This is part of an interview series I’m conducting with games professionals who also teach part-time as adjunct faculty. Diego was the very first person I interviewed, he was kind enough to let me playtest these questions with him.
Diego Garcia is an independent game developer, animator, and instructor in Brooklyn, NY.
https://bsky.app/profile/radstronomical.bsky.social
Interview
This interview was conducted on July 20th 2023, and has been edited for length and clarity.
So, where do you teach? What schools and programs?
I teach for the NYU Game Center and NYU’s IDM (integrated design and media) department.
And what do you teach?
I teach three different classes. “Intro to 2D Animation for Games” is a Game Center Class. I also teach the Game Center’s “Intro to Game Development” classes for our two high school programs. And for the IDM Department, actually it’s cross listed with CS, I teach “Intro to Game Development”, also called ‘Game Development Studio’.
And where else have you taught in the past?
Nowhere else.
How long have you been teaching?
I want to say that I taught my first class in spring or fall of 2015. It’s possible that it was Fall 2014, but I don’t think so.
And what work do you do besides teaching?
I do freelance pixel art and animation that’s usually in a games context. Or, tangentially games related. And then I do independent game development.
We’re watching The Bear, Season 3 features “Ballbreaker” again-
Okay good. I made some new things for season 3, and I wasn’t sure, I actually had no idea if they actually made the cut. And I just started season 3 last night.
I had wondered if it was what you had made before and they were reusing it, or if it was new material. It was like a game over screen or something like that.
Yeah, I stitched a game over screen onto what I made before. I think there’s like two different game over screens maybe, I forget.
How does teaching impact the other work that you do?
This is a very interesting question, how does teaching impact the other art that I do? I think practically, it makes it quite difficult, because I’m juggling all this stuff right? And so, what’s the trickiest thing for me is like, I’ll take a contract job thinking I have plenty of time, and then I’ll get behind grading in my class, and then suddenly, I’m competing for all my time. So that part is tricky.
But what I like about it is that it kind of keeps me thinking about my practice. Like running into problems that I might not run into in my own work that then I’m sort of more prepared for when they come up. So like in my animation class, it’s encouraging me to stay really up to date on animation. It’s helping me understand how other people approach animation, which I also just think is nice, like to see other strategies people come up with. And it’s connecting me back to why I got into it in the first place. I think all of that is just really encouraging, and kind of rounds out my work a little bit. And then on the development side, it’s like, I’m literally just forced to learn these weird idiosyncrasies with how I’m using code or how I’m using development software, because a student will run into a problem that I don’t know how to solve. And then I have to solve it. So that part is also really interesting. And it kind of also relates to game development the same way as animation. Where I just have to be up on ‘what are people using? What’s happening?’ et cetera.
What would you say are to some of the biggest perks of adjuncting?
What I like about it, I guess, is that I both feel like I have a lot of freedom, what I teach and how I approach my class, but then also it gives me freedom to organize my own schedule, and choose when I want to work on other work. So, it’s a three prong thing. It gives me a safety net, I have some base income, so that part is just very practically nice. Then it also is more than that, because it’s connecting back to my work. It’s helping me understand, like “Oh, actually, I have learned a lot” and recognize how far I have come, and continue to learn more from the students. And schedule wise, its relatively low impact, depending on how many classes I’m teaching at a given time. So yeah there’s that juggling, but it’s also like, well I only actually have to go into class twice a week and so the other days I can use for other work. So it’s nice, it gives me freedom to work when I can.
And what would you say are some of your biggest annoyances? You’ve touched on this a little bit, but any others that come to mind?
I think, along with the idea of having freedom to teach whatever I want, is sometimes I feel quite isolated, like within the University. Especially, you know, some of the classes that I’m teaching are classes that I created and pitched. And it’s sort of like, it’s just me. There’s some discussion about how it fits in the larger curriculum and stuff, but if it wants to change or grow, I’m the only person thinking about that. And I’m not directly compensated necessarily for that, in the same way. So it’s hard to push myself to make that class grow and change sometimes. It’s strange that I personally have chosen this free schedule because I’m bad at organizing. I’m a very unorganized person. But then that juggling time part is also really difficult.
How did you come to start adjuncting?
