One thousand blank white cards

The Learn­ing Lab is a course. And so like any oth­er course, there’s a set time dur­ing the week where every­one comes togeth­er to learn. Usu­al­ly there’s a cer­tain focus dur­ing these ‘lessons’. This week’s focus was rules and play. Some­thing one could say we, as aspir­ing game design­ers, are famil­iar with. And so for this week’s four hours of learn­ing we were asked to tell the stu­dents what rules mean to us, how we can use them and tweak them to achieve what­ev­er needs achiev­ing. We explained, using our good old friend, Chess, how the rule­set of a game affects how you expe­ri­ence a game, what it does to your brain, and how you can steer things in a cer­tain direction.

So that was the learn­ing thing, where teach­ers Syl­van and Wieger used white­boards and terms and asked if there were any ques­tions regard­ing the sub­ject. Then came the fun part! We fig­ured that in order to let the stu­dents under­stand how this whole idea of using rules in cre­at­ing things, we’d play some Nom­ic! The rule­set of Nom­ic con­sists sole­ly of, well, mak­ing rules. The lack of any pre-defined struc­ture did result in a cer­tain form of con­fuse­ment among the stu­dents. But, after switch­ing from their every­day infor­ma­tion sponge uni­ver­si­ty mind­set to an open cre­ative mind­set, it wasn’t long before they were all real­ly into it. Cre­at­ing cards, chang­ing game­play, screw­ing each oth­er over and most impor­tant­ly (after all, this was a game we were play­ing here): hav­ing hap­py funtimes!

Excit­ing, inspir­ing, sim­ple fun. There’s a big­ger pic­ture we’re work­ing on with the stu­dents, so we’re back off to work, but will keep you posted!

Syl­van and Wieger out.