Theory and Practice of Game Design Syllabi - The Multiplayer Classroom: Designing Coursework as a Game - page 31

opportunity I thought. I would try a more game-like naming of roles in another
class. We ' ll see if that worked or not later on.

I gave the students too much latitude in choosing the type of game they wanted
to design. I have learned the hard way that better work is done when the
parameters of the assignment are much tighter. When the assignment is reduced
to a specific problem, telling an architecture class to “ draw blueprints for

converting a factory into a luxury apartment building � is far more helpful than

“ draw blueprints for any building you like. �

Such limits force more creativity from the students, and no matter how many
times you warn them, when the sky ' s the limit, they will often try to do more

than they possibly can accomplish.

Grading Procedure
The

section went through a radical overhaul. I knew that
Experience Points (XP) were how players advanced in MMOs. Could I adapt the
usual letter grades? In the table in the syllabus (refer to Figure 3.2), you

“ Grading Procedure �

ll see my
first attempt. And while it looks good as a table, there are several flaws. The most
obvious one is that in an MMO, we can set arbitrary amounts of XP necessary to
advance.

'

The higher level the player, the more XP it takes to move from one level to the
next. This is compensated for, in part, by greater amounts of XP awarded for
tasks such as killing mobs. The only concern is that we find a balance between
difficulty and reward.

The trouble with this chart was that they would have to earn 1200 points to
reach Level 2, while it would only take another 660 points to reach the highest
possible level. This is not only bad game design, but it s not very good class

design either. Yet I blithely went ahead, assuming that they would understand
this. They could see the exact amount of XP possible for any given task. Yet
unless they did the math on their own, concentrating on the amount of XP they
were awarded for a task as a percentage of the possible XP for that task, they
would have no idea how they were doing.

'

Also, in an MMO, players traditionally level up much faster in the beginning
than at the higher levels. So this particular XP system would not feel like a real