Games Studies / Lectures & Exercises
22/9/2025 - 22/12/2025 (Week 1 - 14)
Rachel Ng Jie Ting/ 0378902
Bachelors of design (Honours) in creative media
Games Studies / Lectures & Exercises
Table of content
Lecture 1 - Core Principles of Game Design
Lecture 2 - Balancing Fun and Educational Elements in Game Design
Exercise 1 - My favourite game & what makes this game playful
Exercise 2 - Non-digital to digital - Evolution and remediating this game
Lectures
Lecture 1 - Core Principles of Game Design
Lecture slide 1
- The art and science of making interactive experiences for fun and play.
- Mixes creativity, technical skills, and understanding of players.
- A good game has fun mechanics, an interesting story, and the right level of challenge.
- Player Experience
- Gameplay Mechanics
- Storytelling
- Balance and Challenge
- Over Complication
- Failing to Adapt
- Monetization vs. Player Experience
- Fun: Comes from engaging mechanics, rewarding challenges, player choice, competition, discovery, and achievement.
- Education: Ranges from simple knowledge acquisition to complex problem-solving, critical thinking, and real-world applications (math, science, history, language, etc.).
- Challenge: Designing games that are both entertaining and educational.
- Serious games and edutainment must balance engagement with learning.
- Goal: Make learning feel natural and rewarding without reducing fun.
- Key challenge: Avoid overwhelming players with learning, and avoid making fun secondary or gimmicky.
- Education emerges naturally through mechanics and simulations (trial-and-error, decision-making).
- Don’t front-load education; instead, unlock content gradually as players progress.
- Use puzzles and challenges to teach directly through gameplay.
- Narratives provide emotional stakes while reinforcing learning objectives.
- Focus on fun-first mechanics that embed learning.
- Introduce learning gradually instead of overwhelming players.
- Interviews
- Shadowing
- Seek to Understand
- Non-Judgmental
- Personas
- Role Objectives
- Decision
- Challenges
- Pain Points
- Share ideas
- All ideas worthy
- Diverge/Converge
- "Yes and" thinking
- Prioritize
- Mockups
- Storyboards
- Keep it Simple
- Fail fast
- Iterate quickly
- Understand impediments
- What works?
- Role Play
- Iterate quickly
Instructions
Exercise 1 & 2 (20%)
Timeframe: Week 1 - Week 7 (Deadline Week 7)
Exercise 1 - My favourite game & what makes this game playful
For this exercise, choose a video game title or table-top game that you really, really like. Is there one that kept you returning to play it, even though you have stopped playing for quite some time?
According to the list of Principles of Games Design in this lecture, review the best parts of the game that makes you a fan, as well as the parts where you think the game could use some improvements (Enhance and Refine).
Present your findings from the position of ‘PLAYER’ in the report template.
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Exercise 2 - Non-digital to digital - Evolution and remediating this game
Identify a non-digital game which has been converted into a digital version.
This can differ from the one you played together with your groupmate.
Discuss on:
1. Brief explanation of the gameplay
2. Differences and similarity of play dimension (real life vs on screen)
- Tip! Pick a game with either real-time or turn-based action; describe its core game mechanics and explain how the player experiences them temporally during both play dimensions.
3. Benefits and disadvantages of physical vs digital forms:
- Tip! Find a game that has appeared in both versions; compare, and give grounds for the benefits of playability and playful experiences.
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Feedback
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Week 2:
Week 3:
Week 4:
Week 5:
Week 6:
Reflections
Experience :
Observations :
Findings :
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