When I was in graduate school, I did two TA positions. Because I knew I was potentially interested in doing that balance of teaching and independent game development. So I TA’d under Robert Yang, and under Eric Zimmerman. And then I graduated and was trying to sell a game and not really thinking about teaching. I had Secret Crush, my small studio with Aaron Friedman and Toni Pizza, and we were trying to figure out how to make money, and not really figuring out how to make money. And Toni was already teaching, and one semester she had to give up her class, and so she offered to recommend me for that position, which was the IDM “Intro to Game Development” class. And so I started. And actually, Robert Yang used to teach that class, who I TA’d under, so I sort of knew generally how that class worked. I had enough development experience that I felt like I could handle it, and so I took on that class. And that class was like half game design, half game development at the time. So I was sort of like twisting and rehashing some of the game design stuff I had learned in grad school, and then teaching game development as I would have taught it myself, or and as Robert taught it.
So that’s how you got started teaching. What keeps you teaching at this point? And you talked about this, in the kind of the benefits. But, you know, do you ever think about stopping teaching, or why do you keep doing it?
I am a flip flopper. I think often about stopping, and then the next semester I’ll be like, “Oh my God, teaching is so fun, I love teaching”. I love seeing the students’ work. So I guess what keeps me going actually is seeing how me tweaking a couple of small things to the class will suddenly have everyone feeling more comfortable, or have students making more connections, making really interesting new work that’s experimenting with stuff that maybe I wasn’t able to get them to experiment with last semester. So it’s sort of like, seeing how my own investment in the class has pretty immediate effects on students’ investment in the class, I think, is really nice.
I should also say, when I got started teaching, so I taught that IDM class, the other thing was that I looked at the Game Center curriculum. There were very few arts classes. I knew that all the students wanted arts classes. I had studied animation in undergrad, and so I pitched this “Animation for Games” class, which is what I had been doing even before I got to the Game Center, just on my own, small scale. But yeah, pitching my own class, and that class in particular, like seeing how that class can be honed over time and improved. It’s something I’m always thinking about, including right now, realizing I’m still in the middle of a syllabus rework.
Yes, I’m thinking about my fall class, same.
Yeah, I just have a note with a bunch of topics listed, and then an empty schedule. That’s where I am in my rework.
Would you want to teach full-time, if you just could?
Yeah, at this point I think I can firmly say yes. For a long time I thought I wouldn’t want to. Because I think I was sort of clinging to this dream of a small indie studio, you know. And I think I was misguided in wanting to jump into that before having some other more hardcore game experience, whether that’s working full time at a studio or freelancing on a game that reached some level of success that I’m sort of dealing with those sorts of problems. I think at this point, I really see the value of being able to be a part of the community, contribute to the learning of a bunch of different teams, have a small hand in development that way, and then also be able to just kind of explore what I want to explore when I want to explore it. With the freedom that comes with having a teaching position and still being expected to make work as part of that teaching position, but not having the pressure of an immediate financial gain behind it.
And I also just think it’s really interesting, like… I’ve had some window into this because the Game Center, I think has really been relying on adjunct’s work. Especially right after the pandemic, after a lot of instructors were ready to move on. So I assisted with admissions a little bit during that time, and so I saw a little more into what a full-time professor is actually dealing with. And yeah, I just think shaping the program overall would just be like more of what I like about teaching my one class, you know.
What do you like most, for a single thing, about adjunct teaching?
I think it’s fairly rare. But when I see a student get really excited about an assignment. And actually take it beyond what it says on the paper, and like really put themselves into it. Sometimes I’ll have a student come to me at the end of a semester or the end of a class, and be like, “Hey? I had never thought about this as like a career.” Especially in my IDM class. That program is not games focused. It’s like the intersection of technology and design and art, and so it’s sometimes more of an engineering focus. Sometimes it’s students that like, wanna do video art, whatever. I’ll have a student in that class that was like, “Hey, I just took this because games are cool, and I had never thought about as a career”. Or even that someone would be thinking about things like, you know, when the screen flashes, or how heavy the character feels, or whatever. And so that that’s really exciting. It’s also a little scary. Given the state of the industry right now, but it’s mostly exciting.
Yeah, so when students say, as I’m sure former students have said to you, like “Your class is the reason I pursued games”, do you feel guilty about that?
