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Playdate’s handheld changed how Duke University teaches game design

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Re: Playdate’s handheld changed how Duke University teaches game design

#111

Post by aesthesia »

gnopgnip wrote: post #55
jubilanti wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A $200 textbook should absolutely be out of line

For an advanced course that is how the economics works out. They are expensive to produce and have limited demand, and typically only for a few years until they are replaced.

At least in some fields, advanced courses are the most likely to have lower cost textbooks. Real analysis textbooks are usually cheaper than calculus textbooks. It's the introductory courses that tend to have $200 behemoths attached to online homework platforms optimized for ease of grading rather than student learning.

Re: Playdate’s handheld changed how Duke University teaches game design

#112

Post by 3836293648 »

onemoresoop wrote: post #101
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of free or cheaper alternatives, although platforms like pico-8 are (intentionally) hard to work with, especially as a first introduction to building games and / or coding.

Is pico-8 hard to work with?

No, but it has a lot of very intentional limitations

Re: Playdate’s handheld changed how Duke University teaches game design

#113

Post by htek »

bigfatkitten wrote: post #54
jubilanti wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A $200 textbook should absolutely be out of line

Professors making students buy the textbook they wrote for $200 is especially out of line. In any other industry they call this corruption, but in academia it’s apparently ok.

One professor at my poorly subsidized state uni who had a book he required for class was $180 or so. He had enough (spiral bound Xeroxed) copies in the library for everyone to borrow for the semester. Or you could buy a shiny new one from the bookstore or online at full fare. Another gave the classes copies of the chapters.

Re: Playdate’s handheld changed how Duke University teaches game design

#114

Post by pfg_ »

wincy wrote: post #79
globalchatads wrote: post #74

The constraint-first angle matters more than people give it credit for. A 1-bit screen and a handful of buttons forces students to stop hiding behind art and sound, and actually solve readability and mechanics. Honestly surprised more programs do not do this instead of dropping students into Unity on day one.

Nintendo is the only mainstream game company that seems to understand this. A good example is Elite Beat Agents was a fantastically fun rhythm game that could have only existed on the DS and 3DS with the little stylus pen. You might think “the iPad has a stylus!” But it’s expensive (whereas my friend kept losing his DS Styluses so bought a pack of them for $10) and it doesn’t come with each iPad, so you’d have a frac…

Elite Beat Agents lives on as osu! which can be played using a mouse or drawing tablet

Re: Playdate’s handheld changed how Duke University teaches game design

#115

Post by [deleted] »

martijn_himself wrote: post #78

The Playdate seems an ideal device for busy dads and mums who would pick it up to play a few games here and there and are into programming and maybe would like to teach their kids how to program. I've had a quick play with the tools and API Panic provides and they seem very, very good. The games on it seem to be ideal for short stints of gameplay and are made by some very creative folk. This seems to be the ideal tar…

[deleted]

Re: Playdate’s handheld changed how Duke University teaches game design

#116

Post by sauercrowd »

latexr wrote: post #63
fn-mote wrote: post #21

Re: price point HN readers who can write a console game before bedtime are not the target audience. A handheld device that Just Works and creates an authentic experience is worth a lot. For a college class, a $200 textbook isn’t out of line (the ones people still buy…), which makes this a very reasonable investment in one’s education. Are there other, cheaper routes? Of course. For an introduction? Fewer, and nobody…

That’s a very USA-centric view. 200$ for a textbook which will (often) only be used for a couple of chapters and was written by the professor shouldn’t be normal anywhere. The price of that book could pay for months (and in some cases years) of tuition in EU countries. As someone from the EU who was always curious about the Playdate, I never got one because the price becomes even more absurd once you factor shipping…

> The price of that book could pay for months (and in some cases years) of tuition in EU countries.

To your later comment, the devices are provided. You dont need to buy them.

Also that's not actual price. the tuition fees are that, doesn't mean that's the price. It's just heavily subsizied by the government. Hard to find sources, but the actual price/student in Germany seems to be ~10k Euro/student/year.

