I still remember the frustrations I felt when I was told by some guys that the games I love are not “real games”. I felt stupid at the time partly because I didn’t know how to argue back and also because deep down inside me, I did not consider myself a “gamer”. Now, with the knowledge I gained from this class, I know how to fight back against BS like that and use a feminist lens to examine why this situation happened in the first place. If I could go back in time, I would educate the guys about the different kinds of games and the different types of fun. I would also make them sit down and learn the history of how and why big game companies like Nintendo only target boys and later teenage guys as their customers.
I also want to say that I love all the sketchnotes assignments and I appreciate all the readings and videos. Out of all the materials, two of my favorites are Daniel Cook’s Game Design Patterns for Building Friendship and George Fan’s How I Got My Mom to Play Through Plants vs. Zombies. For Cook’s talk, I really admire how he analyzed the formation and levels of friendship and created a guide for design patterns to foster friendship. While I didn’t focus too much on friendship for P1 and P2, this is an area I would love to dive more into in the future. For Plants vs. Zombies, I absolutely love the idea that Fan made the game so easy to play with that his mom would fall in love with it. I honestly think this should be the goal of more games on the market, and game studios should open the “gate” to more people.
Another important thing I learned from this class is how to talk about games. Besides MDA and 8 types of fun, I enjoyed learning about loops and arcs and how they work with different kinds of narratives. My P2 teammates and I discussed a lot of these concepts during our early brainstorming sessions and they are very useful for our finalization of storyline and mechanics. Moreover, I learned to appreciate the importance of audio cues in games, which are something I never quite paid attention to before. I’m very interested in accessibility in gaming. I’m actually taking CS 377Q Design for Accessibility class this quarter and I learned a lot about multi-modality. I’d love to learn more about how to design games and/or controllers for blind and low vision people. In my P2 team, accessibility is also a big part and we created sound cues for all triggers 😀
One challenge I’m facing is that I tend to limit myself to certain types of games but to be a good game designer, I need to play all kinds of games. So moving forward, I want to push myself to play games I am less familiar with. I would also love to focus more on the mechanics instead of visuals (which I mainly focused on for P2) for my future game projects to try out different game design roles.
Overall, My confidence to play and design games grew tremendously during the class, and I picked up my passion for games. I constantly think about my childhood summer breaks when my cousin and I played all the two-player games we could find on an illegal mini-game website. It was pure fun! And so was this class!
