170995 UE Media Aesthetics in Everyday Use (2023S)

Games pervade the society on many levels and in many forms – the biggest “player” in the field of games is without a doubt the video game industry, but board games, card games, escape rooms and various forms of tabletop or life-action role-playing games are also widely popular. Narrative is one of the key elements of games – while games in general are a form of interactive experiences, most of those experiences contain interactive storytelling and some of the most-beloved games of all time are centered around this storytelling aspect. I’ve been working as a game designer for professional companies for about twelve years now, and in most projects I’ve worked on I’ve been responsible for the narrative aspect of various games and game scenarios.

Aims
In this course, I would like to teach the students to analyze the narratives told by games and to understand their role within the medium. Being a professional with both academic and game design background, I offer a course where the students will learn to understand games and their narratives better by actually designing game narratives and stories. While I can’t promise that students will become great narrative designers after one course, using principles of narratology and game design in practice will give them valuable insights into the ways narratives and games are build. I will also supply them with tools and tips to improve and deepen their game design experiences if they will want to pursue this path further after the course ends.

Contents and methods
Each Saturday meeting will be focused on learning new perspectives on narratives in games, while each Sunday meeting will be focused on practical exercises using those perspectives. The main exercise of every Sunday will be creating a rudimentary design document (or design doc for short) – a blueprint for a potential game.

During the first weekend (11-12 March), I’ll introduce the core ideas behind game design. I’ll explain how the interactivity of games makes designing and analyzing them different from non-interactive media, introducing base terms and methods of ludology, aka. game studies. I’ll also show how I approach my work as a game designer and what place narrative occupies in my design process. On Sunday, I’ll invite the students to create rudimentary design docs of games based on the framework I myself work with.

During the second weekend (22-23 April), we’ll discuss the relationship between narratology and game design. We’ll start by analyzing the seminal impact of Campbell’s monomyth on game design storytelling, discussing its potential and pitfalls. Then, we’ll move to more general narratological frameworks and discuss how interactivity of games affect what stories can we tell (or, rather, construct) using them. On Sunday, I’ll provide frameworks for creating design documents of a few game varieties with a strong emphasis on the narrative: visual novels, gamebooks, and computer or tabletop roleplaying games. Then, I’ll invite the students to work in groups and use one of those frameworks to create a design document of a game belonging to one of those genres.

For the final weekend (10-11 June), the main topic will be the performative approach to game narratives. We’ll discuss how every act of playing a game can be understood as a performance, and how various building blocks of game narratives can be analyzed via the lenses of performance studies. As it’ll be the final meeting, I’ll also provide advice for students willing to further develop, and possibly publish, the games they’ve designed during the course (or elsewhere). I’ll give a brief introduction to main video game engines, as well as platforms for distributing non-digital games.
On Sunday, 11 June, I’ll provide frameworks for designing games that go especially well with the performative approach of the last meeting: life-action roleplaying games (larps), boardgames and escape rooms and invite the students to work on their final design docs.