I really enjoyed this class. It was one of my favorites I’ve taken as an HCI major; the best way to end my Stanford career! I loved how immersive it was, and how we got to do a mix of learning about existing games, and creating our own games.
Before this class, I didn’t realize there were so many design elements that went into designing a game. I honestly thought that game designers for analog games just came up with a theme, and then took inspiration from other games to create a series of rules and challenges. I am not a huge gamer, but I feel like a lot of the analog games I grew up playing were quite similar. Looking back, I think this is just because I gravitated towards certain types of games. For instance, I love games that promise challenge, but games in the discovery, fantasy, or submission categories are ones I tend to shy away from.
Alongside this discovery, types of fun was the main class concept that really stuck with me. I never thought about there being different types of fun for games. I thought that a game could just be fun or not fun. I implemented this concept into basically all of my work I did in this class (critical plays, and both projects). When critiquing games and developing my own, I thought extensively about the types of fun evoked.
I grew in my ability to develop games. My team created an MVP for P2, and we really poured our all into the project. There were so many things we were thinking about as we were developing our game: adhering to the types of fun that we set out to achieve, furthering the narrative at every step of the escape room, creating a set of puzzles that was diverse in difficulty and type, and achieving cohesion across elements.
I also feel like my graphic design skills improved in this class, particularly through working on the box for P1.
Project 1: Final box and cards
P2 was my favorite part of the class. I had such an amazing time working on my P2 team, and feel like I learned a lot about working on successful teams in this project. We worked extremely effectively — dividing up work when possible, and bouncing off other’s ideas to push our creativity. There were even moments of discovery as we were working. One of our teammates discovered a moving whiteboard in one of the rooms we were using, which ended up being one of our coolest puzzles:
Project 2: Whiteboard puzzle
Overall, I had an amazing time in 247G and really learned a lot. Thank you to everyone on the teaching team for making it such an incredible experience!
