Peter McDonald
I’m Peter McDonald, an Assistant Professor of Design, Informal, and Creative Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. My work focuses on the intersection of interpretation and games, and tracks the rise of play as an aesthetic category in the late 20th century. I have two current book projects. Run & Jump: The Meaning of the 2D Platformer uses structuralist semiotics to describe the way formal elements of platforming games communicate in nuanced and poetic ways. It includes chapters on jumping, level design, enemies, and collectibles. My second book project, The Impossible Reversal and Other Styles of Playfulness, tracks experimental forms of playfulness as they appear in the mid-twentieth century through art movements like Fluxus and electro-mechanical games.
It then follows these aesthetic categories through their influence on early video games and academic theories of play. In addition to writing on play and games, I also specialize in 20th century American literature, new media theory, and literary theory. Alongside my academic work, I have developed a practice of critical-making, where I produce board games, electronic literature, and Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) in order to test my theoretical writing and push my thinking beyond abstract ideas. As a member of the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab, and elsewhere, I have made games for South Side Chicago high school students, incoming undergraduates, and the broader community. These projects have involved intense collaboration between people in the hard and social sciences, arts and humanities, and between faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students. I take these lessons back to my teaching as well, where I am constantly experimenting with classroom activities that make use of the deep connection between play and learning.
You can contact me at pdmcdonald [at] wisc [dot] edu
Academic Publications
- “The Principle of Division in Roger Caillois's Man, Play and Games.” Games and Culture 15.8 (2020).
- “Homo Ludens: A Renewed Reading.” American Journal of Play 11.2 (2019).
- “Game Mechanics, Experience Design, and Affective Play.” Co-authored with Patrick Jagoda. Routledge Companion to Media Studies and the Digital Humanities. Forthcoming.
- “The Impossible Reversal: George Brecht’s Playfulness in Deck: A Fluxgame.” Analog Game Studies 4.4 (2017).
- “From Alternate to Alternative Reality: Nurturing Political Participation and Resistance in SEED.” Co-authored with Patrick Jagoda, Melissa Gilliam, and Ashlyn Sparrow. Alternate Reality and the Cusp of Digital Gameplay, 2017.
- “Worlding through Play: Alternate Reality Games, Large Scale Play, and The Source.”
Co-authored with Patrick Jagoda, Melissa Gilliam, and Christopher Russell. American Journal of Play 8.1 (2015).
- “For Every To there is a Fro: Interpreting Time, Rhythm, and Gesture in Play.” Games and Culture 9.6 (2014).
- “On Couches and Controllers: Identification in the Video Game Apparatus.” Ctrl-Alt-Play: Essays on Control in Video Gaming, 2013.
- “Playing Attention: A Psychoanalytic Reading of Game Mechanics in Ico.” Loading... 6.9 (2012).
- “Reflexivity as Entertainment: Early Novels and Recent Video Games.” Co-authored with Christina Lupton. Mosaic 43.4 (2010).
- “We Have Been Waiting: Ontology of the First Person Plural.” Rhizomes.net 21 (2010).
As a core part of my scholarship I engage in “critical-making,” a method of exploring ideas and theories by building examples that can be put to the test. My artistic practice involves Alternate Reality Games, board games, pieces of electronic literature, and video games.
Games are a wonderful medium to experiment with because the smallest decisions ramify across the connective links of a system, and cause unexpected changes. In my work, I treat games as small worlds that can cast images of what our lives might look like if imagined otherwise. There is a hint of Utopianism in this view, but merged with what the writer Alfred Jarry named ‘Pataphysics, or the science that “examines the laws governing exceptions.” Central to my current practice are Alternate Reality Games (or ARGs), a form that hops across all the media at its disposal. In a typical ARG, you might receive a 2am phone call, visit a coffee shop for an interview, crack a website's security, watch surveillance footage, and recruit other players in a chat room. Like other games, ARGs offer an experimental world, but their affordances make fiction only barely distinguishable from reality.
