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The Mechanics of Magic

The Mechanics of Magic

Game Design Writings by Students at Stanford taking 247G and 377G

  • Library
    • CS247G Community Game Design Resources
    • Game Design Resources
    • Graphic Design for Game Designers
    • Graphic Design Resources
    • Chapter 11 from Game Balance
  • Read Write Play
    • Hollow Knight: RWP 4 2023
    • Mystic Messenger: RWP 6 2023
    • Undertale: RWP 3 2023
    • What Remains of Edith Finch: RWP 5 2023
    • Catan: RWP1 2023
    • 80 Days: RWP 2 2023
  • 247G Syllabus
    • The Formal Elements of Game Design
    • Design for Play | Week One | Lecture A
    • Design for Play | Week One | Lecture B
    • Design for Play | Week Two | Lecture A
    • Design for Play | Week Two | Lecture B
    • Design for Play | Week Three | Lecture A
    • Design for Play | Week Three | Lecture B
    • Design For Play | Week Four | Section A
    • Design For Play | Week Four | Section B
    • Design for Play | Week Five | Class A
    • Design for Play | Week 5 | Class B
    • Design for Play | Week 6 | Class A (no class)
    • Design for Play | Week 6 | Class B
    • Design for Play | Week 7 | Class A
    • Design for Play | Week 7 | Class B
    • Design for Play | Week 8 | Class A
    • Design for Play | Week 8 | Lecture B
  • Serious Play Study Group Overview
    • Study Group Week by Week Breakdown
      • Formal Elements of Games
      • Final Reflection Essay
    • [Optional Material] What is fun?
    • Project 1: Those Who Play, Teach
      • READING Visual Design of Board Games
      • Pitch Your Teaching Game
      • Sketchnote: Playtesting Boardgames
      • Sketchnote: Erin Hoffman // Wind, Not Sand: Mapping Dynamic Emotion Across a Product Landscape
      • SketchNote: MDAO
      • Critical Play: Write up your game of FLUXX
      • [Optional Material] Playtesting
      • OPTIONAL Board Game Usability
    • P2: The Future We Deserve
      • Critical Play: A Mechanic and a Story to Tell
      • Interactive Fiction: Tiny Playable Prototype
      • Introducing Interactive Fiction
      • Map and Premise
      • Critical Play: Story AND Storytelling games
      • Essay or Sketchnote: Rise of the Video Game Zinesters
      • Sketchnote: Art of game design- Story
      • [Optional Material] Emergence and Progression
      • Essay or Sketchnote: Rise of the Video Game Zinesters
      • Project 2 Reflection Essay
      • Share what you Learned: Writing Excuses Podcast
      • Values at Play & P2 Peer Grading
    • P3: The Game of Unexpected Consequences
      • P3 Concept Doc
      • Playable prototype
      • Working With System Dynamics (mindmap the reading, apply it to your game)
      • Mapping Systems
      • Sketchnote/Response for Rules & Tutorials
      • Project 3 Check-in
      • Project 3 Reflection Essay
    • P4: Refine a game
      • Sketchnote/Response for Playtesting with Strangers
      • Read: Mechanic is the Magic
  • On Sketchnotes
  • Printing at Stanford

Brooke Ballhaus Critical Play: Play Like a Feminist

May 29, 2026

Florence is a singleplayer point-and-click game developed by Mountains and published by Annapurna Interactive, available on Steam. It is a game designed to be…

Week 9: Journey, Googling Strangers, and Wanderer above the Sea of Fog

May 29, 2026

Near the end of Journey, the two travellers are moving through the snowy mountains, slowly losing strength as the mountain comes closer. The landscape…

When the Nameless Answer

May 29, 2026

When I first started playing “Journey”, I felt completely alone. I was in the desert with no signs of life, looking out at the…

Critical Play: Play Like a Feminist—Mouthwashing—Akary Buenrostro

May 29, 2026

“I hope this hurts.” Those are the first words of Mouthwashing, a 2024 psychological horror game developed by Swedish studio Wrong Organ and published…

Critical Play: Play Like a Feminist

May 29, 2026

For my Critical Play, I played Doki Doki Literature Club by Dan Salvato. The target audience is adults (18+) who enjoy psychological horror and/or…

