’t do well with peers and which I felt trapped with as a result of looming deadlines and sunk cost. I’d like to spend some time with the ‘thingness’ of game code and art, and connect my practice more with the games that I enjoy playing.
Here’s my Prototyping syllabus, adapted from Douglas Wilson’s course for undergraduates at RMIT.
