Reflecting on a quarter of designing serious games
Coming from a primarily digital design background, I wasn’t sure what to expect when it came to designing games. I was scared that balancing player dynamics & game mechanics would be too large of a task, and that it would be hard to predict what would happen in playtests. And as someone who has always leaned towards the visual side, I was worried that there would come a point where the main issues wouldn’t come from something I could see, but rather the invisible rules of the game, and I would be stuck on what to do.
But, there was actually a lot more in common than I originally thought.
Before class…
Coming into P1, I thought it would be a big challenge to incorporate learning, especially since I only really associated games with one goal — fun.
But after a few weeks in the class, I realized all games involve some sort of learning. Whether it’s learning the rules, the set up, or the winning strategies, all players have to encounter new information when playing a game for the first time. In fact, this stage of users familiarizing themselves with the goals, rules, and terminology of the game is just like onboarding in a digital app.
However while digital onboarding usually involves some sort of flow that a new user has to follow, the onboarding process for a tabletop board game can sometimes involve lots of confusion & reading a thick rules booklet. When we test out playing different games in class, it was interesting to see the various approaches games took to design the onboarding process, whether it meant showing sample scenarios or just dunking the players head first in jargon.
It felt like a lot of times during playtesting, there was the attitude of “let’s just try playing a round and see what happens.” That definitely worked, but wasn’t necessarily the most efficient or pleasant. Coming out of this class, it might be interesting to explore how to apply a digital onboarding approach to learning the rules of a board game.
In class…
Once we got to the main ideation portion of our projects, the process felt pretty familiar, except for the fact that I was working with an unknown factor — fun. We were somehow meant to maximize this element, but I had no idea where to even start. But soon, I found that the best way was to find something that was already fun and build off of it.
The easiest way to get started is to mod an existing game.
After all, when I first started design, all I basically did was wow over the gradients and rounded corners I saw on Dribble and try to recreate them. After a while, I was able to develop my own style & sense of design.
Once I figured that out, it was a lot easier to learn through trial & error what tweaks could be made to generate more fun. One modification that was often made was adding more inter-player interaction that kept all players engaged but also switched up the game so that people couldn’t mentally check out or sit on a winning strategy for long. More inter-player interaction also meant more chances for fun noises as other players reacted in response to clever, surprising, or sabotaging plays.
In addition, the concept of defining the user is emphasized a lot in digital design, but the importance of that in game design wasn’t very clear to me until P2. In particular, I realized that the target audience of my IF would determine most of the themes & lessons I wanted the audience to experience throughout my story. I made the mistake of diving head first into creating the story I wanted to tell without considering too much about how that story would be perceived by my audience. Of course, this meant that writing the conclusion was particularly difficult, as I wasn’t even sure what kind of greater meaning I wanted to portray. If I had instead started with my audience as my foundation, it would’ve been a lot easier to write a story that accomplished all the goals I had for my P2..
In the future…
With everything I’ve learned so far about what works & what doesn’t, I think I’ll feel a lot less intimidated by this new medium. I now have a fully stocked toolbox that’ll make me feel prepared & confident the next time I try my hand at game design. In addition, with all the new patterns & modes of play that I’ve been exposed to, I’m excited to see how I can mix & match various elements to create new experiences.
Modding existing games was the tip of the iceberg, and now I’m excited to see how I can switch up or blend mechanics. And the next time I crack open a board game with friends, I think I’ll feel more empowered to mod the game as I’m playing it, to make even more fun.
