This week we read Chapter 6: Game Design from Ge’s book. I’ve broken down this response into a couple of parts I would specifically like to respond to.
Games as a Mirror of our Humanness
Games that have some social commentary, a feeling of connectedness to a larger human experience, or ones that illustrate beautiful stories or worlds — these are games that I gravitate toward the most these days. I remember feeling that with the rise of narrative-driven games such as “That Dragon, Cancer” in the early 2010s (I’m sure there are others from before then, this is just when I became aware of them..!), people were actually beginning to acknowledge the potential that video games had as a medium for immersive storytelling or artistic experience, rather than simply as a competitive/toxic/asocial hobby :(
All Games are Played in Hyper-1st Person
Ge says that “Even if they are played from a ‘3rd-person visual perspective,’ there is still this sense of embodiment” in video games. I can think of some potential counterexamples (Spore? Sims? Games where you have some kind of godlike force…), but I can imagine that even in these games, there is still some sense of being an embodied thing that interacts with the world. Perhaps this facet of video games is truly inescapable as a result of being an embodied thing using some interactive interface to play a video game. I think this ties into the idea that designing a video game is a way to design a human experience, even if the contents of the game itself don’t seem very human.
While I grew up playing manyyyy many hours of video games, I don’t think I’ve ever felt as close to understanding what goes into designing a game as I do now in this class. While we aren’t exactly creating games, I do feel that we are aiming to create experiences, and that feels quite close. The closest experiences I’ve had to designing my audio visualizer, and now my sequencer, are when I’ve tried to create large-scale installation art. Completely different medium, but the process feels very similar — I’ll start with some sketches, and some sense of what I want a person to feel when they enter or interact with the space I’ve created. Then I’ll spend many (frustrating) hours designing and creating the thing, and end up feeling some combination of pride and disappointment at the end. But when I feel like I get it right — when I feel like the thing I’ve made roughly matches the experience I’ve manifested in my head — it’s one of the most satisfying feelings I’ve ever had.