Hard to find

Re: Playdate’s handheld changed how Duke University teaches game design

#117

Post by sageframe »

oulipo2 wrote: post #89
Jach wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the intention, sure, and as long as prospective Masters students know that's what they're getting into and paying for, and are looking forward to it, then it's fine or whatever. But it still strikes me as a silly constraint, just as it would be to require an in-house engine that sucks, or requiring students to develop for some old Nintendo hardware, or requiring students to fit everything in under 96k.[0] Anyo…

No, because the goal of the university is to teach students to think. Not necessarily just to "acquire the skills to apply in industry". Constraints are great for that. So is teaching them assembly, even though most people no longer directly code in ASM. But a constrained language that's close-to-the-metal gives them an interesting view of how computing really works, etc So I'd say it's actually much better for a cla…

I ran a design school for eight years where fourteen-year-olds built real projects—wearable medical devices, robotic systems, public art installations—in two-week studio cycles. No grades, portfolio-based assessment, and a structured constraint I designed that did exactly what the Playdate is doing here.

It was a two-sentence writing assignment. Before you could describe your project, you had to state the idea in one sentence (the soul) and the concrete form in one sentence (the body). Kids who could prototype a working medical device in two weeks couldn't articulate what they'd built. The constraint forced the thinking the tool couldn't.

Jach's argument—"you could impose the same constraints on Unity"—misses the point. You could. Nobody does. The tool shapes the behavior. An engine that can do anything invites you to do everything. Or, for young people, nothing. A 1-bit screen with a crank asks you one question: what's the game? That's not an arbitrary constraint. That's a design decision about where the student's cognitive effort goes.

The expensive tool teaches the tool. The constrained tool teaches the thinking. They're both necessary but they serve different stages, and most programs only do the first one.

Re: Playdate’s handheld changed how Duke University teaches game design

#118

Post by latexr »

sauercrowd wrote: post #116
latexr wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a very USA-centric view. 200$ for a textbook which will (often) only be used for a couple of chapters and was written by the professor shouldn’t be normal anywhere. The price of that book could pay for months (and in some cases years) of tuition in EU countries. As someone from the EU who was always curious about the Playdate, I never got one because the price becomes even more absurd once you factor shipping…

> The price of that book could pay for months (and in some cases years) of tuition in EU countries. To your later comment, the devices are provided. You dont need to buy them. Also that's not actual price. the tuition fees are that, doesn't mean that's the price. It's just heavily subsizied by the government. Hard to find sources, but the actual price/student in Germany seems to be ~10k Euro/student/year. Hard to fin…

> the devices are provided. You dont need to buy them.

I was talking about a textbook, not the devices. I think that was made pretty clear by my use of the word “textbook”.

> the tuition fees are that, doesn't mean that's the price.

Seeing as I’m talking about what people have to pay, that’s irrelevant. What even is your comment? You’re taking what I said and responding to entirely different things. That’s not how we have a productive, good faith conversation.

> Hard to find sources, but the actual price/student in Germany seems to be ~10k Euro/student/year.

There are more countries in the EU besides Germany. In some, you don’t pay at all.

Furthermore, each college has different costs, there’s not just a fixed cost for student for everything. The costs per student for philosophy are not the comparable to the costs per student for veterinary medicine.

Re: Playdate’s handheld changed how Duke University teaches game design

#119

Post by AlexeyBelov »

globalchatads wrote: post #74

The constraint-first angle matters more than people give it credit for. A 1-bit screen and a handful of buttons forces students to stop hiding behind art and sound, and actually solve readability and mechanics. Honestly surprised more programs do not do this instead of dropping students into Unity on day one.

Wow, this is an LLM comment and people ate it up.

Re: Playdate’s handheld changed how Duke University teaches game design

#120

Post by sauercrowd »

latexr wrote: post #118
sauercrowd wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The price of that book could pay for months (and in some cases years) of tuition in EU countries. To your later comment, the devices are provided. You dont need to buy them. Also that's not actual price. the tuition fees are that, doesn't mean that's the price. It's just heavily subsizied by the government. Hard to find sources, but the actual price/student in Germany seems to be ~10k Euro/student/year. Hard to fin…

> the devices are provided. You dont need to buy them. I was talking about a textbook, not the devices. I think that was made pretty clear by my use of the word “textbook”. > the tuition fees are that, doesn't mean that's the price. Seeing as I’m talking about what people have to pay, that’s irrelevant. What even is your comment? You’re taking what I said and responding to entirely different things. That’s not how we…

You were responding to a comment about the price point being not that expensive, claiming that "200 usd for a college text book is very US centric", so I assumed you were arguing against that it's "worth the money".

So what are you arguing for? I genuinely cannot tell.

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