Critical Play: One Night, Hot Springs

May 29, 2026

one night, hot springs (ONHS) is a digital visual novel game (available on Steam, Google Play, etc.); it was released in 2018, and designed/developed/published…

Journey: We Are Never Really Alone

May 29, 2026

My first fleeting thoughts while playing the opening sections of Journey were just how small I felt. The game initially provides almost no context…

Critical Play: Like a Feminist

May 29, 2026

For players interested in puzzle games, artful visuals, and feminist approaches to digital media, Monument Valley 2 offers a compelling example of Shira Chess’s…

Journey and Its Land of Stories

May 29, 2026

Past the age of sixteen, it’s pretty common knowledge that movies are a terrible first date activity. Even so, I can’t really say sit-down…

In Journey, Connection Transcends Identity

May 29, 2026

Imagine you’re wandering a foggy mountaintop and come across a stranger in a three-piece suit, looking out over the valley below. This is the…

Critical Play: Playing Like a Feminist in Gorogoa

May 29, 2026

This week I played Gorogoa, a narrative puzzle game created by independent developer and artist Jason Roberts via Buried Signal studio. The game was…

Facing the Fog (RWP)

May 29, 2026

In Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, a man stands alone on a rocky precipice, back turned, gazing into a white…

Not While You Were On It

May 29, 2026

Finally, they were all free — the scarf creatures you’d spent the last ruin releasing from their columns and cages. Just before you continue…

Critical Play: Play Like a Feminist – Tray

May 29, 2026

This week, I played 2 games that were similar in format but left vastly different marks on me. The first game I played was…

Critical Play: Depression Quest

May 29, 2026

Depression Quest is created by Zoë Quinn with writing by Quinn and Patrick Lindsey and music by Isaac Schankler, is a browser-based Twine interactive…

Final Class Reflection – Luca

May 29, 2026

Games have always been around for me. They’re the shared activity that gets my family in one room, and they’re the ongoing reason I…

Critical Play: Play Like a Feminist – Jinpu

May 29, 2026

I had played a game in the Monument Valley series before and even wrote a Critical Play about it, but my earlier focus was mainly on…

Critical Play: Play Like a Feminist – Hunaida Elhassan

May 29, 2026

Consumption Dressed Up as Commentary: DDLC & the Limits of Feminist Deconstruction Doki Doki Literature Club (DDLC), by Team Salvato, is a free-to-play psychological…

Critical Play: Feminism

May 29, 2026

I played “with those we love alive,” a haunting and mystical game that explores themes of death, growing up, and violence through text-based scenes….

Critical Play: Play Like a Feminist

May 28, 2026

Most otome games have a dirty secret. The protagonist exists mostly as a vehicle. She has just enough personality to be likable, but not…

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Welcome to the Stanford HCI Game Design Blog.

Currently this blog holds two formal classes being taught by Christina Wodtke as well as Independent Study Work. In winter of 2022, cs377g was cancelled because of covid-19 uncertainty, and became a study group. You can follow along by looking at the SGSG syllabus and weekly break down.

CS 247G: Design for Play(SYMSYS 195G)

A project-based course that builds on the introduction to design in CS147 by focusing on advanced methods and tools for research, prototyping, and user interface design. Studio based format with intensive coaching and iteration to prepare students for tackling real world design problems. This course takes place entirely in studios; please plan on attending every studio to take this class. The focus of CS247g is an introduction to theory and practice of the design of games. We will make digital and paper games, do rapid iteration and run user research studies appropriate to game design. This class has multiple short projects, allowing us to cover a variety of genres, from narrative to pure strategy. Prerequisites: 147 or equivalent background.

CS 377G: Designing Serious Games

Over the last few years we have seen the rise of "serious games" to promote understanding of complex social and ecological challenges, and to create passion for solving them. This project-based course provides an introduction to game design principals while applying them to games that teach. Run as a hands-on studio class, students will design and prototype games for social change and civic engagement. We will learn the fundamentals of games design via lecture and extensive reading in order to make effective games to explore issues facing society today. The course culminates in an end-of- quarter open house to showcase our games. Prerequisite: CS147 or equivalent. 247G recommended, but not required.