No, I don’t feel guilty, but I also try to be like, if a student asks me how to get a job in the games industry, I try to be pretty honest. Which is that, I don’t have a great idea of that, because I’ve been teaching since I graduated, and making small games that cost nothing for fun. And so I’m more trying to refer them to other resources. But I am also pretty frank with them that it’s tough right now, and that there’s a lot of game development, game design programs specifically, and like, there’s not that many game design positions on a game project, so it’s definitely competitive.
But no, I mean, if I can help a student find something they love, even if it ends up being a hobby for them, I think it’s good.
And then what do you like least? What’s your least favorite thing about adjunct teaching?
A lot of it has gotten better for me as I’ve been teaching longer. Okay, so, I would say the hardest thing about teaching for me probably was in the early days especially, there was very little oversight. So in the same way that I had a lot of freedom, I also had a lack of knowledge. And so I was free to, for example, pack way too much into a class. Or you know, run a critique, having only ever participated in a critique. And so there was just all this stuff that I didn’t really understand how to do. And so, yeah, maybe my least favorite part of adjuncting is that if I mess up, it has an immediate effect on at least 16 people, and, I probably mess up once a class, you know, like it happens. I forget the clock, or I try to go off lesson, and I’m definitely not prepared to do that and I put a bug in my own code, and I can’t solve it in front of the students, whatever. So yeah, I mean, I don’t know, I guess I’m convoluting what I’m trying to say here. As a self-conscious person, I think that part is tough.
You know, I taught for like two years before anyone came to look at my class, anyone higher up. So I was multiple semesters teaching my animation class before a core faculty member came and sat in on class and gave feedback. And I was like, oh yeah it would have been really nice to know this, like, two years ago. So that’s tough.
And then, I mean, I have bad time management. So then, also expecting the students to manage their own time, I think is a little tough, and in the early days I’d have to massively over assigned stuff. And that’s something I’m still always trying to rein in. How do I not encourage a terrible work-life balance, et cetera.
And it’s a great segue into the next question I had. Over the course that you’ve been teaching, what are some mistakes that you think you made early on?
Definitely overpacking the class. My “Intro to Animation” class was originally called “Intro to 2D Art and Animation for Digital Games”. I was teaching, like, color theory. Composition. You know, figure drawing, and that was the first half of the class, which is kind of multiple art classes already, and then going into animation, and implementing animation in games, all in one class. And so it was just way, way too much.
Because that was before there were any art classes, right?
I think there was like an early viz com class. So there was a little bit of repetition, like a very small amount, but most of the students needed it anyway. Importantly, like, there was zero drawing. And there’s still very little drawing. And so it’s also teaching an animation class without a drawing prerequisite, it is tough.
Now that class, first half is animation, and the second half is animation implemented into games. And even that I’m gonna be changing and trying to reduce the overall load. Because animation also is just super labor intensive. So every week I’m expecting students to animate a new thing. Sometimes it might be 5 to 30 second short. Or not 30 seconds, but it might be a 5 second short. And then one week it might be an 8 frame walk cycle. So it, you know, the work is really variable, and some weeks I think they get burned out. So, just trying to prevent that.
The other thing that’s tough is the more you pack into a class, the less time you’re giving students to sit with a single concept and iterate on it and let it grow. It’s sort of like you’re moving on from a walk cycle to sword slash, or whatever, but they haven’t, all they’ve done is made like one janky walk cycle, and you’ve given feedback, but now you’re like, okay, now do something else. That part is also tricky.
I totally feel that. Yeah, it feels like you’re not giving people their money’s worth, so to speak, if you’re staying on a topic. Like, I wanna give as much as possible. But yeah, less is more when it when it comes to some of these concepts, because they have this ability to iterate on it.
This is also a huge challenge with my high school classes, because they’re high schoolers from all over the country. I shouldn’t say problem, that’s a big challenge. Some of them have never seen a line of code, they don’t understand what a variable is. And some of them are selling their own games inside of Roblox, or whatever, or on Itch, or wherever else. I’m dealing with that now. It’s like, how do you approach that when you have to teach the kids who know nothing, so that they can sort of get somewhere. But then you also just trying desperately not to bore the other kids to tears and have them check out of the class as a whole. And it’s hard.
Are there any other common or mistakes that you made that you feel are maybe common things?
