Reflection: CS377G, Designing (Serious) Games
After taking game programming classes, including cs146, I felt comfortable with the technical idea of making video games. However, I never realized (until this class) that I had neither the vocabulary nor basic understanding of what make or break a game; in short, I was not a game designer, but just a gamer who wanted to make games.
Being a Computer Science student on the Systems track, I had little incentive to take this class. Will this help me graduate? Will I learn anything new? Will there be a lot of work? Turns out: yes, yes, and yes.
Helping Me Graduate
After petitioning this class as a CS general elective, I was glad to use it to replace cs221, an AI class in my graduation plan. Indirectly, the part of the course about game systems (P3) helped me gain new insights about systems as a general concept. Both causal and stock & flow models of economies expanded my perception. Before, I have only thought of systems as loops, if/else statements, and code. Sitting down and learning about this high-level, birds-eye view of the topic showed me there’s just so much more. Hopefully, I will be able use these new ways of thinking about systems to bring it to other classes.
Learning New Things
I think the most important takeaway for me in this class is that I should always play critically: why am I having fun? What makes a game interesting? More specifically, the readings were helpful in providing vocabularies for me to think about these questions. Bartle’s taxonomy explained my addiction to Overwatch as well as how Overwatch only caters to certain types of players. The types of fun that we went over earlier on in class allowed me to categorize impactful games such as Inside and Papers, please as not the exception, but rather the model, of what games can/should be.
Despite knowing that I enjoyed making video games for both fun and for art, I never considered making them as a career, as I didn’t find passion in just making something so people can waste time. I went on a Zynga visit with cs146 (the other game design class) and I knew by the end that was exactly what I didn’t want to do. However, this class showed me that there are careers dedicated to making serious games. This class made me realize that I have a passion for making artful, serious (probably educational) games, and I currently would like to pursue this as a career.
The Things I Worked On
This class’s bare minimum is probably around 3 units. However, because the class’ projects and materials are so interesting, I (and everyone else in the class) puts in an additional 2–4 units’ worth of work. The class creates a unique space for me: I’ve always wanted to make interesting games, but that was never high on the priority list (and it just never gets done.) However, when I can have an excuse (“it’s for a class”) to spend an unreasonable amount of time, I do spend it. I spend it not only thinking about my own games (“How do I show the player this? How do I want the player to feel?”) but also my classmates’ (How will Alex’s game address the impostor syndrome? Will she make it into a 1-play kind of game? Will she compromise the message to make it more fun? Or is there a best of both worlds??) Early play-testing of other projects made it feel like I was a part of the final design and created a sense of community. It doesn’t feel like the class is the interaction between student and professor, but rather the interaction between students (with the professor making sure we don’t stray from our learning objectives.) The “co-op game” experience of this class is something I appreciate as it is a nice change of pace from the normal PSET classes for my major.
Overall
That’s why this class is unique, I think. Most (if not all) of us are here to learn because we’re passionate about the topic we’re pursuing; we’re not min-maxing to get the best grade, we’re not climbing over each other to turn in a better project (which can’t be said about many other CS classes.) We, as a class, are committed to serious games and want to optimize the space that the class provides to do what we’re passionate about. And I think that’s what I want to continue doing: finding spaces to put aside other priorities, use what I’ve learned in this class about prototyping with objectives, and just make games. I’m glad that I took this class, and I’m confident that I am a much better game designer than I was before.
