What is covered, week by week, and which topics each lecture draws on.
Twelve weeks, and each one is responsible for an argument the others do not make. Weeks 2 to 5 take a ranked match apart and rebuild the useful half of it over your own thirty minutes. Weeks 6 to 9 do the same with a Souls boss, for the subject you cannot get started on. Weeks 10 to 12 point both at the course you stalled on.
Two of the weeks are Labs rather than lectures, and in those you play.
Every lecture page carries its slides in the page, with the same slides written out as text underneath them — that version is the one to read on a phone, and it is generated from the deck rather than written separately.
Reward structures in games, and which ones a course can use
Six reward structures that games actually use, and an honest argument about which two of them could survive being pointed at a 130-hour course
Week 1 · 22 February 2027
Laning, roaming, objectives and the ranked ladder
The first three are clocks running at once inside a single match, which is why a MOBA never gives you a minute where the right move is nothing. The ladder is the separate thing that makes a hundred matches add up
Week 2 · 1 March 2027
Playing League of Legends, and taking notes while you do
How to get usable notes out of a game you are also trying to win, and the three observations you have to come back from the Lab with
Week 3 · 8 March 2027
Building the mechanism on paper
Giving every minute of a study block a job, using nothing but a sheet of paper. If filling it in takes longer than eight seconds you will stop doing it, so eight seconds is the design constraint
Week 4 · 15 March 2027
Building the same mechanism as software
Why a timer app has never changed anyone's semester, what code can do that paper cannot, and which tempting features you have to leave out to keep a ladder worth living with
Week 5 · 22 March 2027
Why the hardest game is the one people finish
Because a Souls boss is hard, you die in two minutes, so you find out you were wrong in two minutes. Being hard is what makes the feedback fast
Week 6 · 29 March 2027
Playing a Souls game, and writing down every death
One written line per death, and the point in a run where the boss stops feeling random. That point is when you can finally say what you are learning
Week 7 · 19 April 2027
Treating a subject as a set of bosses, on paper
The paper version of the Souls loop. You attack, you take the one lesson, you go again. The list of what you are fighting grows out of those attempts, instead of being written before you have made any
Week 8 · 26 April 2027
Breaking a large subject into small tasks, and building it as software
The ladder gives you the inside of thirty minutes and nothing beyond it. Long-term planning is the other half of the job, and the way a Souls game does it is to let a large subject come apart into small tasks one attempt at a time, rather than all at once on day one
Week 9 · 3 May 2027
Choosing the course you got stuck on
The course you stopped, restarted and stopped again. You still need it, and that is exactly what makes it the right thing to point this at
Week 10 · 10 May 2027
Running both mechanisms at once
Attempts find the work and study blocks get it done. What reliably goes wrong in the second week of a run, and why your own records will make you look better than you actually were
Week 11 · 17 May 2027
The exam, and what it cannot tell you
You sit an exam on what you covered, and then answer the harder question the exam cannot. Did your mechanism cause that result, and what would you cut from it now
Week 12 · 24 May 2027