When Play Meets Culture: Designing Grammar Games with Sébastien Dubreil & Quinn Roberts
For Professor Sébastien Dubreil at Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of Languages, Cultures & Applied Linguistics, French isn’t just learned - it is played. What started as a series of classroom exercises has evolved into “Games For French”, an archive of card and board games to teach the language, culture and vocabulary in playful ways. This summer, School of Design senior Quinn Roberts (BDes ’26) interned with Professor Dubreil to bring these prototypes to life as a polished collection of ready-to-play games.
The concept behind Games For French came to being nearly a decade ago, when Dubreil developed a similar project, the digital game Bonne Chance, while at the University of Tennessee.
“It reinforced in me the idea that games were a great way to examine a culture and learn a language”, recalled Dubreil. At CMU, he used the approach to design a course called "Jeux de culture et culture du jeu", where students play French board games and analyze them for language, culture and game mechanics, eventually designing their own.
Over the years, the course has produced nearly 30-40 such game prototypes and eventually, it was time to move beyond the classroom. Dubreil began considering adapting these into fully professional games, but “needed someone who is a product designer and could understand how to design each game with its own personality and at the same time create a coherent collection”, which is exactly where Quinn Roberts came into the picture.
From June to August, Roberts worked full-time as the only designer on the team to build the visual identities of each game while Dubreil handled the rules and ensured the translations were grammatically correct. “I tried to make the games visually unique while keeping their format consistent,” explained Roberts. “My role was to take the student-developed prototypes and refresh them to look more professional.”
The internship became both a challenge as well as an opportunity. Roberts was constantly balancing feedback while keeping each of the ten games on track as she researched, developed visual branding and prepped assets for production. In Dubreil’s words, “Quinn sees the Matrix, and completely understood the vibe and the ethos of the project and applied herself to deliver some incredible designs”.
For Roberts, it was new territory as she had never designed for mass production before.
“This process encouraged me to more directly consider how the product would be understood and utilized by its intended audience,” said Roberts.
Her favorite part was how the project pushed her to develop her graphic design skills alongside her experience in industrial design to create tangible visual-oriented products. It also helped her understand the value of cross-disciplinary skill sets.
The results speak for themselves - a set of ten polished, professionally designed games designed to boost French language and culture learning, available on GameCrafter for anyone to try out. There are another 20 games still in the pipeline for development, and both Professor Dubreil and Roberts remain incredibly excited about the future of Games For French. The former is already looking for another student designer this upcoming semester to continue working on the project.
For Roberts, it was an enriching experience, and she enjoyed how the project developed and encouraged a higher understanding of the many facets of design.
“Any experience is good experience in the world of design,” she reflects. “This one expanded my skills and made me think more carefully about how design is understood by its audience.
"And at the end of the day, that’s what design is about—understanding people.”