Students work in groups to design one or more games that engage the players with selected aspects of global challenge problems such as climate change, pandemic prevention and management, and/or preventing nuclear war.

Unlike some courses on game development, which often emphasize the technical implementation of game mechanics, our focus is on "principled gamification".  Class time is divided roughly into background learning, design exercises, and game implementation and evaluation.

The course starts with an overview of "serious games" including play-testing of various available climate-related games.

We spend some time developing formulations that take important aspects of global challenge problems and gamifying them, producing playable games that are simple at first and grow in complexity.  Global challenge problems often involve a combination of natural phenomena and human factors.  Gamification applies to both, often using simulation to model the natural or system side and role-playing and Nash equilibria in modeling the human side.  The Python language is used throughout, except that libraries and services may be included that simply have Python-callable APIs.  The target platforms vary from laptop/desktop (with and without graphics) to browser-based with PyScript.

Several software development methodologies are emphasized:  (1) iterative design, (2) agile development, and (3) exploitation of Large Language Models, such as GitHub CoPilot and ChatGPT.   

Grading is based primarily on the projects, including evaluations of the final games and milestones along the way.  Peer feedback and responses to peer feedback are important in the process.

At the end of the quarter, members of the UW community are invited to attend a game-playing session with the games developed during the course.

The course is primarily for seniors majoring in Computer Science of Computer Engineering. However, students with strong Python skills and/or good Python skills and a strong interest in global challenge problems and their gamification are invited to contact the instructor about possible participation (Steve Tanimoto .... tanimoto@cs.washington.edu).