Sunday Office Hours - Theme: Final Submissions & Reflection
Summary:
This is your last chance to polish your work and turn in your final assignments. Youll have time to reflect on your creative process, share insights with peers, and present your projects.
Description:
Celebrate your progress, collect feedback, and consider your next steps as a designer.
Explore the importance of gaming in public libraries and how to run successful table top programs for all ages with Ryan LaFerney, a public services librarian from the Indianapolis Public Library.
An accessible overview of the academic study of tabletop RPGs and its connection to game design, fan discourse, and play itself. For researchers, educators, students, aca-fans, and fan-scholars.
Description:
Tabletop RPGs are increasingly being studied in academic settings, used by educators and therapists, and taken seriously as a form of media by practitioners themselves. This presentation explores the concepts being brought to bear upon TRPGs by different scholarly and quasi-scholarly discourse communities and shows where they line up, how they diverge, and what intellectual affordances emerge as a result. Participants will come away with a stronger interdisciplinary knowledge base and professional network for their own efforts.
Tangents Of Play: Teaching & Learning Through Misdirection
Summary:
Case studies of games-based learning in my university literature courses. The shared purpose of goals, rules, and attitudes in both study and play, and how unpredictable divergences lead to learning.
Description:
Attendees will engage in hands-on activities from 3 of my classes (Creative Writing, Literature and Games, and Living Literature) and review a few ideas from instructional design and play theory. Ill demonstrate how best practices enhance learner motivation and engagement through semi-structured lessons that remain open to learner experience, player agency, and positive outcomes beyond prescribed goals.
As kids we created games: roleplaying in the backyard, to Monopoly and Uno house rules. Now, we still play and love discovering new game designs. Inspire the next generation to craft their own games
Description:
As kids we created games: roleplaying in the backyard, to Monopoly and Uno house rules. Now, we still play and love discovering new game designs. Inspire the next generation to craft their own games.
Andy is a professional video game designer since 1994, a designer on The Siblings Trouble and more titles coming soon, and has been teaching game design since 2015. Barak has been playing games a long time, had his first game, Capes, Cowls and Villains Foul published and followed that up as the lead designer of Retrostar, and was even a finalist and Game Chef award-losing designer of Ekphrasis.
Teaching Creative Writing With The Carved From Brindlewood Game System
Summary:
Explore how the mechanics of the Carved from Brindlewood system, a narrative-driven tabletop RPG, enhance creative writing practices.
Description:
Carven from Brindlewood is a tabletop role-playing system that emphasizes shared storytelling and investigation, making it an excellent tool for building rich, immersive settings, characters, and conflicts collaboratively. This lecture will focus on how to harness the system's game mechanics and narrative-driven elements to enhance both personal gaming experiences and creative writing curriculum.
Teaching Critical Thinking & Analysis Through Board Game Design
Summary:
Discover how board game design can teach critical thinking and analysis. Learn how this adaptable concept can engage students in classrooms, corporate training, libraries, and more.
Description:
How can board game design encourage creativity, critical thinking, and collaboration? This session highlights a college honors seminar on board game design, detailing how students analyzed game mechanics, developed original games, and refined their creations through playtesting and feedback. Youll see examples of student-designed games that came out of this class and learn what students felt they learned by playing and designing games. Join us to learn how this framework can be tailored for classrooms, corporate training, libraries, or other learning environments to foster collaboration, problem-solving, and deeper learning through games.
Many games do not tell an accurate story. Particularly those focused on history or colonialism. Learn how to use games and game design principles to explore and challenge these norms.
Description:
Many tabletop games focus on a traditional narrative that may not tell an accurate story. This is typical of games that focus on historical topics such as war or colonialism. There are ways to use these games, or those designed with challenging norms as a focus, to explore these topics in innovative ways in an educational setting. Join Matt Shoemaker, librarian at Temple University, designer of Bee Lives and co-designer of The Red Burnoose: Algeria 1857 to explore how to use tabletop games and game design principles to explore challenging topics.
Training first responders uses many gaming mechanics, from recall to role play. Learn how to incorporate some of the same processes into your education and training environment.
Description:
Educators often say, play is learning. A well-designed lesson or training can be so fun and immersive, students dont even realize theyre learning. And teachers often dont even realize we are using game dynamics in our instruction. Yet role playing and other game dynamics are at the center of training and teaching in many fields. Training for first responders and healthcare workers helps them master complex ideas and decision-making. The same elements used to create disaster exercisesboth tabletop and live action--can be adapted to any learning environment. Ill touch on the basics of exercise design, highlight the game elements at work, and lead participants through practice and reflection on how they can add these dynamics to their own lesson/training plans.
The Aesthetics Of Chance (Why Games Have Randomness, Whether You Like It Or Not)
Summary:
Discuss the basics of probability, psychology, and the factors that make chaos a crucial element of games. Learn how to use randomness in your design, how not to do it, and the reasons why.
Description:
Hosted by James Ernest (Lords of Vegas, Kill Doctor Lucky, Pirates of the Spanish Main)