SFPC Opens Winter Term With Two Classes on Play
Lawra Clark teaches expressive game design in GameMaker, alongside a pedagogy course from Alia ElKattan and Fred Wordie. Applications close Nov. 16.
- Class
- Expressive Design with Videogames
- When
- Weekly on Zoom, 10 sessions, Jan. 17 to late March 2027. Apply by Mon., Nov. 16, 11:59 p.m. ET.
- Where
- Online (Zoom)
- Cost
- $1,200, with scholarship rates of $600, $300 and $0
- Instructor
- Lawra Clark
- Class
- Play and Pedagogy
- When
- Weekly on Zoom, 10 sessions, Jan. 17 to late March 2027. Apply by Mon., Nov. 16, 11:59 p.m. ET.
- Where
- Online (Zoom)
- Cost
- $1,200, with scholarship rates of $600, $300 and $0
- Instructor
- Alia ElKattan and Fred Wordie
The School for Poetic Computation has opened applications for its winter 2027 term, and two of its 10 online classes take games as their subject. Applications close Monday, Nov. 16, at 11:59 p.m. ET. Classes start Jan. 17, 2027, and run through late March.
Expressive Design with Videogames is taught by Lawra Clark, with Flan Falacci as assistant teacher. The class works in GameMaker and asks for no programming experience. Its description starts from a familiar writing rule and adjusts it for the medium: "Show, don't tell" becomes "Do, don't show." Students begin with basic movement and exploration, then work through ways of representing things, people and feelings through design, and finish with two or three small games of their own. SFPC first ran a class under the same name in its summer 2022 session.
Play and Pedagogy, taught by Alia ElKattan and Fred Wordie, approaches the subject through theory. The course draws on urban planners, historians, game designers, anarchist thinkers and skateboarding scholars to ask what play is and what it can do politically. Students then build a project that uses play to explain a concept they want to teach.
Both classes meet weekly on Zoom for 10 sessions, with two section times each. Tuition is $1,200, with scholarship rates of $600, $300 and $0. The rest of the winter slate includes Lab for the Post-Internet, Experiments in Digital Security Practice, Everything Good is Collage and Singing to Ourselves: Animating 3D Characters.
SFPC places code inside art and critical theory rather than industry training, so its game classes sit beside courses on surveillance, listening and collage. Killscreen last covered the school for its HTTPoetics program, which treated the handmade web as a form of memory work.
For more reading, see SFPC's HTTPoetics reads the handmade web as memory work, GameMaker comes to Steam; makes game creation accessible from 2012, the Expressive Design with Videogames class page and SFPC's full winter 2027 schedule.
Pages from SFPC's winter 2027 announcement. Courtesy the School for Poetic Computation.
Killscreen tracks the places where people learn to make games as art, not product. Get the free newsletter and we will send the next open call your way.
