How Games Are Designed - The Multiplayer Classroom: Designing Coursework as a Game - page 221

instrument, or teaching, game design demands a particular set of skills that hopefully
work the magic necessary to create an engaging experience for your audience.

Luckily, you re already practicing some of the skills necessary to be a Game

Master. Read the definition again. Couldn

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t a teacher s role be defined in a

similar way?

Teacher (aka Instructor or Educator)

A teacher is a person who acts as an organizer, official source for questions regarding rules,
arbitrator, and moderator for a class. The role of a teacher in a traditional classroom is to weave
students

experience, control the non-student aspects of the class, create an environment in which
students can interact and learn, and solve any student disputes. The basic role of the teacher is the
same in almost all traditional classes, although differing rule sets make the specific duties of the
multiplayer classroom teacher unique to that system.

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Whether or not you will also take on the role of game designer is determined by
several factors. Let ' s see how you answer the following questions.

n Are you open to new ways of approaching your class material? You
probably will not have made it this far in the topic if you aren ' t. An

open, curious mind can take you a long way.
n Are you a gamer? We can see from the case histories that this is not
essential. Game design shares with teachers an attention for detail, an
ability to structure experiences for others, and especially important for a
real world game: to be able to adjust to the day-to-day surprises that
come your way.
n Do you know gamers? Having a gamer in the family, a spouse, child,
grandparent can be a great resource. How about colleagues in your
school? Parents of students? Friends at church? Chances are you are sur-
rounded by gamers of all ages. You may just not know it.
n Are there students you can ask for advice, or who might be able to
help you with the actual design? This is obviously more likely with high
school or college age kids, but these days don

t be surprised to find mid-
dle school students creating games, either with game-building programs,
or even programming from scratch. It should be obvious, but just in
case

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— it ' s probably not a good idea to ask students in the class you ' ll be