One of the suggestions I received when I first presented on this website at GLS 9.0 in Summer 2013 was that I should include a page on the difficulties of balancing departmental expectations with a game-integrated pedagogy. As I was designing my course that summer, I ran into this problem consistently. As I mentioned on the How? page in this section, my department has a curriculum focused around concepts of discourse communities, analysis, argumentation, metacognition, and rhetoric. This already gives us a lot to cover in one semester. And I wanted to add games to that list. Somehow it worked out. Since I've already discussed this in some depth on the How? page, I'll keep the discussion here to a bulleted list of tips:
First and foremost, think carefully about how you want to integrate games. Think about the connections between your institution's requirements and games. Discover ways that they can be mutually constructive.
Use articles that cover both rhetoric and composition with games. The more that we work on this, the more we publish, the more such articles will exist. For a start, we already have the work of Gee, Bogost, Steven Jones, Ken McAllister, and the new collection edited by Richard Colby, Matthew Johnson, and Rebekah Shultz Colby.
Consider interactive multimodal compositions. These don't necessarily require coding, but can be done with WYSIWYG editors (I have my students build websites using Google Sites) or even things like PowerPoint.
Consider games themselves as possible texts. I've used games on citation and rhetoric in class. If nothing else, interactive, game-like in-class activities like short series of missions or jeopardy can help to keep the game-integration fresh.
Hold to the idea that the most important step you can take is to make your class more gameful.