I think that’s the biggest one. So not overpacking the class, I think on the other side of that is forgetting what I had to take the time to learn. Because I think it’s really easy to be like… What’s a good example? Once I remember a student really not knowing how to draw a character jumping. They were just sort of sitting in front of a blank page. And even just being like, ”Well, just look up a picture of someone jumping”. Or like, “Go to Spriter’s Resource or something and look at how Street Fighter did it. It’s okay to borrow.” Like, even just that little thing of that reference is a thing. I guess at some point I had to learn that, and I don’t remember when. Because I, you know, I’ve been drawing since I was 5, and I always joke that I learned to draw in my 8th grade math class, because it’s just what I did when I was bored. But everybody’s coming from a different place, and like, now I guess some of the problem is, “Why are you naming your files with an ampersand in there, or a dollar sign in the file name of your assignment?” Because you can now, and also because, they weren’t digging into The Sims metafiles to mod their game or making HTML websites when they were in high school, like I did. So I learned that stuff myself somehow because I wanted to. And they haven’t been exposed to that kind of stuff. So it’s just like there’s all these little pain points that you don’t remember exist. And they seem really obvious, but they’re just not. They’re actually unintuitive and strange.
Yeah, there’s so much stuff like that. Especially in games. I feel like in our generation, where there was much less, like, high school students who have done game development. There’s only been a small amount of time when that’s been true. For everybody older than a like, you know, maybe their mid 20s or something that, the only way to learn was this idiosyncratic way, like you randomly… Like, the first coding I did was Excel VBA, that’s where I learned what for loops are and stuff like that, it’s such a weird route. But all of those little things that you’re picking up along the way, then seem obvious to you.
What advice would you give to somebody who was thinking of teaching a class for the first time?
They haven’t taught before, like they’re trying to get into teaching? I think if they’re trying to find a class to teach, then it’s like, well you should tell people in your network that you’re interested in teaching so that you can even be aware of them. Since, as we were talking about earlier offline, it’s hard to know that they exist. And then it’s like, how do you connect with academia and put your name in there, and sometimes that might be cold emailing a department, but sometimes it might be I had this friend who adjuncts at this school and I’ll just tell them if they hear about anything to let me know.
Teaching the class itself, I think it’s really useful… No, this is a really hard question. I think looking at existing syllabi is really useful, seeing what other people have done, talking to other instructors about what the pitfalls are. Especially if you can talk about that specific class or area.
And then, I would always remember that, anything that you – especially for a practical class like I’m teaching game development – Anything that I can do, I think it’s gonna take the students at least three times as long to do. Because, for a million reasons. Like, they don’t know how to look for where they forgot a semicolon yet. They’re just slower on the keyboard. It’s like a weirdly huge issue for my class. Just, you know, people who have been using the computer less take more time to type things. There’s all kinds of things, you know. There’s a million places where something small can go wrong, and they don’t know how to solve it. And so you just need to remember that everything takes a lot more time.
And then the other thing, I think, is like, obviously it’s different for everybody, and you have to figure out what works for your schedule. But I try to just be as available as possible to the students when I can. And give actionable feedback that they can incorporate into future work. Like, you know, it’s not just about a grade. It’s really about like, how can you help them grow and find resources, and teach themselves, and all kinds of stuff.
What do you think are some of the biggest misconceptions that people have about adjuncts, either in games or in general?
I have no idea. I don’t talk to people.
Or about how about maybe students specifically then?
Well, I think one thing that I felt going in, and this kind of relates back to like my comment about self-consciousness and messing up, it’s that I felt like I couldn’t. And I think some students probably go in thinking you know everything and you should know everything, and I think it took me a while to be like, actually, it’s kind of okay for me to be like, “I don’t know the answer to that question. Here’s how I would begin to look for answers” and help them find their own answers rather than feeling like I need to provide answers. Like, I think of myself as being there to help them learn how to learn further beyond what I’m teaching them, rather than just to leave my class with like, the written content on the syllabus.
So I guess I don’t think of myself as like “a giver of knowledge and process”, as much as like, a context for you to build that on your own. And that probably depends really on what you’re teaching also. I’m not teaching chemistry or whatever.
Although I mean, I think maybe every discipline has that.
