Games Design BSc (Hons) - 2025/6

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The School of Arts, Humanties & Creative Industries is committed to developing graduates with strengths in Employability, Digital Capabilities, Global and Cultural Capabilities, Sustainability, and Resourcefulness and Resilience. This programme is designed to allow students to develop knowledge, skills, and capabilities in the following areas:

Digital capabilities: The programme is built on the very latest techniques and technologies developed and employed by the games and related industries, thus ¿digital capabilities¿ is at the heart of your learning across the degree. Contemporary video games design, with its multiple and various digital applications in coding and programming, moving image arts, sound design, performance arts, creative writing, games studies, interactive media and digital performance is an inherently ¿digital¿ affair of course, and students will engages at all levels with technology and digital skills and capabilities, though we also include more traditional techniques such as drawn animation and drawing practice, music, writing and live performance as part of the offering. Throughout the programme, students will learn how to explore and practice a wide range of digital tools, allowing them to assess the potentialities and challenges of forms of technical and artistic expression that are increasingly central in contemporary culture and society. In addition, as part of individual modules¿ learning and teaching sessions, you will also be encouraged to communicate with one another and to work on some exercises using SurreyLearn, Microsoft Teams, and other digital and file and output sharing platforms, skills will carry forward to beyond your degree.

Employability: The programme equips students with professional and transferable skills in games design, coding and programming, moving image arts, sound design, performance arts, creative writing, games studies, interactive media and digital performance as well as writing, composition and communication skills. This programme is delivered by tutors and specialists with significant industry experience and contacts, and the notion of ¿professional practice¿ within a creative studio environment is a core attribute of the whole course and its components. The programme develops a range of proficiencies appropriate to games, live action film, animation and other associated areas of the media industries and beyond, by providing up-to-the-minute knowledge and understanding of tools, techniques, processes and practices used every day in these fields at professional level. Equally important for employability within these areas (and often overlooked) is the development of ¿personability¿: so that employers, collaborators, funders and commissioners want to work with you. We develop this by enabling students to work collaboratively and collegiately, in a supportive ¿studio-like¿ environment in which we all work together to realise creative goals. We also facilitate plenty of networking opportunities, so that students get to meet and interact with future potential employers, collaborators, funders and commissioners. We also assist students to enter events and festivals so that their work is promoted and ¿seen¿, widening opportunities and providing valuable peer esteem.

Global and cultural capabilities: The programme welcomes and supports students and staff from a variety of cultures, nationalities, and backgrounds. Our pedagogical practices create safe and interactive spaces where students are encouraged to participate in the production and sharing of knowledge from their own cultural backgrounds and interests. Games design and its associated specialisms, such as moving image arts, sound design, performance arts, creative writing, games studies, interactive media, digital performance and coding and programming, are fields that teach us about the human experience and our part in local and global cultures, facilitating exchange of ideas and experiences and helping to foster creative and cultural empathy in players, readers and writers, viewers and audients of all kinds across the globe. Creative design and output in these fields also play a very important recording and preservation role in narrativising and keeping alive and vibrant different cultural practices and experiences, often encoded in game play and design, especially those that might otherwise be silenced or endangered. You will be asked to respond to forms, modes and challenges from more than one perspective and potentially in relation to different cultures and times. You are encouraged to share and incorporate your experiences and knowledge in your designs, and those from your own cultures and backgrounds, and to respect, understand and value differences in experience. The individual modules¿ learning and teaching sessions give students the opportunity to present your own artistic and design work and to experience and respond to those of others in a friendly, constructive and open forum and you will be encouraged and helped to practice respectful communication and empathetic listening. In doing so, you will explore rigorous critical and creative tools, develop a high degree of self-awareness, and learn how to avoid conscious or unconscious bias when discussing contemporary global cultures and societies. Games Design students will be exposed, throughout their degree, to a wide range of approaches, textuality and visuality from all over the world and students are encouraged to bring this knowledge into their creative and critical games design practice right from the beginning of their study. Throughout the programme, students will develop sensitivity and appreciation for a diverse range of cultures and forms of artistic expressions, as well as emotional and cultural intelligence when discussing them with their peers and tutors.

