Applying a Grammatical Structure to Practice Game Design on Non-Computer Games

In this paper, we propose a pedagogical approach based on the sentence grammar to teach an introductory game design course. Different from the conventional game design courses concentrated on developing computer games, we advocate exercising non-computer games. In our approach, we elucidate the importance of understanding the core idea of a game by executing the game analysis to extract an identical sentence of the game on the first stage. This notion is then progressively brought to other stages of the course. In the second stage, an exercise on activity games is introduced to exploit the students' ability in conceiving the game interaction in a face-to-face multiplayer environment. This interactive experience obtained is then transferred to the third stage to develop board games. The grammatical approach is introduced to interpret the idea of core sentence to help developing their board game projects. We illustrate specific examples of each stage and the progress made by students. A final evaluation on their projects is reported.