CS 4730

I took this class as someone who enjoyed video games and was looking for a light elective in the last semester before I graduated. My enjoyment of this class was shockingly low given its premise (a literal college class on video games); sadly, though Prof. Hott was an overall good instructor (and a big reason why I took the course), the course design and structure made the difference and made for a staggering dearth of fun.

Professor Hott is very nice, approachable, and made the class an open, welcoming space to discuss video games. However, while lecture time often focused on interesting material (e.g., case studies in how video games implemented design principles), the bulk of our semester grade was focused on the games we actually designed, programmed, and built (both individually and in a larger team project at the end of the semester). The result was that lectures were quite disconnected from the bulk of what we were being graded on, which was frustrating. To make things worse, there were in-class activities that amounted to random attendance checks at various points in the semester, so your options were A) attend lecture and spend 50 minutes most days learning material that was interesting but not all that relevant to what you were actually being graded on; or B) skip lecture and potentially forfeit up to 5% of your semester grade.

We were also required to write two reports on games in the first half of the semester. These were required to be at least three pages, single-spaced. Since we were explicitly asked not to write a game review, however, these reports seemed to require doing outside research on the game and its context to get full points. While I scored decently well on these, a lot of my peers I took the class with seemed to find them frustrating, and I understand why. The rubric was rather vague, so the way I did well was by simply getting lucky on the first assignment and following the same template for the second. This is not a fair design for a learning activity.

The actual game projects in the class really didn't make up for this, and were in fact also quite frustrating. We had two individual projects in PICO-8 (a minimal framework sort of like writing a GameBoy game) and Unity. We spent a few classes going through the PICO-8 environment and even profiling some Lua code (which PICO-8 uses on the backend), but spent only one class going through a very basic Unity example (though this was also recorded as a demo for later reference). Unity can be extremely frustrating to use, so it was disheartening that we only spent one (1) lecture on an actual Unity example while spending many more lectures on material that was tangential to the game projects.

Being forced to go to lecture and feeling like I'm not actually learning helpful information is, admittedly, my least favorite college course structure and experience. On the bright side, I've heard that this course is significantly better with other instructors (e.g., Sherriff). If you're looking for a fun end-of-college elective like I was, don't take this class at all, or at least don't take it with Prof. Hott.