Game Design Club @ Experimental Game Cultures

As a part of my role as university assistant at the Experimental Game Cultures department @ University Of Applied Arts Vienna I created the first edition of our Game Design Club. In these sessions, the students create playable prototypes after an introductory talk about game design methodology, a discussion of different design mindsets and analysis of existing games.
This is a hands-on collaboration, we playtest each others projects and iterate on our ideas.

The sessions themselves are playful and have constraints/rules. These are set in place in order to facilitate creativity and avoid blank-page paralysis. For the theoretical part of these sessions we look at chapters from such books as “Game Design Workshop”, “A Theory Of Fun For Game Design”, “Rules Of Play”, “The Art Of Game Design”, and many more.

The main goals of these practical get togethers are:

Gaining confidence in the methodology of game design

Discussing different design mindsets

Creating playable prototypes

Playtesting & Iterating on ideas