In the first installment, we talked about why one would want to teach. Let’s assume you’re sold on the concept of teaching, have the requisite degrees and experience, have contacted a local school, and have been slotted into the schedule for next quarter.

Now you’re faced with a terrifying, exhilarating question:

What in the hell am I going to teach these people?

This is not an easy question to answer, especially in the two weeks you have before you find yourself standing in front of a room full of students. So what do you do? Well, you make stuff up. Huh? What? Well, yes!

The first step to creating your curriculum is a brain dump of your knowledge about the topic. This is perhaps the most difficult step because it is at this point you must distill your years of knowledge and hard won experience (things which are most likely so intuitive and engrained as to be subconscious) into some kind of external format. This is, as you might expect, a somewhat time-consuming process. Here are some strategies I’ve developed in prepping for classes over the years:

1. Create framing questions to direct your thinking. This is just good brainstorming technique – framing questions are great way to guide your thinking. If you have a clear, concise question like ‘what is the most important thing I know about level design?’, your brain will feed you some answers. The trick is keep going even when you feel you’ve found the ‘right answer’ (a notion which is flawed and will severely limit your creativity if you don’t abandon it.) If you look for twenty right answers to a question, I guarantee you’ll find some answers that are surprising, and, in the case of drawing out knowledge on a subject you know well, surprisingly insightful. Here are some framing questions I’ve had success with:

• What is the most important thing I know about _______?
• What is the first thing I do when I _______?
• What are the different kinds of _______?
• What skills make someone an expert in _______?
• What qualities make someone an expert in _______?
• What knowledge makes someone an expert in _______?
• If I could give someone starting their new job only one piece of advice about _______, what would it be?

You can pretty much just insert the title of your class into the above blanks to get a solid framing question. Level Design, Gameplay and Game Design, Programming for the Artist, and so on.

2. Mine for Metaphors. One of the best and most common ways to explain something to someone is through metaphor. Take some of the concepts you’ve brainstormed above and look for some powerful metaphors for explaining them to the uninitiated. For example, one of my favorite metaphors for explaining the difference between single and multiplayer level design is that of “playground versus birthday party.” In planning a birthday party for one child, you buy napkins, hats, and a cake with the child’s favorite superhero or character on them. You plan all the activities around them, scheduling a clown, a bouncy castle, a trip to the arcade; their favorite things. All your effort is geared towards maximizing enjoyment for that one child, the birthday girl. In designing a single player level, the designer is creating a tailored, specific experience for one player, much like a birthday party. Multiplayer level design, however, is like designing a playground. Your primary focus is on creating a space in which the children can focus on having pleasurable interactions with one another. You’re designing a space which maximizes the children’s ability to have fun interacting. Most particularly, you must avoid elements which cause distraction from this interaction. In games this is typified by levels where players end up fighting the level more than each other - constantly having to pay attention to avoiding traps or pitfalls that are just as lethal as other players, for example.

Metaphor is extremely effective in conveying ideas and concepts. Take some time to brainstorm some effective metaphors for the concepts you’ve outlined. I often find that I metaphorical representations when thinking about these concepts anyway; all I have to do is identify and record them for later use.

3. Models of excellence. For whatever topic you’re going to teach, there are going to be some amazing examples of how to do it brilliantly out there. Quickly capture a list of your personal “masterworks” in the relevant area – pieces of work that make you step back and go oo-ooo! For example, as I was prepping for my level design class, I started by writing down a list of games that I thought had particularly excellent level design, getting as specific as possible if I could remember exactly where in the game those levels were and what they were called. Metroid Prime, Counterstrike, Super Mario Kart, Half-Life, and so on. If you’re going to be teaching a 3d modeling or art class, crack open images.google.com and start tracking down games you think are particularly beautiful or well executed, gathering a directory of ‘example’ screenshots. And, while you’re at it, write down what you think are your personal best pieces of work in the field. These, besides giving you a nice mental refresher on topical experience, will be extremely useful in establishing credibility, which I’ll get into in Part 3.

Finally, make a list of people in the field who you consider expert. Who created these pieces you’ve listed? Is it possible to get in contact with them? Is there anyone local who might be interested in guest speaking?