SGSG: Serious Games Study Group

  • Library
    • CS247G Community Game Design Resources
    • Game Design Resources
    • Graphic Design for Game Designers
    • Graphic Design Resources
    • Chapter 11 from Game Balance
  • Read Write Play
    • Hollow Knight: RWP 4 2023
    • Mystic Messenger: RWP 6 2023
    • Undertale: RWP 3 2023
    • What Remains of Edith Finch: RWP 5 2023
    • Catan: RWP1 2023
    • 80 Days: RWP 2 2023
  • 247G Syllabus
    • The Formal Elements of Game Design
    • Design for Play | Week One | Lecture A
    • Design for Play | Week One | Lecture B
    • Design for Play | Week Two | Lecture A
    • Design for Play | Week Two | Lecture B
    • Design for Play | Week Three | Lecture A
    • Design for Play | Week Three | Lecture B
    • Design For Play | Week Four | Section A
    • Design For Play | Week Four | Section B
    • Design for Play | Week Five | Class A
    • Design for Play | Week 5 | Class B
    • Design for Play | Week 6 | Class A (no class)
    • Design for Play | Week 6 | Class B
    • Design for Play | Week 7 | Class A
    • Design for Play | Week 7 | Class B
    • Design for Play | Week 8 | Class A
    • Design for Play | Week 8 | Lecture B
  • Serious Play Study Group Overview
    • Study Group Week by Week Breakdown
      • Formal Elements of Games
      • Final Reflection Essay
    • [Optional Material] What is fun?
    • Project 1: Those Who Play, Teach
      • READING Visual Design of Board Games
      • Pitch Your Teaching Game
      • Sketchnote: Playtesting Boardgames
      • Sketchnote: Erin Hoffman // Wind, Not Sand: Mapping Dynamic Emotion Across a Product Landscape
      • SketchNote: MDAO
      • Critical Play: Write up your game of FLUXX
      • [Optional Material] Playtesting
      • OPTIONAL Board Game Usability
    • P2: The Future We Deserve
      • Critical Play: A Mechanic and a Story to Tell
      • Interactive Fiction: Tiny Playable Prototype
      • Introducing Interactive Fiction
      • Map and Premise
      • Critical Play: Story AND Storytelling games
      • Essay or Sketchnote: Rise of the Video Game Zinesters
      • Sketchnote: Art of game design- Story
      • [Optional Material] Emergence and Progression
      • Essay or Sketchnote: Rise of the Video Game Zinesters
      • Project 2 Reflection Essay
      • Share what you Learned: Writing Excuses Podcast
      • Values at Play & P2 Peer Grading
    • P3: The Game of Unexpected Consequences
      • P3 Concept Doc
      • Playable prototype
      • Working With System Dynamics (mindmap the reading, apply it to your game)
      • Mapping Systems
      • Sketchnote/Response for Rules & Tutorials
      • Project 3 Check-in
      • Project 3 Reflection Essay
    • P4: Refine a game
      • Sketchnote/Response for Playtesting with Strangers
      • Read: Mechanic is the Magic
  • On Sketchnotes
  • Printing at Stanford

Archives

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Recent Posts

  • Brooke Ballhaus Critical Play: Play Like a Feminist
  • Week 9: Journey, Googling Strangers, and Wanderer above the Sea of Fog
  • When the Nameless Answer
  • Critical Play: Play Like a Feminist—Mouthwashing—Akary Buenrostro
  • Critical Play: Play Like a Feminist

Recent Comments

  • anavib on RWP Week 7: Papers, Please, Procedural Rhetoric, and Ruthlessness in Public Life
  • Jeffery Cai on Sketchnote – Addiction
  • Ananya Navale on Critical Play: Cartographers
  • Christina Wodtke on Critical Play: Cartographers
  • Aanika Atluri on RWP Week 5: A Short Hike and Wandering Games

Categories

  • P2: The Empathy Machine
  • Featured
  • Project One
  • milestone
  • P2: The Future We Deserve
  • mindmap
  • P1: Social Games
  • CS247G
  • Assignments
  • P1: those who play, teach
  • Lectures
  • P2: Games In Space
  • Critical Play
  • P3: The Game of Unexpected Consequences
  • Project Two
  • Project Four REFINE
  • P4: Refine a Game
  • Sketchnotes
  • Project Two: The Future We Deserve
  • From the Instructor
  • Project Three: The Game of Unexpected Consequences
  • ReadWritePlay
  • 377G: Serious Games
  • SGSG

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