I have been designing games for nearly two decades, originally as part of the modding community that sprung up in the 1990s, and later as a professional at Electronic Arts and Gnosis Games. The games above are those whose design and execution I am proudest of.
Play and playful thinking are deeply connected with learning, and that connection is the starting point for my approach to pedagogy. Playfulness involves active learning, chances to fail safely, and grappling with complex systems. Each of these qualities inflects the three skills that I use to anchor my classroom: close attention, reflection on the student’s own experience, and the ability to explain and use theoretical concepts. The fundamental skills of critical method, taught playfully, come alive as the rules of a game. Part of my philosophy is that methodological skills can be scaled to a student’s level, a view that has evolved out of the many institutional contexts in which I have taught. Teaching at a research institution such as the University of Chicago, a large public university like Simon Fraser, a community college like Okanagan College, and a summer program for high school students each call for different strategies. I have found that students flourish when they use play to adjust the tools of interpretation to their own needs.
In practice, my model of learning means privileging process over polish in the writing, thinking, and designs that my students produce, and it means striving to give students foundational and transferable tools for future learning. For instance, I frequently ask my students to create their own versions of games or texts they are analyzing, such as writing limericks in the style of Edward Lear or creating a paper prototype of a board game. By building an example, students can grasp the implicit rules of a genre or form that would otherwise feel abstract and opaque. While teaching Emily Short’s Galatea, a work of interactive fiction, I had students construct paper “fortune tellers” to give them a sense of how a branching structure alters narrative progress (top image). I work hard to introduce difficult works and ideas in ways that empower students to inhabit those texts and ideas as their own.
Syllabi for Past Courses
Proposed Courses
Play Make Learn card game (2022)
Role: Lead Game Designer
Play Make Learn is an annual conference hosted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison that brings together game designers, K-12 educators, librarians and museum folks, and scholars. For this conference, I led a team of students to design and produce a card game that could be played pervasively over the course of the conference by 500 people simultaneously, with the goal of creating communication between people in different tracks and fostering a conference community.
The game involved a basic trading mechanic that made it possible, but very difficult, to win by accumulating points. Other cards changed that goal and involved attendees in silly performances and tasks.
Constellations Dark and Luminous (2022)
Role: Lead Game Designer
Much of my recent game design work has been building small role-playing games that experiment with genre and new forms of storytelling. Constellations Dark and Luminous is the culmination of that work in a major tabletop roleplaying rulebook that is currently going through rounds of playtesting.
CDL offers two major innovations. First, it is a Utopian roleplaying game. Set in the far future, it explicitly removes traditional sources of conflict such as resource scarcity, political domination, and even death in order to ask how players would make sense of their identity, relationships, and purpose in such a Utopian space. It takes on the challenge that Fredric Jameson posed to Utopian storytelling, that they are fundamentally boring, and tries to find new narrative tensions to tell dynamic stories.
Alongside the setting, CDL also innovates with a new set of decision making mechanics that de-emphasize individual characters. Instead of having players propose actions, and roll for their success or failure, CDL allows the group to select different scene types based on the dramatic needs of the story. Each scene comes with specific types of actions, and specific ways of resolving tension.
The Parasite (2017)
The Parasite website
Role: Lead Game Designer
Media Coverage: UChicago News
The Parasite was an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) that took place online and in person during the summer of 2017 for all 1800 incoming undergraduate students at the University of Chicago. It told the story of a secret society named PS that was organized around a mysterious room, one that would only open every 11 years. PS sought out the room each time to try and learn its secrets and ensure its safety.
Students were invited to play in a variety of ways: post-scripts on official University email pointed to secret websites, invitations arrived in the mail, out-of-place University administrators turned out to be characters, the campus newspaper published stories, and Hyde Park locals reached out for help with their own investigations. Over several weeks, players uncovered the history of the secret society, and tried to guess at its present motives.
