experimental narrative games class

Each Fall I teach an upper-level undergraduate course at NYU Tandon’s Integrated Digital Media program called Experimental Narrative Games.
In this course students learn about using narrative in games through the use of digital tools, puzzle design, and storytelling.

Crossword Design

Inspired by a particularly cool empty crossword grid on the walls of our academic building, each semester I kick off the puzzle-design component of class with a site-specific crossword challenge. Students work together to reverse-engineer a crossword puzzle based on a pre-existing grid, coming up with a theme & clues for each entry. Because the boards were public, students saw their peers solving (or struggling to solve) puzzles without giving extra hints or clues. After this lesson we continued practicing to design common types of puzzles: other word puzzles, logic puzzles, and perception puzzles, and proceeded from there into more site-specific and object-oriented puzzle design.

integrating puzzle design & narrative design

For the final project of the course, students work in groups to design custom, narrative-based puzzle boxes for guest critics. Each group is given a list of the critic’s interests as a starting point. From there, students must create 3 different puzzles that are narratively linked for the critic to solve. The puzzle boxes are mailed to the critic, who has 1 week to solve them before coming into class to meet with the group and walk-through their process and describe the narrative back to students. By mailing boxes out to critics, students are physically separated from their intended audiences and thus, unable to give hints, extra clues, etc (as they often do when playtesting in-person!). This pushes them to clearly articulate and guide critics to the solution and intended narrative through their design and writing.

This is by far the most popular of all of my assignments — students LOVE designing for a specific critic, combining puzzle design with storytelling & writing, and love fabricating and playtesting physical objects.