ARTG - Art & Design: Games + Playable Media

Explores the ways in which aesthetic designs in art and media influence, make, and convey meaning, and presents methods for designing, authoring and implementing aesthetic components into games and interactive artworks. Students investigate these topics from a conceptual starting point that branches into cultural, technological and/or interventionist inquiries, culminating in a series of creative design projects.

Games are an ancient art form that many people experience everyday. They can be used to bring audiences into imaginary worlds of play, and invite them to engage with the most critical problems facing the world. This course is a core course in the art and design: games and playable media major, and teaches students about the way we conceive of games, as more than products, as a genre of art, and a form of social engagement. Students are introduced to game studies scholars and game design texts, which allow them to start making analog games and interactive artworks.

Games are art forms that are widely accessed across a multitude of modern social, cultural, political, and media landscapes. Many games—from ancient to contemporary—express compelling sociopolitical perspectives and critiques. This course explores games as art with a focus on works that intentionally invite social action and change through performance, play, or participation. Games are discussed from critical, artistic, and aesthetic frameworks. Creative assignments and projects are used to explore methods and approaches for creating expressive games and other forms of radical play.

How can art make change? How can changing culture contribute to broader movements for social change? How can artists make games that move culture and society? Course approaches games as a site for political expression and social change. Looks at game makers who identify as feminist, queer, disabled, Black, Indigenous, people of color, workers, radicals, artists, scholars, and/or activists who are using games to drive social commentary, critical play, and political action. By the end of this course, students have a strong understanding of games as a political medium as demonstrated by the design of their own cultural intervention using games and play.

Builds skills in setting experiential goals and in defining and building mechanical and dynamic elements to support those goals. Through an iterative and reflective process, explores how we evaluate success as designers and artists, and the responsibilities we have to ourselves and to our audience. In this class, students will rapidly prototype interactive experiences in a number of forms and practice the presentation/positioning of their work to an audience.

Foundational course in game design. Re-introduces students to play as an expressive form that extends across many mediums of cultural expression and communication. Students study, experience, and design playful performance and interactive experiments, culminating in a final Playfaire, where, as a collective, they practice community organizing and reciprocity with the needs of individuals to create space for cross-disciplinary play. Course continues the long tradition of play using figures such as the jester and the clown to call into question social norms and power structures. Students also engage in critiques which may involve difficult conversations, but result in more powerful artworks. (Formerly offered as ARTG 80I, Foundations of Play.)

Survey of the basics of visual communication and interaction design, focusing on communicating designs of interactive systems. Covers techniques from a breadth of visual communication traditions; how to choose, use, and innovate; and how to structure dialogue around them.

Surveys the history of digital games from open university games through the home console, PC, and contemporary platforms, and on to indie and art games. Throughout, the course locates connections between technology, marketing, and play culture. (Formerly History of Digital Games.)

Project-centered studio-lecture hybrid course that introduces the process of world-building and interaction design from the standpoint of the art director. Each project addresses a milestone in the art direction development pipeline, and demonstrates corresponding entry-level technical and conceptual skills and strategies. Utilizing this split methodology, the big-picture game development process is presented in tandem with related fundamental digital art and design skills at an achievable scale for an introductory course.

This is a hands-on studio course, intended to give students an understanding of the techniques used to create characters for use in video games. Through this course, students will understand and develop the skills necessary to take a video game character design through all of the stages necessary to have a finished character for use in 2D or 3D video games. You will learn industry tools and techniques to be an effective game artist. (Formerly, Digital Drawing/Painting for Game Design.)

Teaches the concrete skills associated with making a digital game, from start to finish. Activities include establishing a team, concepting, storyboarding, prototyping, producing, and testing a game for release. Students are organized into groups and work together to create and produce a playable game.

Allows students to explore game designs related to their ongoing work within their major in either digital or non-digital formats. Students choose a topic and develop game projects that engage players.

Gives students an opportunity to explore game designs related to their ongoing work within the AGPM major, in either digital or analog formats. Students develop projects that engage players on a topic of their choosing.

Studio course in which students learn the highly technical and fundamental skills in the production of 3D art assets for video games. Covers the essential steps in the 3D art pipeline, starting with basic 3D modeling, UV unwrapping, the creation of texture maps, and finally, game engine implementation. Focuses on developing an understanding of the processes and creative thinking necessary to produce industry-level artwork rather than specific software. Students provided with video lectures and demos, and students can expect to produce weekly assignments to practice basic skills and concepts covered.

Gives students an in-depth understanding of the techniques of 3D character rigging and animation for video games. Students understand and develop the skills necessary to be an effective technical artist and animator with a focus on industry standard methods for animating characters to be implemented into a game engine. Course provides students with video and written lectures, video demonstrations, assignments and discussion boards aimed at giving them historical understanding of game animation, the evolution of these techniques, hands-on work to become proficient, as well as the ability to communicate online with other students and the instructor to answer questions and further their knowledge.

What do immersion and interactivity look like outside of virtual worlds? How can we activate social dynamics and public space for the purpose of play? How might we evoke feelings of purpose, or even magic, for players and spectators alike? Students will study and create immersive experiences designed to play out in real life. Drawing inspiration from performance studies, activism, art history, and more, we will transform the everyday into the extraordinary.

In this studio course, students learn the basics of digital sculpting in ZBrush with a focus on 3D character art. Through a mix of in-class demos and periodic assignments, students learn how to produce high-fidelity digital sculpts and their practical application in the 3D game art pipeline.

