Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
How is this possible? It is possible in the same way that a coffee shop or a shaded
spot on a sidewalk becomes a place in which people carry on conversations. Such
conversations emerge from the daily activity of life. They emerge because they do
not require you to do anything other than what you are doing.
The notion that conversation can simply spring to life in any given setting is in
part one of the reasons that this topic presents its topics in an essential, ran-
domized way. The essential presentation eschews ''word problems.'' While word
problems are tremendously important and are hardly ever left out of standard
math textbooks, in this context they are left out so that when you decide to flick
to a page and begin a conversation, you can do so immediately.
This is a topic of beginnings. It seeks no end other than providing the most direct
possible inroad to a few starting points in your exploration of math. It leaves out
much more than it includes. It avoids systematic learning. It strives instead to be
analogous to a shaded place on a sidewalk or a table in a cafe.
Computer Games and Classrooms
When it comes to the conversation math provides, many people know only
silence or something near silence. It is not even a conversation in a foreign
language for these people. It is not a conversation at all. They have abandoned it
because they have learned that they do not do it well and therefore should not do
it at all.
In many classrooms, math is taught in a non-conversational, exclusionary way.
People who do well with such studies find such settings perfectly comfortable.
They do not learn what they cannot do. Others find the case the complete
opposite. They learn only what they cannot do.
An alternative approach to the classroom would be to make it so that each day
the goal is to find something everyone can do. Each day becomes an occasion of
confirmation.
This topic endeavors to be such a classroom. Professor Hardy, it is hoped, would
approve. You are here because you want to carry on a conversation. The con-
versation has no solid end or aim beyond continuing the conversation.
This topic is about mathematics for computer game development in the sense
that it provides an approach to math that draws from classrooms in which
computer game development and play have been the central activities. Such
