Well here’s some good news (needed recently because my house was broken into this week!): I’ve just been hired to teach a class on board game design at the Vancouver Film School (VFS)!
VFS has a program for video game designers, and one of the first courses that the students have to take is called Game Theory – Analog. The course description:
Students will be exposed to the fundamentals of game theory, unpacking the principles that make games such as chess, dice, and cards popular across centuries and cultures. Building on this base, students will then move to a consideration of contemporary non-digital games as well as considering more academic discussions of risk/reward captured through von Neumann’s minimax theory. The result of this class will be the development of an analog game prototype.
Sounds amazing! The text book that is used is called Rules of Play which has a ton of great info on the theory of game design. I’ll be teaching once a week, in the evenings, for 7 weeks. I’m confident that my experience in the game industry tied with my experience as a facilitator and training designer at Best Buy Canada will help make this a pretty entertaining and educational class. I can’t wait! I’ll be sure to write more once I teach a class or two, to let you all know how it’s going!
-Jay Cormier
Inspiration to Publication 