Admission requirements
The course is open to master's students in design, architecture, urbanism, and landscape. A mix of students across disciplines is actively encouraged, but design students will have priority.
The course offers an entry point into how game design principles and technologies can be explored as materials and tools for creative, speculative, and critical processes. It fosters experimentation, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and the ability to think rigorously about individual perspectives through characters and possible futures. Prior interest in and some experience with technology tools and platforms is recommended.
The course is connected to the following study programs
- Master of Architecture
- Master of Design
- Master of Design
Course description
Course responsible: Nadja Lipsyc
This course invites students to discover and learn game design technologies through creatively and speculatively design possible worlds: their systems, inhabitants, artefacts, and infrastructures. The course is built around a large-scale worldbuilding prompt. Worldbuilding here is a vehicle for expanding imagination and critical thinking about design, technology, and possible futures.
Students will be introduced to worldbuilding and game design as a design practices, drawing on traditions of fiction, speculative design and design futures to explore how imagined environments can challenge assumptions, reveal values, and propose alternatives.
The course treats game design not just as a subject of study but as a method: the structures, mechanics, and participatory logics of games become tools for building, testing, and inhabiting speculative worlds. Through boardgames, roleplaying games, VR, film, readings, and other participatory formats, students build a shared vocabulary for designing with and through fiction and play.
From a collectively defined world will emerge: characters and stories, artefacts and infrastructures, maps and settlements, all developed through individual exercises, group collaboration, and hands-on making. Game design methods include system thinking, rule-writing, player experience design, and iterative playtesting, and will run through this process as both scaffolding and subject matter. These speculative outputs are not ends in themselves, but instruments for probing real design questions about space, systems, participation, and technology.
Students will also engage directly with the games industry through studio visits and guest lecturers. Past workshops have included interactive sound design, character design and sketching, introduction to game engines, and spatial design.
Learning Outcome
Knowledge Students will develop a broader understanding of worldbuilding, speculative design, and design futures as practices, and of how game design principles and participatory technologies shape creative and design processes. They will be able to critically situate game methods and imaginative approaches.
Skills Students will be better equipped to draw on worldbuilding, game design methods, speculative fiction, and participatory experience design as generative tools within product/interaction design, architecture, urbanism, or landscape design contexts.
General Competence Students will be able to articulate and defend the thematic, methodological, and technological choices underlying their final project. They will be able to critically reflect on the role of technology, game mechanics, rules, and participation in creative and speculative processes.
Teaching
Examination
Form of assessment: Assessment folder
Grading scale: Pass/fail
The assessment folder consists of the following course deliverables:
Game projects: A boardgame developed through iterative design and playtesting; an XR (AR/VR) project bible; a final project using student-chosen technologies and game methods.
Worldbuilding (individual): A character sketch and story; a sound sketch.
Worldbuilding (group): A collective map; settlement descriptions; artefact and infrastructure sketches; fictionalised reports.