247G Final Reflection
247G was a super fun time! I think I grew a lot as a critical thinker, a game designer, and a teammate. Before the class started, I had done a little bit of game programming, and game “design,” but nowhere near the scope of what we did in this class. I thought that game design simply consisted of researching the competitive space, planning the baseline premise of the game and the mechanics, and the implementation. However, it was really interesting to learn all about the concept of interaction loops and how to onboard users, especially in the context of well-known games such as Super Mario Bros and Plants vs Zombies. I also loved learning about MDAs and the 8 kinds of fun, because I thought it was interesting to critically break down some of my favorite games into their mechanics and analyze what aesthetics came out of them. I think it would have been interesting to watch the onboarding video before handing in P1, because I think my group struggled a little bit with the difficulty level of our game (Order of the Toads) and our instruction booklet was filled to the brim with lots of information, and I wonder if we could have improved the onboarding experience if we had watched the video back then. Other than that, my P2 team worked hard to seamlessly integrate feedback loops and give relevant information and narrative into our game, and based on the feedback we received, we were fairly successful!
Something else that I really enjoyed were the lectures on feminism in video games. For a while, I was seriously considering a career in the gaming industry, but was very nervous about entering a field so dominated by men based on what I had heard. It was both empowering and saddening to learn about the history of women as developers and players in the video game industry, and really prompted me to think critically about the kinds of games that typically shape a young girl’s childhood gaming experience, such as girlsgogames.com. I wrote my critical play on a game from that website I remembered playing when I was younger, and was completely shocked as to the harmful stereotypes that the game perpetuates. I loved writing this critical play, and if I had the chance, would write so much more and think about the serious impact that games like this or even the Kim K game have on young girls.
In that line of thought, in the future, I would love to design games with a strong focus on feminism, and use game design to expose and destroy these harmful stereotypes in a nuanced way, since I think that gaming can and should be a medium that is accessible to everyone and has the potential to spread very powerful messages.
