matthew is posting

Open Call: The Hostos Game Design Dispatch

One of my summer projects has been working with one of my students to try and get a little newspaper zine up and running to start distributing to the game design students at CUNY Hostos Community College on a monthly basis. The first July issue has things like local news and events, a student postmortem on a 12-person project, and some developer responses to that student postmortem.1

I wanted to let folks know:

  1. Hey! I'm doing this thing and am broadly interested in hearing from gamedevs of all stripes who feel like they might have something to talk to college freshman/sophomore game design students about.
  2. If you have any thoughts or wisdom to share about Playtesting or Student Gamedev Clubs in particular, these will be the focus of our August and September issues respectively! I made a little form you can fill out, and probably I will just update that same form with new topics as we decide on them.

Otherwise, some things I'd generally be interested in publishing:

  1. Postmortems: A long-term project of mine is better preparing my students to write Good Postmortems, both as a useful reflection tool and good domain-specific writing practice. So, if you think you can model good behavior there: hello.
  2. The Year of the Blog: The form above touches on this, but if you have something you think would be a good fit for my students, I'd love to hear about it, and I'll figure out how to fit it in—this maybe is even a good starting point for a theme for a later month. If you're not sure what would be a good fit for students, drop me a line.
  3. Interviews: Like a podcast, but without sound! This could be a phone/video call or an asynchronous email thing, depending on how you wanna play it.

I'm not totally sure what the best way to like... get the word out about these on a regular basis is, so I'd appreciate folks circulating this a bit to folks who might be a good fit! I will continue to post about these on this blog, so you can pop this into your RSS feed reader if you want, or if you would like to get an email about these calls you can give me your email address here.2

  1. Normally I would link to a copy you can read, but I'm trying to mostly keep it offline so my students have to come get a physical copy. That said, if you would like to see what we have done before you step aboard, drop me a line and I can send a PDF.↩

  2. The email subscription stuff on bearblog is entirely manual, so that's just a page to collect addresses. I will not email about anything except these kinds of "we're doing an issue on {Topic}" calls.↩

#HGD Dispatch