LECTURE APPROACH Suggestions & notes for educators interested in teaching One Up: Creativity, Competition, and the Global Business of Video Games Prepared by Joost van Dreunen September 2020 © 2020 Joost van Dreunen,
[email protected] Page 1 of 13 LECTURE APPROACH Introduction I wrote One Up based on my own teaching experience with the material: each chapter roughly captures a 75-minute lecture. Here I’ve provided an outline on how I generally teach each of the chapters to students, including key concepts and companies case studies. Generally, I organize my time with students as follows: A key component is starting each class with a discussion of 2-3 developments from the prior week. These can vary from major product releases to industry conventions and M&A-related news. This helps students to lean into the discussion right away and often provides great examples to illustrate some of the topics and concepts discussed throughout this course. Following the review of the news, I generally spend 20 minutes setting the stage of a specific part of the industry during a specific period. For instance, in “Games Industry Basics”, we’ll discuss the rise of gaming during the Atari-era and its collapse. This allows to highlight the industry’s underlying economics and set the stage to discuss how Nintendo’s strategy played out during the second part of class. Lastly, the topics have been organized in such a way as to provide a cohesive narrative that starts at the early days of the games industry, gradually leads to contemporary strategy questions, and ultimately presents several forward-looking questions.