Making Games and Environmental Design: Revealing Landscape Architecture

This paper features results of two pilot studies (courses) that are part of an ongoing investigation about making games to foster good contemporary learning, challenging traditional environmental design education to embrace games as a means to inspire better teaching and learning, and contributing to the general lack of investigation of video games in environmental design education. There is much written about the potential and value of video games in education. But little has emerged from academia to address the impact of video games on environmental design education, in landscape architecture or any other related design discipline. This paper reveals design processes and products from an immersive, interdisciplinary, Landscape Architecture (LA) elective course on game design. The thesis here is that making games, through application of Constructionist theories in a studio-based setting, can provide a creative outlet where environmental design students can learn more and differently about a given or chosen discipline. Results suggest that designing and making games in the context of such an environmental design curriculum has great potential to stimulate traditional pedagogies and foster student learning, provide an enriched venue for students to learn about a unique discipline, and make teaching and learning more fun, meaningful, and memorable. Both pilots resulted in some excellent game-making and learning experiences, and unique video game prototypes. The evidence is encouraging that game design has educational value in environmental design disciplines and is a legitimate direction for further study.