Experimental Game Mechanics

Introduction

This class takes place both in the winter and the summer semester. The class may be taken by students of all years. It is held by Thomas Wagensommerer.

Content

Conventional game mechanics can be described as “rule-based methods for agency in the gameworld, designed for overcoming challenges in non-trivial ways.” (Sicart, M. A. (2016a). Mechanics. In H. Lowood & R. Guins (Eds.), Debugging Game History: A Critical Lexicon. (pp. 297–304). MIT Press)

This course aims to reflects on strategies to approach, research, evaluate, create and define experimental game mechanics to overcome the present state of game mechanics in a playful way.

Throughout the course, we use and misuse modes of digital production to perforate the surface of representation to expose its new flesh. (cf. Videodrome - David Cronenberg 1983)

This course explicitly understands game (or rather: play) as a matter of artistic creation.