First Semester

The first semester has gone by and with it the first Module which focused on Game Design history and e-learning techniques. The initial task of identifying which questions I had on Game Design were paramount to give a direction to my studies which mainly involved game mechanics and board games. Indeed for my assignments I chose to focus on the work in the area of game mechanics by Joris Dormans, whom I had met at the DIGRA Conference in Utrecht, Netherlands in Sept 2011.

In the meantime I also managed to acquire four board games each of which were built upon a native digital game: DOOM, Warcraft, World of Warcraft and Starcraft. In order to get acquainted with the Machinations framework developed by Dormans I attempted to implement the game mechanics of the Board Game using Dormans' online Machinations tool. Here's what it looks like.

For my assignment I decided to tackle Dormans' PhD thesis, particularly Chapter 7 which addresses game  generation techniques using formal grammars and rewrite rules. It was quite a challenge to not only summarise 12500 words into 1500, but also to make it accessible!