CS 377G Reflection
In all honesty, before this class, I didn’t have the nearest idea of how much thought and design goes into creating games. The last time I had played board games was when I was five or six. And the extent of games that I played went from Life to Monopoly (a.k.a not diverse). However, after taking this class I have realized how meaningful and engaging board games can be if they are well designed. It has also opened so many doors for me to things like user experience, system design, and visual design.
One of my absolute favorite parts of this class was starting every class by playing games. I think it immediately set a tone of fun to the class. As cliche as it is, I think it opened my mind to thinking of learning as fun. It was amazing that we got to see many applications of what we learned, rather than just theoretically learning about them. By playing games, we got to see things like formal elements at play. For instance, we got to see how picking one of the infinite amount of mechanisms could completely alter the feel of the game. Overall, it was a great learning experience to actually be able to see how design choices play a significant role in gameplay.
In the class, we also had the opportunity to do sketchnotes. In all honesty, it showed me how much of a visual learner I was. It’s amazing that I have a notebook worth of illustration that I can look over within minutes and know exactly what I learned. I also loved that we could see our classmate’s sketchnotes. Just being able to see them inspired me and taught me new techniques for my own. However, it also taught me that I can’t always be a perfectionist when making notes. There’s definitely a balance between creating effective notes and focusing on the actual content of the readings.
Because of all these amazing opportunities, I had many important takeaways in the class. For one, I realized how crucial playtesting and iteration is in a game. I realize this now in the difference between how we created P1 and P4 for Senior’s Declassified Stanford Survival Guide. I remember the first time, we were testing out ideas we spent hours just contemplating whether our game was balanced and fun. We would do the math to see whether our game was balanced. This almost doubled the time of our game and didn’t create one that was nearly as fun as we thought. On the other hand, for P4, rather than contemplating, our team just playtested the changes we made. By doing so, we not only tested whether our mechanisms were balanced but also if other people found them engaging. Killing two birds with one stone!
I think another important rule that I learned through playtesting is how painful it is, especially in the beginning. I remember one of my first playtests I wanted more than anything to just correct what the players were doing or tell them to stop because our game wasn’t fun. But as the quarter went, I started to realize these squirmy feelings I got were actually what I wanted. Through allowing all of these small mistakes to happen during playtesting, I was able to fix and clarify those things for the next playtest. I realized that if I chose to correct players, I would often forget to note that it wasn’t something that was intuitive to the players, and the same mistake would happen again.
Another super important learning for me was the importance of modding. I actually learned this through P2 and P3. I don’t know why at the start of P2 I had this weird inclination that modding was copying somehow. Consequently, I found myself spending hours coming up with a novel story. Despite being really happy with my story, I realized how much of a time suck coming up with an incredibly new idea could be.
But then I had the opportunity to experience modding a game. For P3, my team had no idea what we wanted to do our game on. But we had the chance to play a card game where you had to mod an existing game on another topic. I was hesitant with this technique, but it eventually led us to a drastically different yet creative game that we were all proud of. However, we probably spent significantly less time creating the game because of the mod. For one, I think it was because coming up with a new idea is incredibly challenging. But also, while modding a game you are only testing one or two variables at a time, knowing that the others are probably balanced.
When I go to make games in the future, I will definitely remember all the key concepts that we have learned in this classroom. Through this class, I’ve realized the power of being able to create an impactful game. It gives me the opportunity to alter the way people think. Designing a good game can not only bring joy but also drastic change. This class has also taught me so much more than just designing games. It’s taught me about visual design, packaging, being resourceful, being a good team player, and being a good listener.
I would like to thank Christina and Ben for creating such an awesome environment for us to learn in.
