Asking Students to Do All the Work: An Analysis of a Fully Peer-Assessed Course on Game Design and Development

Ten years ago we started a course on video game design and development. It was the first course on video games in our university and possibly in our country. We were immediately daunted by two main decisions: (i) the selection of the projects to be developed during the course and (ii) the evaluation of students’ projects. We wanted to give students the maximum freedom and no limit to their creativity. We wanted them to focus on the creation of a game that people would love to play without worrying about some score objectives to maximize and without caring about their instructors’ game design preferences. Accordingly, we decided to ask students to do all the job, starting from the submission and the selection of the game concepts to develop during the course, up to the final evaluation of the projects, the evaluation of their teammates, and thus basically the grading. In this paper, we discuss our experience over the last ten years with our course organization and grading model that, we believe, gives students complete freedom to express themselves and leaves them most of, if not all, the agency.