4. Research existing ideas. I’ve put this last because I’ve found it to be the most frustrating aspect of prepping to teach game classes. There simply isn’t that much out there that’s useful, especially if you’re teaching game design and related disciplines. There are lots of neat, specific, topical articles on Gamasutra, Escapist, and others, but there is most certainly a dearth of cohesive theories and practices to work from when prepping a curriculum. So, find stuff that’s out there, integrate it into what you have, and use it, but don’t just grab articles that have your topic in the title and hand them on to students: read them, figure out what they have to teach, and reconcile it with your own experience. I see far too many teachers defaulting to simple handing out articles from Gamasutra and saying ‘read it’ because they don’t know what else to teach.

Organization

So now you have your thoughts on paper. If you’ve done this correctly (and haven’t let your logical/analytical brain interfere with the brainstorming process) your thoughts should be scrawled all over the page, a jumbled mess. Now it is time to engage your logic circuits, to organize this stuff into ordered, bite-sized chunks, each of which builds on the ones before, and which culminate into some sort of complete, cohesive knowledge base.

A lot of times, this sort of ordering becomes self evident: you need to know Photoshop before you learn about UVW unwrapping, and so on. One strategy is to look over your topics and start by rating them 1-5 in terms of complexity or difficulty, then arrange them accordingly. Another way is to group ideas and concepts by “knowledge chains” – simply figure out concepts and skills that have others as prerequisites, draw out little chains between them, and then organize the chains by difficulty. Go with whatever makes the most sense to you.

In my level design class, I organize lessons according to specific games. I start by having students create levels for Excitebike, a simple, easy to understand game, and one of the first games released with a proper level editor. I lecture about iteration, which is what I’ve identified as the core skill of level design. Design, Test, Record, Revise, and Repeat – the more iterations of this cycle you can get, the better your levels will be. I introduce the basics of running a playtest (don’t talk, answer questions, or interrupt in any way, just watch and record) and get into spacing, timing, and creating flow for the player by removing pieces which consistently trip playtesters up without providing a rewarding challenge to master. Next week is Chu Chu Rocket, before which I lecture on puzzle games and the challenges involved in balancing frustration (too difficult) against boredom (too easy) to create ‘aha!’ moments in players, and make them feel clever. After that, it’s a lecture about multiplayer level design and creating Battle Mode maps for the original Super Mario Kart. And so on. As the quarter goes on, the games get increasingly complex, and the concepts layer on top of one another, eventually culminating in the creation of a level for Tony Hawk’s Underground (a game I worked on) and a special “design test” and interview in which I directly gauge the students’ designs (and writing) on the scale I would apply if I were looking to hire a level design to work on Tony Hawk. Obviously, the structure of your class will be dictated by the subject you’re teaching and your experience; just make sure you diagram out a logical, ordered map to guide your lesson planning.

Also, note that some structure is imposed by the format of your classes. As I said, at AIPX the classes are four hours long. More precisely, classes begin ten minutes after their scheduled start time (so 6:10 for a 6:00pm class), and there is a twenty minute break halfway through the class. In addition, the AIPX quarter consists of 11 weeks, and there is usually at least one week where class is not held due to school vacation. So, this means that you’re going to want to break this stuff up into about 20 chunks of learning, one for each ~ 2hr sub-period of each class.

Not unlike a good level, I try to design my class periods with a nice mix of stimulus: lectures, group activities, tool learning, and in class “work time” where the students work individually and I move around helping each in turn with their specific projects. I find that having a structured in-class goal to work towards – a peer critique of levels at 3pm, for example – is the best way to keep work time from devolving into ‘screw around online time’ (more on the ‘how’ of teaching in the next installment.)

At this point, you can break down your lessons and map them directly to specific class periods. At AIPX, you’re actually required to file this weekly plan with the school for each class, each quarter you teach. I usually print out a version of this to give to students on the first day of class. Also, I maintain a shorthand version for my own in-class use.

Weekly Plan for Level Design
“In Class” Weekly Plan for Level Design

And there you have it! Your class is locked and loaded. In the next and final installment we’ll look at the how - how exactly to keep a classroom full of eager, ADD game students, each of whom is sitting in front of a computer loaded with games, on task.