I wanted to savor the moment that I had tied John Romero's score in a game of Doom II, but I knew it wouldn't last long.

The series' co-creator and lead level designer—the man who best understood every detail of the corridors we were sprinting around—was on hand for GDC, a show he has attended nearly every year since the original Doom shipped in 1994. He kicked off the 2014 conference's first morning not with a panel, however, but with a row of laptops, all connected for a rare kind of LAN party.

Somehow, I wound up first in line on Monday for a one-on-one match with the game design legend, and while I'd joked that my performance would determine whether I'd get fired from my new full-time Ars job, I kind of had a masochistic wish to bring an old, offensive catch phrase to fruition. A few well-placed bursts of pixellated buckshot later, I'd tied Romero 2-2, and I wondered if I might have victory in my sights after all.

"Do you play Doom much?" he asked, midgame, his helmet-clad avatar screaming across the "Entryway" map and unlocking its few hidden crannies. I joked that these days, most of my gaming time is spent simulating border crossings, and the rest of our match proved that out, as I could only muster six kills to his 20. Once the man gets his hands on a plasma rifle, show's over, folks.

That's not the kind of education Romero doles out on the regular these days (assuming he doesn't troll online Doom servers for fresh meat). In October of last year, the University of California-Santa Cruz announced his hiring as creative director of its masters in games & playable media program, where he's currently building curriculum alongside fellow game design legend and wife, Brenda Romero.

The game-academia couple spoke to that fact at a GDC panel about designers in academia, alongside Deus Ex designer Warren Spector, who himself recently took a position at the University of Texas, and Naughty Dog designer Richard Lemarchand, who teaches at the University of Southern California.

That panel generally agreed that game design curriculum is at its best when it combines longtime game design experience with analysis of fresher, modern trends, echoing much of the philosophy that game design university DigiPen shared with Ars late last year. Spector invited a moment of awkward silence when he suggested students endure plenty of failure before finishing a college program. "In the real world, if I fail too often or too recently, I get fired."

More surprising was the panel's insistence that crunch, the trend of overworking studios' staff to meet deadlines, wasn't as negative as the press and public have otherwise stated, and that eager, young designers should be exposed to it on a limited basis. John Romero cited the first crunch period of his 2010 design company Loot Drop as "the best time in [our] game development," while Spector said that sometimes, "crunch is cool. Energizing, good for bonding." Brenda Romero explained that while she detests forced periods of crunch, she spends roughly 12 hours a day making, playing, or reading about games and assumes good game designers are wired similarly.

Hopefully, if the Romeros' upcoming curriculum leans in a crunchy direction, they can at least offer students a chance to see the phrase "You fragged ROMERO" on their computer screens from time to time.