Today in class we did an exercise where I asked each student to play an independent game. The students then came in and drew on the board Brian Schrank’s diagram defining the different types of avant-garde games and then each one wrote the name of the game they played on a Post-It and positioned it on the diagram, explaining why they thought it went there. We discussed each game, moved them around and even came up with a way of visualizing games that seemed to span multiple areas on the board. The result:
After they finished, someone suggested we do this exercise with their final project ideas, which are in-progress. That looked like this:
I was really excited by how energized the students were about this exercise, and also the fact that they initiated the second part of analyzing their own games.
Super fun and useful for anyone teaching about artgames using Brian’s book.