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A small list of resources related to games in education

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This list was a Google doc that I started as a resource for a 6 month long project/class, which revolved around solving the numeracy and literacy issue for a specific demographic. The list is a collection of websties, games and more which recently came back to life with a discussion on chat.gamedev.in. I thought I’d collate all those links and put it up as a blog post so that it can help me and others who are interested in games and/in education.

Last updated on July 11, 2017 Continue reading “A small list of resources related to games in education”

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Game UX – An Introduction

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This being the first post of its kind, let me start with a small intro 🙂 Apart from teaching and making games I also end up playing a lot of games, let’s just call it an occupational hazard 🙂

Being a designer, most of the time when I play a game I keep noticing the small bits that make these games pleasurable and really stand out. Some people call it polish other call it juice, whatever it is, it makes the experience a whole lot better! Ask any developer on how costly in terms of time and effort it is to implement such things and chances are that most the time, it is super simple and cheap!

For most game and UX designers, their internal vocabulary consists of thousands of such examples; but that vocabulary is built over a lot of time, crafting and playing with such experiences. When it comes to teaching game design, I’ve always wanted some sort of a glossary that could give a glimpse of that experience without actually having the need to play the game – of course, this is not a substitute for actually playing the game and experiencing it first hand, but rather act as a quick reference or an easy way to convey an idea.

Game-UX is a series of articles and videos that tries to give a running commentary on good and bad user experience design in games. The large chunk of the content will be on this blog and the videos up on the game-ux youtube channel (please do subscribe!).

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An experiment

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There are a lot of people out there who want to learn how to code or make games, some of them are interested in making robots to doing creative coding while others are interested in game design and development. Many students who start off learning to code or make games give up early on mostly because they hit a wall and there is no one around to help them.

We’ve tried workshops and they also doesn’t seem to help greatly as the amount of work one needs to put in on their own is really high. People assume workshops to be self-contained units of learning and that everything they need will happen in their time in class. Be it game design or programming, one never really stops learning – and the biggest chunk of what you learn comes from the amount of exploration, experimentation and work you do outside of any classroom.

So especially for those who are really keen, can keep themselves motivated and push on through the muck and mire, I’m thinking of using a new channel on chat.gamedev.in for a virtual #gamelab.

As I was going through the tigforums, I kept on wondering how anyone would discover new games and activity that keeps happening on the devlogs and realised that the forums by design foster and cater to active participants and participation – and those who stop updating their devlogs or stop working on their games, their conversations are automatically buried and lost. This also really forces you to take the effort to put enough work to move forward; the onus is upon the learner to keep asking questions, keep prodding for more information and showcasing their work. So, we take a chapter from what we learned from running and seeing how online communities work and try to apply in creating a mentoring space and see how it goes. One also hopes that the proximity it has to other game developers and general activity in the community should only help such a space.

As a friend pointed out that this does not mean that face-to-face meetups are moot; only the opposite! They suddenly become more meaningful, crisp and full of purpose as both parties now come together with intent.

So if you are interested in learning on your own or helping someone with how to design and build games, programming, design, ux and anything else infact, do feel free to come and join the fray.

Check out chat.gamedev.in