A Final Reflection on Serious Games
I came into the class already in love with game design. I had had a wonderful experience in CS 146 making my own games in Unity, but I hadn’t gotten a good chance at something with more discipline and structure. From my other experiences in attempting to make games previously, I had already figured out that making board games and card games was much more difficult for me, since I the rules can’t just be coded and operated by a computer — they need to be understandable enough for regular people to just be able to read and play the game. This was one of the biggest difficulties for me in every non-coded game I had made. Even the ones I still think are successful still have rule complexity as their weakest point.
On class readings
The readings were incredibly helpful. This was the first class I had ever been in where I (a dyslexic person) actually enjoyed myself while doing required reading. Every selected piece was incredibly informative, giving formal terminology to things I had observed but had no words for. One of the pieces that really stuck with me was the excerpt from the Rise of the Video Game Zinesters. I had played a handful of Anna Anthropy’s games before, but I had never read any of her work (mostly because at that time I didn’t know I was trans, so I wasn’t relating to the sort of “leftist anger” energy she gives off). It amazed me that so much of the topics she was already talking about continued to be problems in the modern games industry: everything is about what will sell to the people we’re already selling to, which means just cishet white men selling to more cishet white men, etc. Being dyslexic, pretty much the only written media I consume is in the form of comics, webcomics, and graphic novels, so I was already familiar with the “zine” mindset as well as its roots in the queer comix scene. I enjoyed how Anna Anthropy’s games always felt like interesting vignettes, much more “artistic” and amorphous, but still getting their main points across with deadly accuracy. It made me realize that up until that point I was looking at serious games as all systems models all the time, wanting to find or create parallels to every existing thing from the real world. That mindset led me towards making games that centered details and polish first, when they should have been centering feeling and gameplay. The Anna Anthropy reading in particular helped me realize that the only way I was going to get better at making games was to strip back all the extra layers and still make something beautiful without them.
My hard learned lessons
Since most of the class was spent honing the skills I had already known from previous game design experience, a lot of the important points in learning for me were in planning and iterating. The part of designing I’ve always liked most is coming up with game mechanics and flavor to fit certain scenarios or design goals, so I tend to get caught up in “what it all means,” especially when it comes to serious games. One of the hardest things for me to learn was to allocate more time for playtesting — even to the extent that I should spend more time playtesting than working on the game itself. This very often became the reason why I was cutting it very close to the deadline for many of my games.
This was especially difficult when coupled with one of my other biggest takeaways, which is that I needed to keep all my changes to be incredibly small. Many times in between playtests, I would change 3 or 4 core numbers for certain balanced items because the game was too hard, or too easy, or not engaging enough. This resulted in a swing way too far in one direction, which would then mean that I would have to swing all the way back in the other direction, trying to find a goldilocks zone somewhat unsuccessfully. However, in cases where I was only tweaking one or a few mechanics at a time, the changes were much easier to spot, and it was also a lot easier to make decisions on what changes to keep and what changes to discard for the sake of balance, which became the main focus for two out of three of my games.
This class was a perfect testing zone to cover the topics I’ve always wanted to without it having to be “too much.” I tend to gravitate more towards serious topics anyways in my art, and so I wanted a space where I could explore that formally as well without being too heavy-handed. I feel like I really managed to learn a lot of new things both in terms of approaches to design and how to structure games as a whole.
