Over the last few years we have seen the rise of "serious games" to promote understanding of complex social and ecological challenges, and to create passion for solving them. This project-based course provides an introduction to game design principals while applying them to games that teach. Run as a hands-on studio class, students will design and prototype games for social change and civic engagement. We will learn the fundamentals of games design via lecture and extensive reading in order to make effective games to explore issues facing society today. The course culminates in an end-of- quarter open house to showcase our games. Prerequisite: CS147 or equivalent. 247G recommended, but not required.
A game I have recently enjoyed is Cat Cafe Manager. As with similar management games, there are lots of little loops and arcs that come together to form the games architecture, which mainly involve grinding for resources, improving one’s cafe, which makes it easier to grind for resources, and so on. In Cat Cafe Manager, there are a variety of such resources that are gained from serving different customers. One example is Gold, which Businessmen pay in. If a player wishes to purchase something that requires Gold, they then will advertise to Businessmen, serve them, then spend the Gold. This goes for all the resources with the exception of Nectar, which uniquely is used to buy ingredients for the cafe. Unlike the other resources, this one is both gained but also lost to a lesser degree in order to serve customers food and drink. Hence, this loop builds off the others, but is more complex as one must manage having Nectar at all times.
Engaging in these resource loops largely makes up the game, with the overall arc involving choosing a particular direction or “project” to expand towards. For example, the player can choose to focus on gaining more cats, and would have to farm resources in the appropriate order to efficiently accomplish the milestones towards that end. Or, they can choose to improve the cafe decor, and so on for a total of four player-chosen arcs. These come together to form the greater arc of just completing the perfect cat cafe.