Rules & Roberts is a print-and-play educational roleplaying game to learn Robert’s Rule of Order. Even if it’s a spoof of Dungeons & Dragons, R&R is more of a storytelling game: it’s light on mechanics, there are no dice rolls or complex stats, and the Dungeon Master doesn’t have to prepare any material nor read […]
Category Archives: education
p5.play
I just released p5.play, a javascript library for the creation of games and playthings. It’s still a beta but it includes features that are common to most 2D games: Sprites with animation support, collision detection and resolution (limited to Axis Aligned Bounding Boxes and circles for now), a camera and functions to facilitate mouse and […]
Experimental Game Design – Critical Playthings
This year’s installment of my undergraduate course Experimental Game Design went really well. Students designed non-digital games (outdoor and tabletop) for the first half of the semester and worked on digital projects for the second half. You can find course materials here, and downloadable final projects in the student area, mostly Mac only.
MultipliCITY
This is the introduction and the printable materials for a workshop I gave at the Allied Media Conference 2014 in Detroit. The workshop was centered around MultipliCITY, a basic framework for a city planning board game designed to be expanded and modified by the participants. You can download MultipliCITY here and read slightly edited notes […]
Experimental Game Design – Alternative Interfaces
Selected students’ works from my experimental game design class at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Art. A hands-on game design course focused on innovative and expressive forms of gameplay. In this installment of Experimental Game Design the emphasis is placed on the interface: inputs beyond mouse/keyboard/joystick/touch, outputs beyond screen/speakers, playing contexts beyond the suburban living room […]
Designing Games to Understand Complexity
This is a transcript of a workshop I conducted together with Liam Burke at the Allied Media Conference in June 2013. The workshop is meant to be a very basic introduction to system thinking via games targeted toward grassroots activists. It uses a simple fishery simulation available here as example.
The Fishing Game
The unimaginatively called “Fishing game” was designed for the 2013 Allied Media Conference. It’s meant to be played, discussed and modded in a interactive workshop context. The companion presentation can be found here. In order to play the game you need: .Exactly 4 players .About 30 money bits – decorative marbles will work .About 30 […]
Allied Media Conference Games Lineup
Next week I’ll be in Detroit at the Allied Media Conference. The conference track “Imagining Better Futures Through Play” looks dense and exciting, with a strong focus around DIY gamemaking and inclusivity. You still have 5 days to back our indiegogo campaign, the proceeds will cover travel and lodging costs for the presenters Here are […]
Radical Game Makers: We Want You!
The Allied Media Conference is a yearly gathering of independent and activist media makers from all over North America. We gather in Detroit to share strategies on how to create sustainable social change through media. This year’s conference is June 20-23 and I’m honored to be one of the coordinators of the game-oriented track along […]
A COMPUTERLESS VIDEOGAME MODDING WORKSHOP
Here is a recipe for a rrradical game design & literacy workshop I had the chance to organize together with Una Lee, Toronto-based activist, designer and all-around awesome person. It was presented at the Allied Media Conference in Detroit in June 2012 but you can try it at home, with your own class, club, organization […]