A reflection on this class

I’ve realized that every year asI grow older, I play fewer games and seem to enjoy the games I do play less. Maybe that’s just reality as other things take up more and more of my time, but it’s a really sad one, especially for someone who’s childhood dream was and still is to make games. As a kid, I’d pretend to make little RPGs using Lego figurines and sets, and my friends and I would actually play them. But I felt that sense of wonder and fulfillment less and less with each new game I played. So, I asked myself, why have I enjoyed games? What is it that makes a game fun? What makes a game worthwhile to play?

I’ve made probably around a dozen or so games of one form or another before coming to this class, though some were certainly more complete than others. Just last year, in a game design class at Cornell, I had made a multiplayer mobile game. Back then, my team and I took a while to really know what our game was; we pivoted on our core game concept thrice over the span of six weeks (Cornell has semesters, and it was a semesterly long project).

It was from that experience that I realized I still didn’t feel comfortable with making a game. It was a process where my team and I would go about for weeks discussing ideas and what to pursue, and we’d ultimately settle on something that everybody could live with, but nobody was truly happy about.

This quarter, I made three games and polished one of those three, all within the span of ten weeks. When I sat down to create the third game with my group, we bounced ideas of what our game would be for maybe only ten minutes, and decided it would be interesting to look into political power as a system to model. It was a complex enough system, but somehow we took that idea and managed to come up with interesting ideas for it in just a few hours, and we had a playable prototype within a few days. And that prototype was fun enough that we didn’t really need to make any major pivots. That once hard and stressful process of building out a game from an idea now felt a whole lot easier.

Along the way of making games this quarter, I got the answer to the question of what makes a game fun (specifically, there’s 8 different kinds of fun), I discovered what games could be in addition to just being fun, and I experienced many kinds of games that I’ve never played before. I got to host a type of real-world game I hadn’t imagined would be possible. I learned that sometimes, modding a game (like Pandemic) when you have a good reason to do so can be a better idea than starting from scratch. I had a chance to tell a story through a game. I worked with friends and partners in taking a nebulous idea into something tangible in the span of a couple days. And, I found out what it’s like to really think carefully about what I want a game to be and execute on that.

With digital games, you spend so long working through the details of implementing this mechanic or making that animation work that it can be easy to lose sight of the game as a whole. In this class, there was a focus on the craft of game design — emphasizing playtesting (not just to do it, but how to do it), keeping in mind the elements that make up a game, and realizing how the seemingly random trajectories that games take are in fact carefully thought out by the designer.

In the time we spent playing some of the board and card games in the beginning of class, I had made discoveries that I otherwise wouldn’t have. (Oh, this game works because of how its mechanics allow players to play each other, or that game really pushed the boardaries of what a game can do with cards.) I was exposed to all the different approaches others take in coming up with ideas through conversations with my project partners. And if there’s one thing I really became familiar with this quarter, it’s asking friends to playtest something for me.

Of the three questions I’ve been asking myself about games, I think this class has answered each of them, though perhaps some more indirectly than others. As it turns out, for me what I find fun may be quite different than what others find fun, and maybe that’s for the better.

There are, of course, things that haven’t changed too much for me. Even after having also taken CS247I, I’m still not sure if I’m fully sold on sketchnoting. It’s not not that I doubt it can be useful, but, sometimes, I just want to read something and not have to worry about anything else while doing so. I also don’t think I will be suddenly inspired to play more games myself.

But if there’s something that has changed, it’s that I have a greater sense of confidence that I can, in fact, make a good game. Last year, I had begun working on a tabletop RPG system after not being fully satisfied with existing ones like Dungeons & Dragons, which I’ve played and led campaigns in a number of times. That project never made it anywhere, in large part because I didn’t have a framework for developing the game and lacked the confidence to see it through. But, this spring break, after having taken this class, I think I will take another shot at it. This time, I know what I’ll have to do and what I need to keep in mind.