Podcast Archives - Board Game Design Lab · Gabe Barrett

How to Create More Game Designers with Jay Cormier

·1 hr 1 min·5 clips

Jay Cormier limits students to 10 components and one-hour playtime to crush scope creep and spark creativity.

How do you teach game design? The host frames it as a bigger problem: how to help more people become designers, whether they are eight years old or eighty. Jay Cormier has the classroom mileage for that conversation. He has taught game design at the collegiate level for over a decade, and he knows how little time students really have. In a seven week class, a strong idea matters more than a finished game. A rough prototype can still have a good core if the teacher judges it against the stage, the limits, and the next move. The episode gets into the psychology, too. The host notes that Cormier can warn students their games will not be amazing quickly because his career gives the warning some weight. Cormier pushes back on his own advice. When he gave one class that reality check too early, they eased off. So timing matters. He now saves some of the harder truth for the end, once students have already done the work and turned something in. The prototyping advice stays plain. Cormier starts students with an alpha kit: paper, cue cards, cubes, and basic materials. Nothing fancy. The point is to get the idea onto the table fast, then find out what works, what breaks, and what needs changing. The close points listeners to failfaster.ca, Design Your Destiny, and Cormier's social channels.

As heard by us

A workshop-style conversation about helping new designers learn without losing momentum.

Jay Cormier's conversation treats game design teaching as a practical, hands-on problem: how to bring new designers along without pretending a first pass is already done.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

If you mentor beginners, this gives you a plainspoken way to teach game design without killing momentum.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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