Before taking CS247G, I truly didn’t think about games very often. I always thought of myself as someone who enjoyed board games, but I didn’t think about them very deeply or critically. This class has ruined me, however, and now when I play board games I find myself making mental critiques of the game design or considering which sources of fun it’s aiming to tap into. As a woman, I also always felt a bit intimidated by video games and a bit unwelcome by those who play them. Since taking this class, I’ve thought more and more about the idea of feminist games and the idea of women playing video games as an act of feminism — I believe this has influenced me to want to play more games, even ones that are traditionally seen as more masculine ones.
Genuinely, I feel that a lot of the class concepts stuck with me. In particular, I really liked learning about how to make games accessible, the significance of gender in games, world-building, and game design patterns for building friendships. I also really feel like the MDA 8 types of fun has been drilled into my brain and aren’t something that I’ll soon forget. Most notably, however, I feel like the concepts surrounding narrative architecture are something that really impacted the way that I think about games. I always viewed the story element of an analog game as superficial/unnecessary, but this class really convinced me of the importance of creating a solid and convincing narrative. My team made sure to implement this into our game by creating expositional materials, connecting every puzzle in our game to space or rockets, and working hard on the aesthetics to make sure there was cohesive branding all throughout.
Because I have no background in game design, I definitely felt overwhelmed when starting both P1 and P2, simply because the idea of coming up with a novel game idea seemed really difficult. I liked though for P2 that the teaching team had us come up with mood boards, playlists, and concept docs before actually starting any part of the game because it forced me to come up with a clear vision of how I wanted the final product to turn out.
I think that my P2 team taught me a lot about what good teamwork looks like, and how to take a large project and tackle it collaboratively, step-by-step. I really liked how we all made an effort to communicate with each other about what we had going on during the upcoming week in our personal lives so we knew what we could expect of each other. We also rotated which member would be the project manager for the week, and that person was in charge of making sure whatever we needed to get done was going to get done. I believe when working on a team in the future, I’ll think back on this team as a model of what type of dynamic/environment I’d like to cultivate.
If I had more time to spend on P2, I would have liked to put more thought into the accessibility aspect of things. As a software developer, I feel really passionate about accessible web design, and so this is definitely something I wish I could have put more effort into with our analog game. I don’t necessarily think that anything about it is particularly inaccessible, but it wasn’t something that we had top of mind while we were making it.
