What is covered, week by week, and which topics each lecture draws on.

Lectures

Every lecture the course claims to run gets a dated page and a teaching-team reference. A course decides how many lectures it needs; one of them carries a real deck. related: connects lectures to the sessions and assessments they feed.

Why Failure Feels Bad (and Why We Keep Playing)

The opening lecture — the paradox of failure, and why a whole course can be built out of the worst moment in every game

Week 1 · 22 February 2027

The Taxonomy of Losing

A four-part hierarchy for failure — time, progress, resources, death — and the games that don't fit it cleanly

Week 2 · 1 March 2027

Rows of illuminated arcade cabinets lined up inside the American Classic Arcade Museum

Lives, Continues, and the Arcade Economy

How difficulty design got tuned to a coin slot, and what stuck around after the coins stopped mattering

Week 3 · 8 March 2027

A hiking trail signpost in the Swiss Alps marking the way back, at a junction of several paths

Checkpoints and the Architecture of Mercy

Live demo inside

Punishing versus generous save design — try both policies against the same hazard before you take a side

Week 4 · 15 March 2027

A tiles-mode screenshot of the roguelike Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, showing the player's inventory, monsters and a summary panel

Permadeath and the Weight of Consequence

Roguelikes, meta-progression, and the difference between consequence and punishment

Week 5 · 22 March 2027

Death as Narrative Engine

Hades and the games that build failure into the plot instead of pausing the plot for it

Week 6 · 29 March 2027

Difficulty as Communication

Flow theory, resilient flow, and what a Soulslike is telling you when it kills you for the fifth time

Week 7 · 5 April 2027

A person using an Xbox Adaptive Controller and a large joystick to fly a biplane in a flight simulator

The Ethics of Assistance

Live demo inside

Celeste's Assist Mode, and a live timing challenge you can widen for yourself before deciding what that widening costs

Week 8 · 12 April 2027

Speedrunning and the Death That Isn't

Resets, personal bests, and failure re-cast as diagnostic information instead of a setback

Week 9 · 19 April 2027

Losing Together

Multiplayer tilt, attribution theory, and the second failure state that happens after the first one

Week 10 · 26 April 2027

Comedy, Rage, and the Aesthetics of Failure

Getting Over It, rage games, and the gap between how failure feels to the player and how it plays to an audience

Week 11 · 3 May 2027

A pinball machine's illuminated playfield, full of lights, ramps and bumpers built to make every hit felt

Feel — Juice, Feedback, and Designing the Moment of Loss

Live demo inside

The same outcome, felt two different ways — and the argument that "juice" is doing real design work, not decoration

Week 12 · 10 May 2027