Yes that’s true. I’ve also read your, I think I’ve heard you talk about what if we taught math the way we taught art, or whatever, and not it being like this set of obscure spells that you’re supposed to know, memorize, and how do we find our way to those answers and stuff.
And that, what you just said could be straight out of Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. His whole thing is railing against, I forget what he calls it, like piggy bank theory of learning or something, that the instructor is depositing knowledge into the brain of the empty student, is not how it works actually. And that even students think that, I feel like that’s something I actually find really difficult to get across. Sometimes students will have an expectation of like, “Okay, I want to learn this. And so just like, implant the knowledge to me, please,” like they expect a very, “I will show you how to do it, and then you will do it.” Like, in this idea of learning how to learn is difficult.
Do you talk about that in your own classes?
In the beginning. I typically do now because of the weird grading stuff that I’m doing. So it gives me an excuse to talk about why I’m doing that, but it doesn’t matter, still there will always be a couple students who I can tell are resistant to and dislike that I’m foregrounding the fact that they’re the ones who are creating knowledge. And that they have to figure things out and things like that. They really just want like a tutorial or something like that. They just want to be shown how to do something and then do it, even though I do that, we do that.
Yeah, of course, but the goal there is like, how you take the knowledge in this thing and then distort it to map… or to wield it, to create an original idea rather than just copying what exists.
Yeah. And so that’s something I think a lot about is how to make that more smooth, that it’s not something that’s being forced, to think for themselves like that, that it bridges that gap. Because it’s also just how most of the education system works. Like there’s a lot of pressures from early schooling all the way through to university to have the standard, to have all this kind of thinking. And so if they’re coming out of a system that’s really had them filling out these checklists, like “you do X Y and Z, ergo you know this, and now you’re ready to move on”, I don’t expect to be able to counteract ten, fifteen years of how they’ve been taught previously. Anyway.
Has teaching your classes changed how you think about games, specifically?
Weirdly, I think not drastically. I think maybe especially because I’m teaching classes that are about production process more than design itself. I’ve come to series of realizations of ways I could be doing stuff better in a programming context, or whatever. But it’s pretty rare that it fundamentally shifts what I think a game should be, or could be.
Certainly get a lot of like game ideas. It’s interesting, giving students prompts and constraints and seeing them very often come up with the first sort of obvious solution, and then, in trying to push them to come up with something a little more radical, then it’s like, “Oh, man. I should go make that game, I should go make that”. That’s the struggle I have, in my game development class.
But yeah, and I don’t think a fundamental difference. I mean, I definitely think through the larger conversation and through trying to improve the work life balance in my own classes, I think it’s made me think about how do I actually want to spend my time making games? And what do I want my relationship to doing this work to be?
But it hasn’t radically shifted how I think about what a game is. I think grad school did a lot of that already.
The was my last question, but the last question that I have written down is so… what else should I ask about? This is a meta question.
As someone who does not know a lot of these, I think just like good resources on how to teach. Because that’s something that I really have not found a lot of.
So that’s something I should ask about, what are some good resources?
Yeah like, what was something that was really helpful to you, learning how to teach your class, I think is really is really good. Because I think coming at it from, and I’m sure a lot of people are not coming at it from the direction I am, but for me it was like, “I guess I teach now. I’m gonna propose this class.” I had a faculty member help me design the class, but from there, it was just figuring it out as I went. And literally, not until, like starting to read your blog and stuff, was I aware that there’s, obviously, so much writing on the process of teaching more generically. And yeah, I just think that’s really useful.
I feel like I want to make a joke somehow, about how everyone thinks that they can just make games, and how then game designers are typically annoyed at, say, film people who’re like, “How hard could it be? And it’ll be about the nature of choice! Nailed it”. But like, we do that with teaching, like no one who comes in to teach it has learned pedagogy, that sort of thing.
It’s also a classic example of what I was talking about before, which is that you had to learn that somehow, and like you can’t just assume that anybody going into teaching like already knows where their resources are. Like going back to when I had like very little oversight starting, I didn’t know who to email about what, I hadn’t been introduced to a lot of people. There were all these optional like, “Hey come to this thing!” but I wasn’t paid to go to them, and I was also doing game development, or whatever, so I was choosing how I use my time. And it’s like, there are resources, it’s just you’re not really shown how to take advantage of them, or what the value of them even is.
