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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

Month: May 2023

Critical Play: Play Like a Feminist

May 30, 2023

I played a game called “With Those We Love Alive,” on the recommendation of one of my project 2 teammates. It was developed by…

Critical Play: Play Like a Feminist – Jonathan Affeld

May 30, 2023

I played Doki Doki Literature Club on Steam in this week’s critical play. Doki Doki Literature Club is a visual novel developed by Team…

Critical Play: Super Smash Bros

May 30, 2023

Playing Super Smash Bros, particularly with a feminine character like Princess Peach, provides an intriguing opportunity to explore the intersection of gaming and feminism….

RWP: What Remains of Edith Finch

May 30, 2023

What Remains of Edith Finch, a first-person exploration game developed by Giant Sparrow and published by Annapurna Interactive, was an incredibly immersive, and as…

Critical Play: Play Like a Feminist

May 30, 2023

As a long-time player of Super Smash Bros (SMB), SMB has left an indelible mark on my early childhood days. As the only girl…

Critical Play: Play Like a Feminist

May 30, 2023

The game I played was Doki Doki Literature Club by Team Salvato for PC and later console. It is a visual novel/dating sim for…

Critical Play: Play Like a Feminist

May 30, 2023

“Play Like a Feminist” by Shira Chess offers us fresh eyes to critically analyze “Florence,” an iOS and Android game, developed by the Australian…

Florence critical play

May 30, 2023

Playing a feminist game like Florence holds a significant meaning for me as a feminist gamer. It signifies a shift in the gaming landscape…

Critical Play: Play Like a Feminist

May 30, 2023

Game, Creator, Platform, Target Audience This week, I played one night, hot springs on Steam, developed and published by npckc. Its intended audience is…

Sketchnote: The Role of Architecture in Video Games

May 30, 2023

Critical Play: Mysteries

May 29, 2023

For this critical play, I decided to play “Her Story” on iOS. This interactive narrative game invites players to unravel the mystery of a…

Critical Play: Play Like a Feminist

May 29, 2023

For this week’s critical play, I played Super Smash Bros with the character Isabelle. Super Smash Bros, from the name, is not a game…

Read Write Play: Stardew Valley

May 29, 2023

After playing Stardew Valley and reading “Playing in the global ‘village’: a comparative analysis of capitalist ideologies in Stardew Valley and Story of Seasons”…

Critical Play: Play Like a Feminist

May 29, 2023

Super Smash Bros., created by Masahiro Sakurai and published by Nintendo, is a popular fighting game series played on various Nintendo platforms. The game…

Critical Play: Play like a feminist – One Night Hot Springs

May 29, 2023

Embarking on the narrative journey of “One Night Hot Springs,” a visual novel developed by npckc and available on Steam, the player is taken…

Critical Play – Stardew Valley

May 29, 2023

Introduction to Stardew Valley For this week’s Critical Play, I played Stardew Valley on my iPhone, a role-playing game created by Eric Barone. Despite…

Critical Play: Games of Chance

May 29, 2023

In this critical play, I played a mobile version of digital poker called World Series of Poker on iOS. The game allowed me to…

Read Write Play: Undertale

May 29, 2023

After reading “The Rhetoric of Video Games” by Ian Bogost, I began to think about the rhetoric of Undertale. One key theme that is…

Critical Play: Play like a Feminist

May 29, 2023

I decided to play Super Smash Bros by Nintendo. I played a typical brawl as the character Princess Peach. Super Smash Bros is a…

Critical Play: With Those We Love Alive

May 29, 2023

        The game “With Those We Love Alive” is an interactive fiction game centered around observing and existing within a fantastical…

Posts pagination

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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

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Categories

  • P2: The Empathy Machine
  • Featured
  • Project One
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  • mindmap
  • P1: Social Games
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