Last Thursday saw me start my MA in ‘Digital Games: Theory & Design’. Since being offered a place on the course back in December 2015, I’ve been raring to begin: reading the inspirational blog posts of Rosa  Carbó-Mascarell (a former MA student) and discovering all the incredible things she did while undertaking the course, I was bristling with excitement at the prospect of beginning. I’m thrilled to say that if the remaining sessions are anything like the classes that occurred the other day, I’m in for a fantastic year ahead.

My aim in writing these posts, in the first instance, is to reflect on some of the theories learnt over the course and to help me consolidate my understanding of the ideas discussed. Additionally, it would be lovely if the entries proved useful for future MA students in ‘Digital Games: Theory & Design’. (Rosa’s blog was so incredibly helpful when weighing up whether this was the right course for me, I’d love to give something back and provide a similar service for prospective students!)

Thursday morning’s session was with Dr Kelly Boudreau and saw us begin the ‘Concepts & Analysis’ portion of the MA. As the MA students sat around the table, Kelly spoke about ‘Interdisciplinarity’ (the integration of knowledge from different disciplines) and asked that we share our previous disciplines – our undergraduate degree courses – with the rest of the class. It was fascinating hearing about the array of different backgrounds from which people came: Psychology, Ancient History, Media & Communications Studies and International Tourism were just some of the different disciplines that fellow students brought to the table. Things became even more interesting when we began to devise questions which applied theories from our previous disciplines to video games. One student, Ashley, spoke of her degree in Communications Studies and devised a brilliant question which sought to explore how the body language of NPCs (Non Playable Characters) might emotionally affect the player. I got a geeky thrill from listening to questions like Ashley’s and I eagerly await more discussions like this.

In the afternoon, we met another tutor of ours, Chris Cox, who’ll be teaching us for our ‘Games Design’ sessions this term. His class was every bit as intriguing as the ‘Concepts & Analysis’ session – and a great deal of fun to boot! Encouraging us to think more about the way in which meaningful play is generated, Chris made up a game called ‘The Epic Ball Game’, which consisted of the following rules:

  1. By the time he’d counted from 10-1, anyone with a tennis ball had to pass it to another person in the room.
  2. Before the person with the tennis ball passed it, they had to say both their own name and the name of the person to whom they wished to pass.
  3. They also had to share a fact about themselves before they passed the ball.

Originally, I’d assumed this was simply a clever exercise to keep us all awake after what had been a rather mentally taxing morning! However, ‘The Epic Ball Game’ proved far more than just that. As the class went on, so Chris asked us to tweak the rules of the game in an attempt to make it more engaging. It was an eye-opening process. New rules that people suggested which we’d initially thought might make the game more fun (such as allowing for a longer countdown) actually had the inverse effect and made the game less appealing. With its constantly changing rules, ‘The Epic Ball Game’ really helped us to appreciate – among other things – the importance of iterative design when crafting a game.

There’s far more I could enthuse about – such as Chris’s diagram of a games system or the challenges Kelly has set us for the coming weeks ahead –  but I’ll have to leave it here for now. Suffice to say, it was hugely positive start and I eagerly await next Thursday.