DESMA 157: Game Design with Sam Malabre is a B+ at its best. While the course concept is excellent, I find it hard to recommend the lecturer.

A significant concern is that the university requires students to complete course evaluations before the class ends, often before we have completed all assignments, taken finals, and received final grades. This timeline prevents honest feedback, as many students worry that their evaluations might negatively affect their grades or upset the lecturer. Course evaluations should be administered after courses conclude and final grades are posted, allowing students to reflect rather than rush to complete them before finals.

Taking Game Design with Malabre requires a substantial time commitment, often exceeding the workload outlined in the syllabus. The high expectations frequently led to after-hours meetings with group members and regular visits to office hours for clarification.

One primary concern is that Malabre does not actively teach specific skills. Instead, students are expected to seek these skills independently. It is crucial to enter the course with a solid foundation in visual design, typography, color theory, fabrication, illustration, printing, and game theory. Without experience in these areas, it can be challenging to keep up.

Additionally, the assignments and instructions were often excessively long, unclear, and complex, making it challenging to understand expectations. A tendency to over-intellectualize assignments added unnecessary confusion.

I want to address two main concerns regarding grading and expectations. First, grades were often determined by effort and comparing students' work to each other rather than strictly adhering to the provided rubric. Since this is an introductory game design course, students enter with varying experience levels. Grading should focus on each student's effort to understand the concepts taught in class rather than how their work measures up to their peers. For example, the number of token pieces created set an unspoken benchmark that negatively impacted grades. Additionally, after seeking help for revisions and incorporating feedback to improve our work, we still received lower grades than anticipated—among the lowest we have seen in a DMA/UCLA course. This was frustrating and discouraging, especially when it felt like grading standards were being unfairly adjusted based on the work of others.

Second, all assignments required deliverables, including a carefully designed board game, custom-illustrated cards with descriptions, a comprehensive rulebook, custom-illustrated character pieces, tokens, and additional game pieces. The expectation was to create game pieces using acrylic, which necessitated frequent visits to the Fab Lab and numerous emails. Given the Fab Lab's limited hours, this added significant stress as we tried to meet our deadlines.

The unspoken expectation for the number of acrylic game pieces to fabricate set a limitless standard among students, ultimately hurting our grades. Moreover, students must pay for labor and materials when using the Fab Lab's laser-printing services, which may not be within everyone's budget.

It is important to note that the instructor appears to be a pro-Palestinian activist. Some students observed that he treated individuals from specific socioeconomic and educational backgrounds differently, reflecting classist attitudes. This behavior contradicted his commitment to equality and seemed to affect grading practices.

While the course offered valuable insights into game design, the unclear instructions, inconsistent grading, and unrealistic expectations made it challenging and occasionally frustrating. Clear communication and more realistic grading standards would create a more supportive learning environment for future students.

Although the lecturer is skilled in teaching the technical aspects of game design, his grading and feedback seemed influenced by personal biases. It became evident that he favored students who were already deeply invested in game design and often preferred those with prior experience. This created a challenging environment for students with less background in the field, making it seem like only those with advanced knowledge and skills were set up for success. Rather than focusing on helping all students achieve a baseline level of mastery, the grading appeared to reflect a "mastery mindset," where only the most experienced students thrived. As a result, if you did not enter the course with extensive experience, you were at a disadvantage, making it challenging to succeed despite your best efforts.

I really enjoyed this class, and Sam was extremely passionate, kind and understanding throughout the process! I had a few external circumstances that impeded my performance, but Sam was really encouraging, inspiring me to finish strong.

To give a brief description of DESMA 157, it's not a game design course for video games. The entire class is focused more on game theory and making physical board games, so if you're interested in digital games, go take DESMA 158 (Game Engine) instead.

Over the course of the quarter we had 2 projects. The first week or two was pretty slow; we just went over basic game theory, what makes people play games, and test-played a couple card and board games in small groups. After that you hit the ground running. This is definitely not a class you want to take during a busy quarter. There's pretty much something new due every class and a lot of hands-on fabrication work / designing / print-testing so you have to spend a pretty insane amount of time in the Fab Lab and Makerspace.

Project 1 starts off as an individual character design assignment and then turns into a group project. You learn about balancing characters and create a card deck moveset for your own character. Then in groups, you design a board game for the whole class's characters to play in.

Project 2 is an individual "polemical game", or a game with a political/social/environmental viewpoint. For example, you could make a game about the negative effects of global warming, gender struggles, or whatever else.

Despite the class being pretty hard and fast-paced Sam was a good prof who's very organized. They're not so relaxed that you can skip every class (which you shouldn't, anyway, because everything is so fast-paced) but they're very understanding if you actually have a reason to ask for an extension/absence. It wasn't my favourite class only because the course content wasn't super aligned with my art practice, which Sam had no control over.