Explores experimental mechanics, dynamics, themes, and aesthetics within the tabletop RPG form. In groups and individually, students will play, run, design, write, workshop, and print/produce experimental tabletop RPGs, as well as conduct usability tests focused on layout, design cohesion, and accessibility.

Feminist games including intersectional feminist games, transfeminist games and queer feminist games, will be created by students in this course. Students will study the existing history and present of these genres of games, including game mods, personal experience games, narrative games, alternate reality, augmented reality and electronic literature. Students will work individually to create games as art and activism building on critical theories of race, gender, sexuality and algorithms.

Students study, and make, queer and trans art and games. Course considers how gender and sexuality are systems of rules often assumed in game design, and how those rules can be subverted to create novel and experimental games. By identifying and resisting cisnormativity and heteronormativity, students create original game concepts, using a critical, intersectional approach that understands that race as a constitutive element of both gender and sexuality. Course also studies with queer and trans ecologies understanding gender and race as inseparable from our idea of nature.

Cross Listed Courses

Enrollment is restricted to art and design: games and playable media, and critical race and ethnic studies majors and proposed majors.

Discusses a variety of aspects of writing found in videogames and other interactive forms of media. Using a mix of creative writing projects and in class discussions, students will practice and critique existing work as well as their own.

Introduction to Virtual Reality is an introductory course with a combination of theory and practice. Students are exposed to the history of Virtual Reality and hands-on experience in making VR and developing their own VR project. By introducing broad topics around VR, such as immersive spectacle, virtual embodiment, sonic immersiveness, students will gain knowledge about cultural, historical, and practical perspectives of VR. Students will also learn technical skills in developing VR in Unity 3D. 3D modeling experience is not required in this class. This class is an integration of the production of 3D and 360 degree VR experience. Photogrammetry, 360 degree video production and editing, and other expressive media will also be introduced for advancing the development of VR.

How do we conceptualize a Black Aesthetic in the realm of digital art and media? How do we re/define Black virtuality when, historically, computer graphics has failed to accurately render Blackness? This course looks at the field of digital media from a technological and cultural perspective, understanding the ways in which anti-Blackness has been embedded in our technology, from photography to video games. Concurrently, course examines the history of the Black Aesthetic as an interventionist art movement, and find ways to intervene in the contemporary digital media landscape.

Cross Listed Courses

Enrollment is restricted to sophomore, junior, and senior art and design: games and playable media, and critical race and ethnic studies majors, and Black studies minors.

Students study the fields of ecofeminist art, climate fiction, virtual environmental art, Afrofuturism, Latinx futurism and Indigenous futurism, and create digital art relevant to these fields. The dual global crises of climate change and COVID-19 have forced a reevaluation of the idea of the human through a confrontation with the realities and histories of global colonialism and white supremacy. In response, social movements and artists have created artistic strategies which can envision futures beyond the horizon of the imagination of capitalism.

Looks specifically at the design of non-digital games. Surveys a variety of game types and designs. Students prototype card or board game, culminating in a final project that engages players on a socially relevant topic.

Students create novel, interesting game concepts and outline and polish a game pitch for their yearlong project, starting with concept ideation and storyboarding to prototyping and presenting the game idea. This course is part one of the art and design: games and playable media capstone requirement.

Course focuses on individual projects, supported by collaboration within a general working-group. Students create novel, interesting game concepts, and outline and refine game proposals for longer-term projects. Studio projects cover a range of creative practices, including concept ideation and storyboarding, prototyping, and presenting and/or exhibiting the game idea in a more finalized form. Can be taken as a single course or as part one of the art and design: games and playable media capstone requirement. Continuing with the capstone series via ARTG 171 will require team collaboration.

Students craft the core loop of their yearlong game project. Students build the game, examine player feedback, and repeat the process to make the game better. This course places particular emphasis on advanced production techniques for working in teams, as well as software engineering practices for software design, software testing, and build management. This course is part two of the art and design, games and playable media capstone requirement.

Students scope and polish their final game designs. Students work towards releasing one specific game platform while coordinating across disciplinary boundaries to create and integrate all the necessary code, art, animation, and sound assets for their game. This course is part III of the art and design: games and playable media capstone requirement.

Supports students who are collaborating with the ARTG/CMPM 170-series teams on the creation of their capstone game projects. Enrollment is restricted to students who are working with senior game-design project groups, and by permission of the instructor,

Explores how storytelling techniques can align with game mechanics to examine and provoke questions of identity and personal narrative. Drawing from games that express personal experience through autobiography, to games that question the relationship and separation between player and character, students develop exploratory prototypes in digital and/or nondigital formats around potential mechanics for personal narrative and expression. Course culminates in a final piece of interactive art as well as designing the exhibit and public documentation for this work.

Explores and presents multiple approaches and methods for documenting, describing and demonstrating a creative practice and a collection of creative work. Students will develop artist-centered narratives, curate and design portfolio materials, and investigate tools, media formats, and platforms useful for communicating an individual creative perspective and body of work. Portfolios and other descriptive materials will also be discussed from an interactive and playable framework, with an emphasis on both individual expression as well as viewer/audience experience.

Individual study in areas approved by sponsoring instructors. Tutorial may not be used to satisfy major requirements. Petition required, approved by instructor and department; petitions available on the program website.

Individual study in areas approved by sponsoring instructors. Tutorial may not be used to satisfy major requirements. Petition required, approved by instructor and department; petitions available on the program website.