I came into this course in a strange spot with my gaming experience. I considered myself extremely experienced within certain pockets of gaming but quickly came to realize that there was a near-endless world of types of games that I had not even considered existed. The thing this course did the most for me was reveal these other games and give me a great excuse to play some week-to-week. Through just this playing, as well as the class learnings and discussions, I feel as though my previously deep, but narrow, gaming experience has been broadened immensely. It has left me with very shallow insight into many of these new games and genres that I want to continue to explore through the open and critical eye that this course has helped me begin to develop.
Second to opening my eyes to all the different types and kinds of games there are, this course developed my understanding of the development and analysis of many different types of games. Seeing games that I’d previously played thousands of hours of, but without much consideration to their design (mechanics, dynamics, aesthetics etc), through this new lens was extremely refreshing and made me fall back in love with some of these games that I used to play a lot but haven’t touched recently.
The design portions of this class, through sketchnotes but most notably in the projects, challenged me the most. However, I did feel some internal barriers start to break down over the quarter so Scope their work. Don’t take on too much responsibility if it will become an issue to complete I look forward to continuing with this momentum after the course.
If I were to take this course again I would hope to have begun it with an understanding for these game design aspects that I now have so I could get more out of developing these areas further through the course content, assignments, and projects. Thank you!
