This is the course I will be teaching in January 2012.
The title of the course is a bit of a play on the title of Brenda Laurel's groundbreaking 1991 book, Computers as Theatre, in which she demonstrated how all of "personal computing" — and, in particular, computer games — had become a truly theatrical form of experience.
I double-majored in both computing and theatre as an undergrad at Calvin in the 1980s, and the exploration of Laurel's idea has been a significant part of my explorations of computing ever since.
Calvin alum Brenda Bakker Harger, a faculty member of Carnegie Mellon University's Entertainment Technology Center, will be co-teaching this course with me. This center began a decade ago as a joint venture of Carnegie Mellon's computer science and theatre departments, and one of its co-founders was the late Randy Pausch (whose "Last Lecture" you may have heard of). Brenda has been teaching at the ETC from the beginning and specializes in using improv to improve the design of characters in animations and games.
Brenda and I are also lining up both in-person and Skype sessions so that students in this class will be able to interact with professionals in the animation and gaming industry who work at Pixar, Electronic Arts, Disney, and other major companies.
Our plan is for motion tracking to be a key part of the projects of this course, with the student teams designing interactive experiences that the player/performer interacts with via body movements, rather than mouse and keyboard. This will most likely be done using the Adobe Flash and the Xbox 360's "Kinect" device.
This course will satisfy the programming/scripting requirement of the proposed Digital Multimedia Arts Minor.
Course Description:
The form of personal computing first introduced commercially by the Apple Macintosh (1984) and Microsoft Windows (1985) and dominant to this day was strongly inspired by a team of researchers at Xerox PARC in the 1970s.
Years later, team leader Alan Kay reported that key to their revolutionary invention of "pointand- click" personal computing at Xerox PARC had been their persistent discussion of this technology as a form of theatre.
Likewise, Brenda Laurel demonstrated in Computers as Theatre in 1991 that programmers continued to struggle in the design of Macintosh and Windows software primarily because of their lack of awareness and understanding of the fundamentally theatrical user experience they were trying to construct. Formerly of Atari, Laurel pointed to computer games as only the most obvious examples of the theatricality that has continued to inform personal computing, to this day.
In this course, students will explore ways in which a specifically theatrical approach – considering character, (inter)action, space, and audience – can enrich our understanding, experience, and design of computer games. Students will work in small teams to create simple computer games using Adobe Flash and its built-in scripting language, "ActionScript."
Other course activities will include looking at theatrical aspects of existing computer games, visits by experts, and (following the example of designers at Pixar and other studios) a few simple theatre and improv games played as a class.
Special consideration will also be given to ways in which the situation of this work at a strong liberal arts college with a Christian perspective can make a difference to both the process and product, in the hope of creating computer games that are not only entertaining but also thought-provoking.
This course is intended for any Calvin student, and no prior formal experience in theatre, computer programming, or scripting is required.