Final Reflection — Unlocking New Possibilities with Games
I try to take a “creative” class every quarter because I find this very helpful for me to stay productive and feel happy. I had little experience in design, and I thought the best way to test whether I would enjoy it as a future career was to do projects myself. Though I hadn’t played many games as I grew up, I was very interested in this topic because I enjoyed observing the way people’s attention, interaction, and expectation changes during gameplay. Moreover, I believed in the value of serious games: while sitting in lectures or other conventional settings is proven to be not as efficient as we might expect, people would definitely be more engaged in games and thus learn knowledge, skills, and values from them. I’m so glad that I have taken CS 377G!
I loved the people in our class a lot. Unlike bigger CS lectures when people are generally more competitive than collaborative, our class has the magic of bringing people from different backgrounds and understanding of games together and letting us learn from each other. I’m usually not a big fan of group projects because people’s level of commitment often dies down when their quarters get busy, but I loved working in groups in our class. In my P1, a card game built to let people learn history, I was impressed by how my team members came up with a great card design and managed to make it even better by prototyping and playtesting. In my P3, our team had a hard time deciding on which system we wanted to present. Though we were all interested in “brain drain” and even made a lot of progress there, we decided to pivot to representing college life not only for international students but for everybody after we realized our initial plan might not be attractive to many players. It wasn’t an easy decision (and I still want to explore the possibility of discussing the topic of international students in U.S.) but it was very rewarding to listen to people’s different opinions. Brainstorming with people who not only play games but play them critically made me realize lots of opportunities and challenges in a plan that I’d otherwise never notice.
Moreover, I enjoyed our class activities, no matter it’s critical gameplay or game design theories. After taking ME 101 and a few d.school pop-out classes, I was disappointed to realize that I only improve my understanding of design from working on my project (then making mistakes, and then learning from feedback) and actually learn very few new things in class. I knew it’s hard to give people comments on their ideas without hurting their self-esteem and creativity, so I was ready to, as I did in previous classes, do basically nothing in the classroom and do a lot of hard work on my own. Luckily, I found our class very different. The readings were immediately relevant to projects we work on at the time (though sometimes I only realize it a few days/weeks later). Scratch notes, mind maps, and reflections were effective ways to make me spend some time thinking about what I just read. Beyond that, I got a lot of useful tips in class. When we were all stuck on developing a good story for the interactive fiction, the story wave graph and creative writing process saved me from coming up with a boring plot and encouraged me to start writing no matter how bad it might be in the beginning. I think what made our classes so helpful is its flexibility. On the one hand, it does the job of an introductory game development theory class; on the other hand, it is a workshop in which everyone learn from coming up with new ideas quickly and creating many versions of a game to test out the different possible outcomes.
To me, working on the projects has been very challenging and exciting. The two-week sprint is probably too little time for people to organize enough playtesting and make something beautiful and that is carefully thought through. Sometimes, especially during P2, I felt very stressed out when I realized I couldn’t finish it on time. I was glad that people could joke about the stress we all felt and support each other (and of course, I was grateful that we had another week to work on it), but I do think it would be helpful to clarify our leaning goal in each of the project so that we can decide to prioritize certain tasks over others (should we focus on designing something artsy? should we make something that’ll have the greatest potential in the market? or should we build something with fancy mechanisms?). I’m glad that we have a final project in which we can polish our previous work and make something that looks more concrete and complete — and the showcase was a highlight because we learn from each other’s’ presentation!
It’s just so amazing to be able to build something fun that doesn’t necessarily require a fancy platform or a super strong technical background — I can build a storytelling card game for a friend’s birthday party, or come up with new rules for existing games when my little cousin gets bored. I came into this class not sure what I should do, but after taking it, I’m 99% going to choose HCI and 100% going to explore the game industry.
