Many universities have added game design courses or even full study programs focused on game design to their catalogue. Most if not all of these courses and programs have been heavily influenced by traditional academic subjects such as computer science, psychology, art or dramaturgy. Game design can definitely benefit from inspiration from such diverse areas, but as the field matures game design must find its own academic identity.
There are many challenges that must be met as academia enters the game design field, relating to research, practice and education. In this paper we focus on education by tackling two fundamental questions that a university needs to ask as when planning and implementing a game design study program:
• How do we best teach game design?
• What should the core courses of our game design curriculum be?
We aim to share our experience with game design education and answer the questions above from University of Skövde’s perspective.