LAR 380W / LAR 312R
TH 2:00 – 5:00pm, WMB 4.118
Open to all UTSOA Undergraduate and graduate students
Allan Shearer: ashearer@austin.utexas.edu
Serious games are games designed to inform, train, persuade, or explore complex real-world problems in which there are uncertainties, strategic tradeoffs, and long-term consequences. They occupy a growing intersection of game design, simulation, learning sciences, and applied research, and have been used to model and understand complex systems in domains ranging from climate change and public health to disaster response and national security.
This course examines serious games as both artifacts and methods for studying behavior, learning, and decision-making across all scales of the built and natural environments. The course introduces students to the theory, design, and evaluation of serious games. Students will explore how game mechanics, rules, and narrative structures can be used to represent systems, support learning, and shape professional and civic decision-making. Readings on game design theory and practice will be discussed, experienced through gameplay, and applied through the iterative design of original games.
Key characteristics of games examined in the course include rulemaking, player agency, rewards and incentives, positional asymmetry, randomness, information sharing, feedback mechanisms, and ending conditions. Several serious games will be analyzed over the semester, with special attention given to Aftershock, a cooperative game developed by Paxsims, which models a humanitarian crisis.
A semester-long project will ask students to work individually or in pairs to design a paper- based (non-computer) serious game addressing a challenge in the built and natural environments. Projects must clearly articulate learning goals and intended outcomes, and gameplay should foreground the key factors, trade-offs, and uncertainties that shape the challenge. Games may be competitive, cooperative, or hybrid; must involve at least two players; and should require minimal pre-game preparation. Each game should take approximately 1 hour to play. Short exercises throughout the semester will emphasize user testing, critical reflection, and iterative design.
