72390 - Multimedia and Audiovisual Laboratory (1) (LM) (A-L)

Learning outcomes

At the end of the workshop, students acquire fundamentals related to some specific aspects of multimedia languages through a program of guided activities.

Course contents

The workshop can be attended by no more than 30 students. To register it is necessary to:

• send an email to mauro.salvador2@unibo.it at least one week before the start of the workshop;
• receive a confirmation email from the teacher.

In case of a full booked workshop, students are invited to contact the Coordinator or the HelpDesk for information on how to fulfill this educational obligation.

 

The lab aims to give a set of practical tools to design a digital ludic product. During this five week course many different types of design methods will be described and tested through several case histories and some personal experiences from participants.

Students will learn how to identify and distinguish different key factors and dynamics to obtain a good design know-how, engaging all the various issues that emerge during a creative design process. They will be able to actively work in a team, sharing and comparing their ideas, while acknowledging and accepting strengths and weaknesses of their creative team.

• Introduction to playfulness in contemporary media and to design methods: case histories and personal experiences.
• Design thinking: tools, methods, case studies.
• Game design: theoretical fundamentals and in-depth analysis on unconventional products (location based games, advergames, applied games, newsgames).
• Prototyping: group concepts ideation, iterative cycles of design, paper or digital mock-up prototyping .
• Pitching guidelines.

Readings/Bibliography

Below you can find a selection of readings. I recommend going through at least one title per subsection.

Game culture

Marco Benoit Carbone & Riccardo Fassone (Eds.), Il videogioco in Italia, Mimesis 2020.

Anton Nijholt (Ed.), Playable Cities : The City as a Digital Playground, Springer 2017.

Ian Bogost, Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games, Basic Books 2016.

Valerie Frissen, Sybille Lammes, Michiel de Lange, Jos de Mul, Joost Raessens (Eds.), Playful Identities. The Ludification of Digital Media Cultures, Amsterdam University Press 2015.

Mauro Salvador, In gioco e fuori gioco: il ludico nella cultura e nei media contemporanei, Mimesis 2015.

Game design

Christopher W. Totten, An Architectural Approach to Level Design, CRC Press 2018.

Anna Anthropy, Naomi Clark, A Game Design Vocabulary, Addison-Wesley, Boston 2014.

Maresa Bertolo, Ilaria Mariani (Eds.), Game Design. Gioco e giocare tra teoria e progetto, Pearson 2014.

Jesse Schell, The art of game design: a book of lenses, M. Kaufman, Burlington MA 2008.

Game & media

Riccardo Fassone, Every Game is an Island Endings and Extremities in Video Games, Bloomsbury 2017.

Riccardo Fassone, Cinema e videogiochi, Carocci 2017.

Nicola Dusi, Dal cinema ai media digitali, Mimesis 2014.

Marco Pellitteri, Mauro Salvador, Conoscere i videogiochi, Tunué 2014.

Teaching methods

The workshop will be divided into moments of theoretical study, moments of collective work and moments of small groups work with the aim of prototyping and pitching an original project.

Lectures are provided in presence. In case of a prolonged sanitary emergency, this section will be updated.

Assessment methods

The assessment of the individual student involves the assignment of a mark to which contribute:

• the quality of the group project developed during the workshop;
• the constant and active participation during workshop hours.

ATTENTION: to obtain eligibility, students must attend at least 75% of the scheduled meetings.

Teaching tools

Google Drive, Twine, Mirò and, when necessary, other free digital tools.

Office hours

See the website of Mauro Salvador