Today in my graduate computer games class I asked students to design a game (which they will then need to implement) which has the following two constraints:<\/p>\n
Constraint 1:<\/i> Playing the game should be an artistic act. The player can be composing music, creating a drawing, making a sculpture or writing a poem — there are many possibilities. But the game must give the player some way to explore their own artistic muse.<\/p>\n
Constraint 2:<\/i> The game should be educational. It could be a way of learning math, or geography, or physics, or history. The educational goal could be anything generally considered useful or worthwhile.<\/p>\n
The idea is that providing two constraints pushes the designer to think outside the box, rather than fall back on a variant of a game they already know (which students often do without even realizing they are doing so).<\/p>\n
I created a little sketch of a game for them as an example of the general idea. I made sure not to add any fancy art direction — I want them focusing on game play.<\/p>\n
You play the game by creating your own original melodies (constraint 1<\/i>), and as you play, you learn arithmetic sums (constraint 2<\/i>).<\/p>\n
Also, I couldn’t resist the title. \ud83d\ude42 Click on the image below to try it.<\/p>\n
![](\"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/sumware.jpg\")
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