I heard last week on a mailing list for USC film school alumni that Nina Foch has passed away.

Nina taught the course on directing actors that was required of all first-semester students in the graduate screenwriting program at USC. As new students, none of us knew each other*, and most of us were new to Los Angeles. Some incoming students had directing and acting experience, while some of us… um… didn’t. It was the kind of “forged in fire” instructional experience that sticks with you forever. Nina never put a kind spin on a review of work she thought was crappy, and never pulled any punches. She was tough, and mostly fair.

Nina instructed obliquely, but with force. It took me more than a month to start to figure out what she meant when she talked about “intention.” And it turned out that the class would have been more accurately entitled “Deciphering and Assigning Intention, Because That’s The Only Thing It’s Important To Understand When You’re Directing Actors.”

// Find out what I found out, and how it might help us make better games…

Just wanted to draw your attention to a discussion that Will and I (and soon, perhaps, you?) are having in the comments of the DSU post.

It started out answering a question Ben posed about what the core one minute of gameplay in Ars Magica might be, and is evolving into a pretty interesting discussion of the extent to which that concept has relevance to tabletop roleplyaing in general, and ArM specifically.

Be aware that, in said comments thread, I have recently given up on italicizing the proper names of games. Kate Turabian is presumably outraged.

So, jump in! Italics optional.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, at the end of the week before last I drove across the boring part of Minnesota to visit Dakota State University in Madison, Wisconsin, to attend Nanocon and speak to the students of their game design program—and other interested students—about game design.

The game design program at DSU is interesting. It’s very new, and is growing up out of their computer science and graphic design departments, with faculty coming from both areas (as well as one lone mathematician, Glenn Berman, who’s a long-time gamer, the campus game club’s faculty advisor, and the power behind the Nanocon throne).

The game design curriculum at DSU is relatively technical, given its roots. That gave me a great opportunity to touch on subjects outside the norm for them. I was worried that my largely non-technical background might make what I had to say less interesting to that mix of students and faculty, but their game club is very active in card, board, and tabletop roleplaying, and there were lots of fans of Magic, Diplomacy, and D&D in the audience. (When I mentioned Diplomacy, it triggered a short round of good-natured shouting across the auditorium among two pods of people who’re apparently involved in an ongoing play-by-email game.) To make my presentation as useful as possible, I tried to highlight the broad applicability of tabletop game design strategies to computer games, and it seemed to go over well.

// Click to read the rest of the account, about the core-one-minute theory, and the answers to your burning process questions…

The weekend after next, I’m heading to Madison, South Dakota to be a guest at a small convention called Nanocon. I’m sure the convention will be fantastic, but the highlight for me will be the opportunity, the day before, to speak to students in DSU’s B.S. in Computer Game Design program.

I’ve been asked to speak primarily to the game design process, to give a sense of how games go from idea to end product.

That’s a broad topic for an hour (including Q&A), so I thought I’d try to narrow down—and make sure I’m not missing anything important—by throwing the following question to all y’all:

What are your most burning questions about the game design process?

Or, if you’re a design vet, here’s an alternate question: What’s the thing about the process that’s most poorly or narrowly understood among game design newcomers?

I thank you; DSU thanks you.

Recently, I was going on about how game designers might have something to learn from designers in other realms. I probably should have gone so far as to suggest that “game designer” has more in common with, say, “interaction designer,” “web designer,” or “industrial designer” than with “game distributor,” “game store clerk,” or maybe even “game player.” (But not “game master.” Going that far would be plain wrong.) In closing, I encouraged game designers to keep abreast of developments in other fields of design, suggesting a series of blogs in particular that I thought were good reading.

Bare days later, over the transom at Daring Fireball came a link to a graphic designer’s re-envisioning of the hairy old Monopoly board that’s seen so much abuse at the hands of every university, sports team, and lifestyle brand in the whole entire world.

Check out Helvetica Revival Monopoly. It’s gorgeous: it’s different, it’s clean, and it looks like money looks to me.

I don’t know the story behind this design, if there is one; I can’t find any text at all to accompany it.

Love or hate Monopoly as a game (and you can chalk me up in the latter camp on most days), it’s hard to deny that this is a really, really interesting merger of a classic game with a graphic design style that’s rarely—if ever—seen in the hardcore gaming world, but which is nevertheless very well-respected in the mainstream design world. (For certain values of “mainstream” and “design,” naturally.) What would happen if this design aesthetic were applied to a traditional hobby game? Imagine, that is, the cover of something like Helvetica Revival Dungeons & Dragons.

I’m interested in your reaction to Helvetica Revival Monopoly. Love it? Hate it Why?