Reflecting on 377G
Before the class, I thought I might enjoy making games. Playing games was a big part of my life growing up. However, I had limited experience actually creating games. I had the fortune to have designed some mini-games for a learning platform at an ed-tech startup. (Although, in hindsight, this was mainly gamification and not game design as I would define it today.) While I was working at this startup, I read Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal and became wholly interested in the idea of serious games for social impact.
I was also coming into the class after a period in my life where I chose to move away from my creative side. To date, I’ve spent most of my professional life as a designer, and, a little over a year ago, I transitioned into product management. During this transition, I worked very hard to change people’s perception of me as a designer into taking me seriously as a product manager. Naturally, this meant spending less and less time doing creative things myself. I assumed at that point that I would move forward without really exercising my creativity.
In this class, I found myself reconnecting back with my creative side. When Christina first mentioned sketchnotes, I was very dubious on how helpful it would be. I figured it would just be doodling. However, she mentioned it helps people retain knowledge better, so I thought it was worth a shot (I’m generally not a great note-taker because my handwriting is illegible). As we continued sketchnoting, I grew to like them. Through sketchnotes, I was able to practice processing visually. And as the quarter continued, I found myself doodling and whiteboarding with groups in other classes to articulate my thinking.
Obviously, the game sprints really pushed me as well. I had the opportunity to work with some amazing teammates (shout-out to my OG team Abdallah, Gen and team streeetch Francesca, Yanyan, and Jia). Through these sprints, I learned how formative creative collaboration is for games. While it’s definitely hard to reconcile individual artistic visions, each of the games greatly benefited from the different viewpoints we had. When we did the IF project, aside from my debacle with inform7, I think I had a harder time because I didn’t have a group to bounce off ideas with. While I think where I ended up with the IF project was reasonable given the timeframe, I personally felt that the process and the end game was lacking in comparison to the other projects.
Through the game sprints and in-class modding exercises, I learned to be comfortable with pushing out some (in my opinion) low-quality things. I think many, if not all, of us hold a high bar for our work, and showing my work to others when I didn’t feel ready really challenged me. This began to change when Matt came to our class to chat about his journey as a game designer. I am a huge fan of Pandemic and hearing its game designer say that he went through years of making terrible games made me realize that I have a long journey ahead of myself. In any creative work, there’s often a gap between what you want to be creating versus what you are actually creating. I realized that bridging this gap would require many, many bad games and I began to look forward to pushing these out.
In this class, I learned that I do love making games! And, my love for serious games has grown. Building games is hard, complex, a roller coaster ride, but ultimately fulfilling. Seeing people play and thoughtfully discuss the games I helped create brought a deep sense of satisfaction. I also really enjoy sharing messages through the format of a game. While it can sometimes be frustrating to not know exactly how the player(s) will interact with the game, it’s also kind of marvelous to see the unexpected ways a game can come alive.
Additionally, reading Rise of the Zinesters stoked my desire to increase representation in games. The class made me firmly believe that everyone, gamer or not, can bring a unique perspective to building games. Watching classmates love for games grow over the quarter was wonderful.
A couple years ago, I watched Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s A Danger of a Single Story Ted talk. I was recently reminded of this talk when I went to a NYT panel with Roxane Gay who happened to quote Chimamanda’s talk. In her talk, Chimamanda shares about how as a young girl she struggled to find books with girl protagonists who looked like her and how this affected her identity. She stated,
“Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.”
When I go to make games in the future, I will seek to make space for representing underrepresented stories. I will make it a point to collaborate with those who have stories to tell, including designers, storytellers, and sound artists. I will also think carefully about how the mechanics of the game tie to the message that is being shared. Lastly, I will definitely go through a ton of terrible games before I get to the good ones, but I’ll keep in mind to keep at it.
