Games and Simulation Certificate - Elective

This course focuses on a critical reading of video games, including cultural and gender representations, and implications of decisions in narratives and design. Students will analyze how video games bring new pathways, questions, and perspectives about cultural memory. Through creation of their own interactive fiction within this course as an important step in their game development education, students are encouraged to apply humanism and critical lenses to games' representation of local and global cultures.

This project-based course engages students in exploring, assessing, and applying the elements of storytelling within the design of digital games, including the practice of situating game narrative as an essential design element across multiple communicative modes (i.e. imagery, audio, video, text). Students will explore narrative elements employed in classic and modern digital games, develop original story elements for digital games, and engage with the stories created by their colleagues.

This hands-on project-based course centers on advanced simulation environments, their development, evaluation, and importance in contexts ranging from education, health care and emergency response, exploration and mission planning, and entertainment. Understanding the objective of simulation will involve information gathering, problem exploration, and multimethodological analysis of complex problems. The emphasis of this course will be on the effective design and integration of diverse elements and will include practical and theoretical applications, of: mobile, virtual, augmented, mixed, and extended reality simulation; storyboarding and narrative development; collaborative participatory design; modeling methods; and a variety of human-computer interaction (e.g., affect and context aware systems) and learning science (embodied learning and designed based research) methodologies.

This course develops and applies critical frameworks to understand diversity and bias in world-building, game mechanics, character representation, and social behavior within games. We will interrogate games to discover implicit and explicit biases, explore diversity and inclusion initiatives within the gaming industry, and develop strategies toward more inclusive game development and play experiences.

Video game development is an ever-changing diverse field that has seen many advances in the recent years. This course aims to teach students fundamental concepts of game development as well as basics of the Unity Game Engine. The course will cover topics such as fundamentals of C#, components of Unity, game objects, transform operations, cameras, lights, materials, textures, skyboxes, terrains, prefabs, handling assets, adjusting project settings, character controllers, particle systems, physics components, ray casting, animation and audio. The course is heavily hands-on and project oriented. The covered topics will be implemented on small-scaled Unity template projects. There will be a larger scaled final project, where students will implement a basic video game applying the best practices covered throughout the course. At the end of the course, students will have gained fundamental game development skills that can be further advanced with upper level courses.

This course aims to give students fundamental knowledge and hands-on experience about the ways of earning money through video games independently. The course will include content-based lectures that cover information about relevant aspects and platforms along with best-practices and real-life examples. There will be discussions, hands-on activities, research and case studies, reading and video assignments followed by quizzes, a midterm exam, and a final project that emphasizes hands-on application of the learned content. In the course, the tools of the trade and various channels for monetizing independent gaming will be introduced. After completing this course, students will be equipped with the necessary knowledge to be able to pursue independent money-earning activities in gaming.

This course surveys eSport as an activity, as a site for groups or teams building community, and as an emerging digital industry worldwide. Students will learn about differing stakeholders and organizations converging in eSports. Learners will also consider eSports from differing lenses, perspectives, and academic disciplines. Emerging employment opportunities in eSports as well as potentials for professional players will be discovered and examined.