All of arts teaching is sort of like that, that we’re always rediscovering that sort of stuff. I haven’t ever read a book just about how to teach class or anything. For the same reason, I think that that you have, it’s just how I spend my time. Like, I am interested in teaching my classes better, but I don’t want to devote too much time to that because there’s no upside to it.
Right. It’s like, if I don’t read this book, I’m not gonna lose my class. But if I don’t finish this freelance project, I’m gonna burn bridges and not get paid, and whatever else.
So that’s a great question to ask. Are there any other questions you think would be good for me to ask? Or that you would like to have been asked?
Not off the top of my head. But maybe I’ll email you if I think of any. Or DM you.
I appreciate that. Alright any other comments or questions?
No, I was just thinking about my other least favorite part about adjuncting, which is not knowing how to help struggling students.
Oof.
It really sucks. There’s not always a great answer, but it just sucks so much.
Have you learned anything along the way about how to help struggling students?
In some cases I modified my class to be more forgiving of students that just take longer to connect with some things. So for example, I was talking about my dev classes where people come in with different levels of experience. I make the project a little more open-ended and ambitious.
Potentially ambitious. But I make the graded requirements quite easy to achieve, and very clear. It’s like, “You need to add a player ability when you press space” and I give some examples what that could be. So that they can start to either just grab one of those and do it and get the point, or, build their own, build on it and do their own thing. So that’s one thing that’s to prevent students from struggling in the first place.
I probably give more time than I can afford to students, sometimes. I just make myself really available. And I schedule meetings with students. I try to give a lot of open work time in class, so that I can be available for students, while they’re exploring and experimenting.
That’s smart, I should do that more.
Yeah, just like a better division of labs. Well, my class also is two days a week, so I have a lab. But my office hours for my animation class, instead of doing office hours, I have mixed feelings about this, I go to the lab for an hour. So that they all know, I know that they are all available when I am available. And then if they need more time outside of class, I schedule a meeting. So that’s one. But then, sometimes students are just struggling because they’re having problems or they’re not getting along with another student or whatever, and it can be really hard. I don’t think there’s always a great answer other than letting them know what resources are available to them, and that you’re there to talk to them.
I feel that all the time with the struggle between advising a student… Like, for some students, just doing the thing shows they’ve learned, and they don’t need critique, really. Just, being able to make the character jump, or whatever, was itself this big learning experience. And then anything beyond that is actually detrimental, because it makes them more aware of just how basic what they’re doing is, then they won’t have the enthusiasm to learn to keep going.
Like, I don’t know that he’s ever elucidated this in perfect detail, but if you ever saw Bennett Foddy teach,
Yeah I took his prototype studio class.
He doesn’t really… If pressed, he will tell you how bad everything that you’re doing is. But he won’t, for the most part, he lets students just have whatever accomplishment you’ve accomplished. I know I’m getting this from somewhere, somewhere he has talked about that encouragement, in some psychological thing. That by providing encouragement and validation, they’ll go on to learn and eventually realize the mistakes that they’re making, but pointing them out now will just discourage them, and will prevent them actually, possibly from wanting to continue to learn it. And difficult because different students are on a spectrum of that. Some students really do just need to be celebrating the basic wins, is clearly what they what they need. But whereas some students do need more advanced critique. But knowing where someone falls on that is something that I think is a total challenge, it’s really hard.
It’s really interesting to hear that, because I said many times to people, when he was teaching me, that he was the best teacher that I had at giving me criticism while also encouraging me. While also feeling like, I wanted to keep working on the thing. And it wasn’t that he didn’t critique it. He definitely gave criticism. But his criticism always came from a point of like, “What you created is really valuable, and here are some directions you could take it”. I don’t know if I do a great job of it, but that is sort of the approach I try to take in my own criticism, and it’s why I came up with this grading scheme. It’s like, “You did this thing. Nice work. You’re getting full credit. Here are some other ways you could look at it, or if you wanted to take it further, you could consider stuff like this.” And probably sometimes I over-critique, and over-explain, and people are like, this is too much. But I mean, for it’s more about evaluating growth, and were they able to overcome this discrete task. And then, now that they have, how can I get them to think about it in a context of a larger design? Or, taking it somewhere more original.
Interesting.
It’s never ending.
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