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Comment by oulipo2 | Hacker News Reader

The article makes it quite clear as you read that the appeal is the constraints, it allows the students to think outside of the box, and ask themselves a lot of interesting questions

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That's the intention, sure, and as long as prospective Masters students know that's what they're getting into and paying for, and are looking forward to it, then it's fine or whatever. But it still strikes me as a silly constraint, just as it would be to require an in-house engine that sucks, or requiring students to develop for some old Nintendo hardware, or requiring students to fit everything in under 96k.[0] Anyone can add arbitrary constraints to anything, and lots of interesting questions will arise from figuring out how to deal with (or work around) such constraints. But is the constraint to develop for this specific device (and all the sub constraints that implies) actually a good one vs. any other set of constraints, especially for the purposes of game design? I doubt it. Especially how some of the constraints like only using black-and-white graphics are easily enforced without also requiring such a specific niche device.

[0] .kkrieger (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NBG-sKFaB0) is my favorite of this genre of constraints, but it's mainly impressive for being possible at all (and you can read up on some of the developer notes for how much effort was put into satisfying this constraint). It didn't actually advance the design of FPSes or anything, and FPS design ideas could be better learned by making and iterating on an FPS without the tiny size constraint. If students want to impose extra constraints on themselves, like developing for the Playdate and making use of its crank for game control, go for it, but it's a bit different when they're imposed from the outside for no real reason other than "hey, it's some constraints, and constraints breed creativity".

No, because the goal of the university is to teach students to think. Not necessarily just to "acquire the skills to apply in industry". Constraints are great for that.

So is teaching them assembly, even though most people no longer directly code in ASM. But a constrained language that's close-to-the-metal gives them an interesting view of how computing really works, etc

So I'd say it's actually much better for a class teaching coding and creativity

This is part of a 2 year Masters program focused on Game Design, Development & Innovation, costing a student $113,000 to pursue. If a student enrolls in it without already having learned how to think, this is not the program that is going to teach that. Surely any competent school can teach students how to think within the first year, if they do not already know how to think, leaving the rest of the years (and any Masters or PhD programs) able to assume that the students already know how to think and thus save the time to teach actual content.

If students sign up and pay for a class you teach called "Data Structures & Algorithms", and you just read from Hamming's book every lecture and don't actually attempt to teach any data structures and algorithms, expect to not have a teaching job for long.

Learning to code for Unity is the easy part, learning to build great architecture, optimize resources, create a creative game is the hard stuff

If it's so easy, all the better. You can learn to build great architecture, optimize resources, and create a creative game all while also using Unity. There are additional bonuses to this beyond the pure knowledge too.

I mean it's all there in the text... it's for the introductory class "in an introductory class focused on game design fundamentals, students can’t afford a long learning curve."

I ran a design school for eight years where fourteen-year-olds built real projects—wearable medical devices, robotic systems, public art installations—in two-week studio cycles. No grades, portfolio-based assessment, and a structured constraint I designed that did exactly what the Playdate is doing here.

It was a two-sentence writing assignment. Before you could describe your project, you had to state the idea in one sentence (the soul) and the concrete form in one sentence (the body). Kids who could prototype a working medical device in two weeks couldn't articulate what they'd built. The constraint forced the thinking the tool couldn't.

Jach's argument—"you could impose the same constraints on Unity"—misses the point. You could. Nobody does. The tool shapes the behavior. An engine that can do anything invites you to do everything. Or, for young people, nothing. A 1-bit screen with a crank asks you one question: what's the game? That's not an arbitrary constraint. That's a design decision about where the student's cognitive effort goes.

The expensive tool teaches the tool. The constrained tool teaches the thinking. They're both necessary but they serve different stages, and most programs only do the first one.

Agree with the niche-ness, for me this would be big red flag, especially in education.

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