Playing at Class: Increasing the Awareness of Tabletop Game Design for Videogame Development

Modern tabletop games are more than a trend. Mastering these games and understanding their game systems can be useful tools for videogame teaching. Videogame students can explore modern board game mechanisms and dynamics as inspirations for building their projects. Learning the way analogue games are developed also supports prototyping and playtesting. But many videogame courses lack these approaches. Students might not be aware of these modern tabletop games. In this paper, the authors propose a practical method to use games in videogame development classes to increase awareness of analogue games. The proposed method resulted from an experiment where 54 videogame students played three simple games and saw two complex ones. The results show the awareness of modern board games increased significantly. But obtaining higher impacts of modern board games on videogame development requires time and resources.