By Cary Shimek, UM News Service
MISSOULA – If life is a game, one online student with the 91次元 has discovered some winning moves.
Brittany Westlund, a third-year graduate student living in Kalispell, studies UM’s new Master of Fine Arts in Game Design and Interactive Media. Like a growing number of college students, she is completing all her coursework online, starting with her UM undergraduate degree in media arts. She intends to finish her graduate work next spring.
Game design is life for Westlund, and she has scored some impressive wins in recent months. Last spring, her game won Best in Show in its category at UM’s Media Arts Expo. This past summer, she collaborated on a short-form video game – or game poem – published in Game Poems magazine. Additionally, an article she wrote was accepted recently for publication in the Games for Higher Education encyclopedia.
And this is all while teaching online UM classes, launching her own game studio () and working on a video game about a curious mushroom who helps restore a struggling forest through rest, renewal and small acts of care.
“Brittany has become a leader and innovator in creating community in the online space,” said Michael Cassens, an associate professor in UM’s School of Visual and Media Arts and one of Westlund’s mentors. “I think her journey has been remarkable and that she has come to embody who we are here at UM.”
As it says on her studio site, Westlund strives to create gaming experiences that inspire curiosity, compassion and creativity – basically the opposite of violent first-person shooter games. “There are plenty of those out there,” she said with a laugh.
A native of Vancouver, Washington, Westlund moved to Montana and began her professional life working in a microbiology lab before attending Flathead Valley Community College for her first two years of undergraduate studies. She greatly appreciated the , which allowed her to transfer and finish her undergraduate degree tuition free at UM. As a married student in her early 30s rooted in Kalispell, she didn’t want to relocate, so she was attracted to UM’s media arts bachelor’s degree that can be taken fully online.
Westlund was used to being surrounded by people, so initially she found the online experience a bit lonely. Over time she “developed some hacks” to combat this.
“You need mentors you can talk to about the things you really care about,” Westlund said. “And I made sure I was doing the work to connect with the campus community.”
She made it a habit to participate in student workshops and seminars, whether they were offered by her department or not. She also benefited from weekly seminars with her game development crew. Graduate students in her school also are required to take on teaching roles, which grew her connections to campus and passion for teaching.
“Usually this starts as a grading assistant, but by the second or third year you can be teaching,” Westlund said. “I kind of followed that route and fell into web design because I was comfortable in that area. I was really excited to teach people how to code because it was hard for me to learn. I think it kind of gave me an advantage knowing where people were going to get caught up, because I know where I had problems. So it has been fun for me to relate my own learning experience to theirs and really connect with the students.”
Having taught online classes with 15 to 45 students, Westlund is now considering a teaching career after graduation.
“I really enjoy it so much,” Westlund said. “I love helping students understand things they didn’t think they could – like coding – which they totally can. It’s just so fun to prove to them what they’re capable of.”
She worked on the game poem, Asunder, with UM Assistant Professor Ashley Rezvani and UM alumna Kate Lloyd. Game poems are short interactive experiences designed to elicit a feeling.
In their game, a person is in a house surrounded by swirling objects and intrusive thoughts. Players are encouraged to make the first moves to calm the chaos by sorting what can be held and what can be set gently aside. When the character becomes unburdened at last, the player is rewarded with a quiet moment where she steps outside into a sense of relief.
Rezvani led programming and game design, while Lloyd curated the sound design. Westlund directed art and environmental design. The group met online many times to work on the game poem, and Westlund made a field trip to Missoula to record the voiceovers for the project in a campus sound studio.
She said sound design plays an essential role in Asunder. As players place flowers into a vase, musical layers form and combine into a song that offers a moment of peace within the chaos.
“Working on that project was such a great experience, and being on campus made me feel very much like a student – like ‘Whoa! UM’s campus and resources are incredible,’” she said.
Their game poem may help establish a new genre, as it will be published in the inaugural issue of .
With the Games for Higher Education encyclopedia, Westlund just learned this month that her article about the game Before I Forget was accepted for publication.
She said the encyclopedia is a centralized resource for educators to find “serious games” to use as learning activities. A serious game is designed for a purpose beyond entertainment. Before I Forget is a short exploration game about dementia that focuses on memory, identity and love and has application to fields like psychology, cognitive science and gerontology.
Westlund said her UM media arts training gave her skills like graphic design, animation, illustration, motion design and more.
“But it wasn’t until game design that I saw a way to combine all those skills into something that could be incredibly meaningful for me,” she said. “I’m so excited and inspired by the possibilities that come with interactive storytelling.”
With creating her own game studio focused on emotional design and narrative meaning-making, Westlund is prepping for life beyond graduation. She hopes it becomes a launchpad for making games and supporting other game designers, because the process is so difficult.
“My time at UM has taught me to embrace collaboration with others,” Westlund said. “It’s just so much easier and faster and more enjoyable to work with other people on games because they are so hard to put together yourself. I’ve really learned to value the community and collaborative nature of my program.”
With the game Westlund is designing – working title Luna – a small Moonpetal mushroom seeks to restore balance to her forest. But she does it through nonviolent ways, like creating moonbow paths, resting, brewing tea and helping woodland critters. These actions create opportunities for players to progress in the game.
“There are already a lot of talented game designers out there making violent games,” she said. “I’m trying a different approach.”
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Contact: Dave Kuntz, UM director of strategic communications, 406-243-5659, dave.kuntz@umontana.edu; Brittany Westlund, UM graduate student, brittany.westlund@umconnect.umt.edu.