When players arrived on campus, they discovered that the secret society had infiltrated their orientation week activities. Wandering away from the party of opening night, for instance, could take you to meet a gardener pouring tea inside a tent, or to a room filled with large cardboard boxes, or might have led you to a strange bazaar with rules all its own. These events played out across the week, taking over some planned events, hovering at the periphery of others, and inventing several new things to do.
As the lead game designer, I organized a team of twelve undergraduate and graduate students to produce the activities of the game, which ranged from online puzzles and social media challenges, to physical games, and live action role-playing. I worked in collaboration with two other teams building out the narrative and performance elements of the game to make sure that there was a plan and cohesion across the design elements.
The Portal | The Sandbox (2015)
Artists' Statement and Website
Role: Design / Web development
One of the persistent challenges to ARGs as an art form is their documentation. ARGs are distributed among many people, places and times, they involve many intricate moving parts, and they only happen once (usually). So it is difficult to capture a sense of what happened during their execution for future designers and academics to learn from. The Portal | The Sandbox was an experiment with curating the documentation from The Project through a piece of original new media art. The narrative of the piece tells the same story, but from the perspective of The Project's antagonist and in the form of a fable. Using this conceit, we embedded images, video, and sound to frame the tale, and placed larger collections of archival documents at points where the two stories intersect.
I conceptualized the idea of this archive alongside Patrick Jagoda, and am responsible for the visual design, coding, and organizing the archive.
Hexacago (2015)
Video interviews about Infection City
Role: Game Designer
As a fellow at the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab, I created a suite of games to be played on a single board representing the city of Chicago. Hexacago, the name of this suite, was an experiment with the flexibility of game materials, and it taught me several lessons about game design. I learned meta-rules, such as how does board shape or tile shape make some kinds of games easier and others harder, or how size and shape of game areas tend to interact. The board was used during several ARGs and as part of an ongoing program teaching game design to high school fellows.
Of the games I co-developed, several have innovative and educational elements that stand out in their own right, including :
Division of Power: A game about the relative costs and benefits associated with generating electicity using different power plants. The game was an experiment with balancing synchronous and asynchronous play by having a shared player area where companies set up competing lines, and an individual play area where power plants had to be placed through spatial reasoning.
Infection City: A game about epidemiology. It was an experiment with cooperative mechanics. We made it difficult for one player to dominate the game by having different parts of the board require players to plan several moves ahead--like chess problems. No one player could keep all the areas in mind at once, and so territory was split.
Policy Gridlock: This was a game about water usage and pollution. It featured strongly asymmetrical play between four players, where the city, the farmer, the corporation, and the federal regulator each had different interests and mechanisms to accomplish those interests. Each organization impacted the others in complex competitive and cooperative ways.
Tales from Decrypt: Was a game about cyber security that implemented tower defense game mechanics in board game form.
SEED (2014)
Overview video of SEED
Role: Game Designer
Media Coverage: Fast Company |
Hyde Park Herald
SEED was an alternate reality game (ARG) that involved over 70 highschool students for three weeks of intense, in-person play, followed by two weeks where the players had a chance to become game designers. In SEED, South Side Chicago high school students were brought together through contact with a future corporation called ProPhyle, which warned them of the end of the world. Players came together for seven hours a day to try and piece together the nature of the threat from the distorted communiques, reveal the actual motives of this corporation, and decide how they wanted the future to look.
In teams, players hunted for geocached clues, worked through folders of data on possible world ending scenarios, organized a spontaneous protest of a character being unfairly imprisoned, built Arduino bots, and role-played the story alongside a dozen actors.
As a game designer, my main responsibility was planning the activities that would fill up each day, delegating those tasks to the team, designing the board games and puzzle elements, and reacting in real time when players went outside our plans. I worked in a team of three other game designers, several actors, writers, and set designers, as well as organizational staff. In the subsequent two weeks, where players designed their own game, I lectured on using games to communicate meaning, and worked closely with three of the teams.
