CONFERENCE

GDC EDUCATION

Monday, March 25 & Tuesday, March 26

At the 2013 GDC Education Summit attendees will explore experimental and inventive educational approaches that established game curriculum builders can bring back to their faculty and classrooms. This program is aimed towards educators from established game development programs or new game course creators that want to understand the challenges they'll face in the next few years. It will bring scholars together with experienced professionals willing to learn, share ideas and achievements. The summit is a great professional development opportunity that will explore how collaboration leads to success not only in the classroom but in all aspects of work and life.

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Beyond the Dialogue: Perspectives on Industry and Academia

Matthew Burns (University of Washington)
Frank Lantz (NYU Game Center)
Richard Lemarchand (USC)
Jane Pinckard (UC Santa Cruz)

Panelists will discuss the relationship between commercial game development and academic video game education, studies, and research. This is a high-level, wide-ranging session that will survey the state of cooperation between the two fields, and highlight specific areas that could benefit from increased engagement. "Beyond the Dialogue" reflects the panelists' belief that while we often speak of academia and industry in a constant dialogue, there is much to be gained from more active cooperation.

Catacombs and Curriculum: Role-Playing Games for Teaching Design

Sam Roberts (USC School of Cinematic Arts)

Tabletop role-playing games span a wide breadth of gameplay - from tactical, rules heavy play to pure collaborative storytelling experiences. At the same time, they expose and accommodate many different formal elements of games, and allow the instructor to discretely analyze and teach each one separately. This session will discuss how to use tabletop role-playing games to teach these formal elements, both for critical analysis and design, and how the openness of tabletop RPGs allow instructors to incorporate teaching a wide variety of skills and arenas in a class.

Game Design Curriculum Deathmatch

Mary Flanagan (Dartmouth College)
Tracy Fullerton (USC School of Cinematic Arts)
Noah Wardrip-Fruin (UC Santa Cruz)
Eric Zimmerman (Independent)

Game design teaching approaches differ substantially in areas such as number and size of projects, writing components, technologies, and the inclusion of historical or other contextualizing theories. In the Game Design Curriculum Deathmatch, top game design instructors will fight three rounds by giving 3-minute presentations on aspects of their introductory, intermediate, and advanced courses. The instructors have to justify their teaching approach, and give recommendations for what sorts of institutions might want to adopt a course like theirs. After each round, the design teachers will have time for a lively debate and a vote with the audience.

Yamove! An Experiment in Collaboration Between Researchers and Indies

Katherine Isbister (NYU/ NYU-Poly)
Syed Salahuddin (Babycastles)

Can a great indie game answer fundamental research questions? What happens when you mix engineering students with cutting edge NYC indie game developers? Yamove! was an experiment in bringing these two worlds together. The resulting game was an IndieCade 2012 finalist, as well as a successful research project. In this talk, given by the lead researcher and an indie game curator/designer who worked on the project together, you'll learn about how this collaboration worked, how it came to be, and how to think about whether this might be something that fits into your own curriculum and plans for game education.

Biff! Boom! Pow! Introducing Students to Sound for Games

Karen Collins (University of Waterloo)

How do you teach students about sound design for games when they only get a few classes on the subject? How can game instructors learn enough about sound design to be able to teach it? What kinds of exercises can help a student to rapidly develop skills in sound for games? Designed for a full, 12-week course, but adaptable for shorter courses, the exercises and examples introduced in this lecture teach students about the functions of sound in games through hands-on, creative practice. The exercises teach listening, spotting, recording, editing, creative design, mixing, Foley, and more!

Play, Make, Appreciate: A Games Education Manifesto

John Sharp (Parsons The New School for Design)
Colleen Macklin (Parsons The New School for Design)

Over the last 20 or so years, game educators have collectively developed a game design and development education model based on engineering and studio art traditions. This has served our students well enough, and has provided the game industry with the next generation of employees. But should we be satisfied with the status quo? Macklin and Sharp suggest that we are just getting started. They propose a broader consideration of games and play in higher education--the Play, Make, Appreciate Manifesto. Join them as they question game puritanism and the fetishizing of games at the expense of play, as they ponder how we can increase enrollment and strengthen our position within academic institutions, and as they suggest ways to bring more diversity to our student populations.

Michael Mateas

UC Santa Cruz

Michael is recognized internationally as a leader in AI-based interactive entertainment. He is currently a faculty member in the Computer Science department at UC Santa Cruz, where he holds the MacArthur Endowed Chair. He founded and co-directs the Expressive Intelligence Studio, one of the largest technical game research groups in the world and is also the founding director of the Center for Games and Playable Media at UC Santa Cruz. Credits include Prom Week, a social simulation-based interactive story and puzzle game, and Fa�ade - the world's first AI-based interactive drama. Michael has given numerous keynote addresses and paper presentations at conferences worldwide. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.

Tracy Fullerton

USC School of Cinematic Arts

Tracy Fullerton, M.F.A., is an experimental game designer, professor and director of the Game Innovation Lab at the USC School of Cinematic Arts where she holds the Electronic Arts Endowed Chair in Interactive Entertainment. The USC Game Innovation Lab is a design research center that has produced several of the most influential projects to be released in the emerging field of independent games, including games like Cloud, Flow, Darfur is Dying, The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom, and The Night Journey � a collaboration with media artist Bill Viola. Tracy is also the author of "Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games," a design textbook in use at game programs worldwide. Prior to entering academia, she was a professional game designer and entrepreneur making games for companies including Microsoft, Sony, MTV, among many others.

Ian Schreiber

Game Developer & Professor

Ian Schreiber has been in the industry since the year 2000, first as a programmer and then as a game designer. He has worked on five published game titles and two serious game projects. Ian has taught game design and development courses at Ohio University, Columbus State Community College, and Savannah College of Art and Design.

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