Resourcefulness and Resilience: games design, and its associated specialisms, such as moving image arts, sound design, performance arts, creative writing, games studies, interactive media, digital performance and coding and programming, act as modes of telling and experiencing stories that expose us to different, varied and diverse experiences from history as well as our contemporary world. These stories, creative objects and approaches and the critical material around them teach us many things about ourselves as people, individuals and communities. How and why we behave and think the ways we do and how we cope with the challenges that our lives (and our lives in university!) throw at us. How and why we play games are also critical questions when considering individual and societal wellbeing. Famously, stories convey important lessons, comfort and significance (emotional, mental and spiritual) to us through the medium of language, image, sound and performance, not just in what they say, but how they say it. Games, rather like poetry, can allow us to engage with and express feelings and concepts that everyday language sometimes cannot access. Play (and poetry!) is good for the soul!
The life of a game designer can often be a solitary and isolating one. This programme, through workshopping, group work and shared design and creative and technical experience will help equip you for the real world setting of your current and future practice. This programme provides students with a number of challenges which reflect the current state of the art. Students need to respond to these with inventiveness and flexibility and you will often be required to research your own solutions to given problems. Over the course of the degree you will also hone the critical contextualising faculties that you will need to develop sophisticated creative and reflective work and to apply relevant and pertinent context to your technical and creative work and to your practice as a designer and artist, through constructive critical workshopping of your work and those of your peer writing community. The workshop friendships and connections you make in these settings, and attached events, you will likely carry forward throughout your career in games, moving image arts, sound design, performance arts, creative writing, interactive media, digital performance and other associated areas of the media industries and beyond. You will also benefit from the experience of your tutors as professional practitioners working today and from periodic guest speakers attached to the programme in relation to your practice as an artist and designer, the practicalities of building a portfolio of work and your profile as a artist and designer, the realities of the publishing industries and the importance of connecting to games/gaming and specialist communities that will be essential to your current and future emotional and practical wellbeing and success as an artist and/or designer. Thus, the programme fosters the wellbeing of our students, empowering them to become self-aware and resourceful individuals by offering a progressive, scaffolded learning experience and by allowing them to develop cultural sensitivity and emotional and social intelligence.

Sustainability: Throughout the programme students are made aware of sustainable design and production practices around the generation, production and presentation of games, their players and the interfaces between them both on-set and behind the computer. Students are shown best practices such as LED-based lighting, virtual production technologies to minimise crew and talent travel, recycling of sets and other materials, better transport choices, minimising of waste and energy usage, and awareness of environmental and social effects on local communities and landscapes.
On this programme, you will also be encouraged to reflect on cultural sustainability; you will encounter and study a range of writing, performance and play practices from different social, cultural and professional contexts. The ways people and communities play games can often codify aspects of culture and experience that may well be misunderstood, marginalised and/or endangered in our globalised world, and this programme will help you to give voice to some of these important cultural and identity spaces, help expand your knowledge and sensitivity as a thinker, games designer and artist. Games designers and creative practitioners also have the opportunity to write their own digital and gaming sustainability narratives in their current context in response to the ideas and techniques encountered in the writings and teaching on the various modules on the programme and can also realise cultural sustainability goals, playing an important role in increasing and maintaining awareness of cultural identity, themes and experience. The programme aims to exposes students to non-canonical perspectives originating from non-Western, queer, and/or indigenous communities, thus allowing students to broaden their critical horizon, develop ethical awareness, and become more environmentally and culturally sensitive thinkers and writers.
Furthermore, from a content viewpoint, many of the creative projects developed by students on the programme address environment and sustainability issues as part of their subject matter. We also work closely with the University of Surrey¿s Institute for Sustainability to explore and promote the United Nation¿s Sustainable Development Goals.