The Source (2013)
The Source Prologue #1, and
#2
Role: Game Designer
Media Coverage: Pacific Standard
The Source was a social realist alternate reality game (ARG) that told the story of Adia, a Chicago teenager who discovers an old gift from her absent father. Her father was an engineer with a penchant for puzzles, and Adia reached out to 70 players for their help figuring out the box that he left. Over five weeks, players got to know Adia and her best friends, Roz and Micah, talked with her online as she learned about her father, and collaborated in person to crack his codes. The game stretched the limits of the ARG form, creating a model of intense, in-person participation and refusing the tropes of the genre.
As a fellow at Game Changer Chicago, I designed several original board games, I created site specific social games to make use of the space, and I led several role-playing exercises.
The Project (2013)
Trailer
Role: Game Design Team Lead
Media Coverage: Grey City Magazine |
The Chicago Maroon
The Project was the first large, collective ARG production at the University of Chicago, and it told the story of a portal that leaked magic onto the campus and transformed those it touched. The game unfolded over the course of a month, between online netprov, and occasional live events that were primarily game-driven. For instance, one of the events I helped design involved an enormous blanket fort made out of parachutes, which players needed to navigate by testing out the rules of the space, failing, and trying again. The final night culminated in a large moment of immersive theater, as actors and players took over the eleven floors of the Logan Center for the Arts. The Project took place in partnership with Montreal’s Topological Media Lab, and made use of many forms of responsive media. An ice-cube melting onto an umbrella, for instance, made vibrations that were picked up and transformed into odd sounds. A light was connected to a camera monitoring a candle, and mimicking its intensity.
I was a game design lead for one of three teams working on the game, each team developing its own events and rabbit holes in different styles. I led three other designers in the planning and execution of three major events, and collaborated with the two other teams for a final event. I directed actors, wrote scripts, and designed the game rules for these live action events.
Ortgeist (2012)
Ortgeist website
Role: Project director
Ortgeist was a short two hour transmedia dinner party that served as a proof of concept for a longer game using site-specific media to give a sense of enchantment to spaces. Ortgeist was built around the conceit that the world is inhabited by small spirits, tied to bridges, trees, garbage, and furniture—and that those spirits begin to leave subtle signs of their daily lives around Chicago’s Jackson Park. Players were invited to ‘listen in’ to these spirits with GPS based responsive audio, to find hidden geocached clues, and eventually to speak as representatives of the spirits at a congress/dinner party. The dinner party itself served as an experiment with open ended role-playing, where each participant sat at the name-tag of a particular spirit (that of a dresser, of a bridge, of the lakeshore sand) and had to imagine the desires and needs of that non-human being.
I led a team of three other graduate and undergraduate students creating this game. I was primarily responsible for the visual aesthetic and LARP design.
Revolve (2004)
Role: Animator
The early 2000s were an interesting moment for independent game development, before many of the tools that would enable the wave of independent games yet existed. Revolve was a game developed at the cusp of this change, where the player commands a small creature through a 3D platforming world. Depending on the player’s choices, the creature evolves in new ways and gains new mechanics for navigating the world. Revolve was submitted to the Independent Game Festival in 2004, but never found a publisher.
I was the lead animator on the project, and in that role I had to design a vocabulary of expressive movements for a range of alien bodies.
Jupiter Effect: Influx (2003)
Trailer
Role: Art director
My graduate project at the Center for Digital Imaging and Sound was a game built in the Unreal 2k3 engine that was a hybrid of first-person shooter and dog-fighting simulator. Players piloted large robots that could seamlessly switch between a humanoid form and a jet form, and each came with a different set of weapons and mechanics. These two modes expanded the play-style of the traditional FPS in significant ways that I think are still quite novel.
My role on the project was art director—I led an animator and two graphic designers in creating a distinct visual look that drew inspiration from neon city scapes and science fiction novels.
