Aaron Trammell is an Associate Professor of Informatics and has affiliations with Culture and Theory, African American Studies, and Media Studies at UC Irvine. He writes about how board games inform the lived experiences of their players. Specifically, he’s interested in how these games further values of white privilege and hegemonic masculinity in geek culture. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Analog Game Studies and the Multimedia editor of Sounding Out! He wrote two books: Repairing Play (MIT Press, 2023) and The Privilege of Play (NYU Press, 2023).
What is the assignment?
Build a Multimodal Atlas for a Role-Playing Game
The final project for this course is a twenty-page “Atlas” where you develop a world for use in a future game project. Format this Atlas in the style of a supplement for a role-playing game and include within it any rules, charts, tables, or images necessary to establish the fiction. It is okay if you prepare this as a supplement to an existing roleplaying system. If you do, please flag which system you are supplementing with this work. Students are expected to consider the people who inhabit this world, their cultural and political beliefs, as well as the world’s architecture, topography, technology, and fantastic twists. These projects will be evaluated by their creative merit, the interplay between people, culture, and technology within the world, as well as the world’s aesthetic appeal, and originality.
How does it work?
With this assignment my goal is to get students thinking creatively about what it means to construct a living breathing world that a game can take place within. So much of game design focuses on engineering the mechanical aspects of fun and this assignment is aimed at encouraging students to see how design can also be about thinking logically about fiction.
I thought that making students design an atlas would be helpful because it encourages a sort of analytic thinking about social, geographic, and cultural concepts. It is very much an assignment that encourages students to consider how they are communicating key pieces of information to their readers.
Student Artifact:
Jessie Archer created an Atlas for a game-world titled “The Glacial Outpost.” Her Atlas is an excellent example of the thinking that one needs to do for worldbuilding. Even though Jessie created a really fun and silly world (a penguin society!), each aspect links to the needs of the society that she is spotlighting and a game-player could easily imagine exploring the world if they were playing the game.
View Jessie’s Atlas here.
What do students say?
“When creating The Glacial Outpost Atlas, I spent a considerable amount of time researching how penguins and puffins are capable of surviving against the odds of frigid temperatures and aggressive predators. With innate survival skills, they proved to be an outstanding source of inspiration, and I modeled the fishing technology in my world as a way to augment their existing capabilities as survivors. I really enjoyed working on this assignment, as it allowed me to showcase the pairing of academia with creativity by having the opportunity to worldbuild, which is crucial to my major.”
– Jessie Archer
Why does this work?
After studying and analyzing different game-worlds throughout the quarter, students are given the opportunity to compose their own multimodal Atlas for their own game world. Through world-building, students develop multimodal communication skills by composing their own maps, legends, and descriptions. Students also have a clear audience that they are writing to – the players of their game.
Check out these resources for developing world-building and multimodal communication assignments:
