Teaching gameful design

This paper discusses the course 'Gameful Design' held as part of the computer science master curriculum at Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien). We argue that the challenge of meaningfully teaching serious game design and gamification design is not solved by solely imparting design guidelines. It is a matter of conveying a method of how to engage with a real-world problem, how to ideate and explore, and how to iterate and reflect on gameful design. We describe the three methodological cornerstones the course is built on - research-based teaching, design thinking and explorative design - and outline the format of the course. From a relective practice perspective, we give structured tangible advice how to run such a course in the form of guidelines and we describe the impact it had on our own research.