What is covered, week by week, and which topics each lecture draws on.
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.
Welcome to the masochism club
Why players choose punishment their wallet would refuse, and how to tell a punishing design from a cheating one before the semester needs the distinction
Week 1 · 22 February 2027
The corpse writes back
Why the Undead Curse makes respawn the plot instead of a mechanic to excuse, and what that licenses in item description
Week 2 · 1 March 2027
Shortcuts, not signposts
Interconnected shortcuts and soft visual guidance as the same argument — the geography teaches without a minimap or a quest arrow
Week 3 · 8 March 2027
The rhetoric of combat
Why the fight is a reading test, not a reflex test — telegraphs, stamina and animation commitment as one grammar
Week 4 · 15 March 2027
The boss as dramatic climax
Why a phase transition has to earn its narrative justification before its mechanical one, staged with Malenia's Waterfowl Dance as the test case
Week 5 · 22 March 2027
Fifty points, no dead ones
Why an attribute allocation reads as a persona, not just a stat sheet, and what "no dead points" requires of the system underneath it
Week 7 · 12 April 2027
The economy — souls, runes, and the stake
Why the fusion of death, currency and risk into one system is the invention, and why the levelling cost curve is the most tuned number in the game
Week 8 · 19 April 2027
Say it in ten words
How messages, bloodstains and phantoms build empathy between strangers who never share a server tick
Week 9 · 26 April 2027
Delete the quest log
Why the genre deletes the quest log and the marker, and what that subtraction forces the player to remember instead
Week 10 · 3 May 2027
Write the bad ending first
Why ambiguous NPC dialogue functions as navigation, and why a tragic ending can outlast a happy one
Week 11 · 10 May 2027
Final showcase — the bonfire crit
Presenting and peer-reviewing the Final Project one-pager, and the semester's closing address
Week 12 · 17 May 2027