Teaching children is hard. I’ve written before about the industry codeswitching between developers and journalists, and trying to keep dev jargon out of my pieces for enthusiast publications.
With the kids, I try to say things like Will your player know he has to try again? and Have you taught your player how to do that? but more often I catch myself telling the 8-years-olds that their games need a narrative arc. My teaching is more effective with the teenagers, who are excited to meet a real professional game developer. (Without fail, someone asks if I know Notch.) I hope that actually seeing a female game designer will show any interested girls that it’s a viable career option, but so far my boy students outnumber my girl students more than ten to one, so they’re also getting the usual message about what game development looks like.
Anyway, after I told my class that a good game has a clear conclusion, one of my students made this as the bad ending:
I don’t remember saying failure state in that class… but I might have.
Related: Other students amusing me with fail.
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