Service Learning Plan

Instead of handing the students a can of paint, some canvas and telling them to get to work, I want to bring my experience as a game designer to bear on them. At the Game Design Club on campus we're prone to meetings wherein we create games from scratch using a variety of media (cards, dice, various prototyping tools) and usually have some manner of playability in short order.

To meet the objective of making a game, they need to:

Make a goal - What must the player do to end the game?
Put something in the way - Why is it difficult for the player to reach that goal?

One aspect of fun in games comes from the challenges inherent in achieving the game's goal. To that end I want to start by describing this to students through a simple exercise in which I ask them to take a card from me. Once they realize that's boring, I act to prevent them from getting the card and we fight about it.

Then I bring out a deck of cards and ask them to consider a couple goals and find a way to prevent each player from achieving that goal.

Media and the Body

A lot of what media and the body means to me comes by way of how we consume media, not necessarily how we perform it. To that end, I chose an image from The Matrix, wherein the characters are "jacked in". In the movie's canon, The Matrix began as a way to escape the world, a form of entertainment. As time dragged on, the people of that world began to spend more time consuming media of the Matrix, "playing the game" as it were, that they a majority of their lives in the Matrix, eventually becoming wholly integrated with it.

The sad bit about all this is that it's how I see media consumption evolving in the next 200 years. As we seek to create increasingly immersive experiences, natural evolution of the idea will come 'round to whole-consciousness immersion in the experience and we'll long for something outside our normal, dreary lives.