IUI’s MARLA museum continues to preserve games and game media. Join us to learn how the preservation process has been developing and discuss the challenge of preserving games in the current climate.
Description:
MARLA is IU’s only game preservation lab with IU Museum status. We have spent the last several years attempting to become the preeminent space where faculty, staff, and students preserve games of all types for future examination and scholarly study. This “third space” is fun, and quirky where multiple serious techniques of preservation are studied/practiced to ensure a long life for the artifacts themselves and future game design students.
The MARLA Council of faculty, staff, and students strive to pioneer new preservation techniques, while adhering to known best practices as we enter our third year. We also have a full-time TA to maintain MARLA’s many needs. These needs include navigating necessary funding, software/hardware repair, collection space, discerning donations, and safest ways to catalogue and preserve the artifacts within the constraints of the space and budget available.
The Running of Intro and Advanced TTRPG Courses at the Collegiate Level: A Retrospective
Summary:
Experience the history of 3 years of TTRPG courses at IUI Luddy MAS. We examine the strategies that have and have not worked in the classroom and explore student feedback and their own game creations.
Description:
Tabletop RPGs aren’t just games—they’re a powerful storytelling artform that has shaped movies, TV, and modern pop culture. Yet most game programs still focus on coding, engines, and 3D modeling. This seminar examines a multi-year experiment of how multiple TTRPG courses can and have been run in higher education.
Join Mathew Powers and Jason Peercy as they report on how they built and ran IUI’s first set of TTRPG course. They will present their academic findings and share the student experiences from these courses. You’ll learn how the courses ran, how students responded to them, and how they are being shaped for the future.
If you’re an educator dreaming of teaching TTRPG design, or just curious how to make it happen, this session gives you the tools, ideas, and inspiration to build your own, and learn how others have attempted to pioneer the process at their institution.
IUs MARLA preserves games through artifact collection, play, and a third space. Students curate the space, fostering discussions on rare games and new gaming culture, documented academically.
Description:
Cultural Impact: In the MARLA lab at Indiana University Indianapolis, faculty and students are working on a games preservation project.
Project Components: Game artifact collection, playable digital artifacts, and the creation of a third space within the school.
Purpose of the Space: This space encourages play and provides access to older games for scholarly work. Students actively curate the space, showing interest in older and niche games.
Presentation Focus: How this space fosters conversations about rare but influential games across genres, develops interests in past games, and reveals that experiences with historical games typically do not happen with original hardware.
Developing Culture: This evolving culture of new experiences with older games includes meta-discussions and is documented through ephemeral conversations, video essays, and academic coursework.