Equality game, anxiety attack, and misfortune: A pedagogical post-mortem on engines, modding, and the importance of player experience

In this chapter, I present a post-mortem covering three consecutive offerings of a course on persuasive games at the university level over a three-year period from 2010 - 2013. The course, "Designing Persuasive Games," is part of a larger, multidisciplinary program on digital media and game design. In this course, students are invited to engage both with theory and praxis, the process of "practicing" theory (Shaffer, 2004), by not only reading and writing about persuasive games but also through the design and development of one. Here, I present the overall design of the course across the three offerings and describe the most significant aspects of the course, from a pedagogical perspective, that I believe to be of value to others designing similar courses. These aspects include choosing a game engine, scaling projects to retain rhetoric, modding as praxis, and player experience testing. A sample grading rubric for persuasive games is also included at the conclusion of this chapter