CS377G is not only the first game design class I have ever taken but also my first HCI class at Stanford. My previous experience lies in the domain of storytelling and art. Specifically, I have been focusing on crafting immersive experiences through theater, 360-filmmaking, and VR/AR. Throughout my artistic journey, I have come to realize that people are always more motivated to play games than to engage with “art.” Thus, incorporating processes of “gamification” and “play” became a significant artistic concern of mine, motivating me to take this class despite my lack of prior experience.
This class has turned out to be an incredibly rewarding experience. I must admit: this class is a lot of work! Navigating the individual assignments and group projects, especially while juggling some health issues, has been challenging at points. However, looking back, I appreciate how thoughtful the class is designed and the vast amount of knowledge it has presented me.
As a student of literature and art, the concept of worldbuilding has been fascinating to me. Naturally, I loved the readings on game narrative and rhetoric. The ideas of crafting “spatial stories” and making creative arguments (such as a political message or an educational aim) through “procedural rhetorics” are particularly relevant to my artistic endeavor of creating immersive experiences. While I previously concerned myself with storytelling alone, this class has forced me to learn to incorporate game narratives into game mechanics and dynamics, opening up a completely new world for me. Previously viewing myself as the “artistic educator” and my audience as a “passive receiver,” I now have to focus on designing an interplay of mechanics, dynamics, and narratives that transform the players themselves into active agents in the experience.
Moreover, dissecting the concept of a “serious game” has allowed me to contemplate the idea of educating through art/games in a new light. While before I might have created projects with a general concept in mind, the expected goal of my art projects often revolved around “vibes” rather than concrete outcomes. Learning about the different types of fun and the “precision of emotion” has forced me to sit down and think about the exact things I hope to achieve through my game, whether it is to teach something or mirror a system, and carefully evaluate how my game could achieve those goals. The need to distill my educational goal through game design has pushed me out of my comforting bubble of “conveying a vibe” to instead focus on careful evaluation and assessments.
Throughout the quarter, I designed two games: Bugs and Drugs and Truth or Troll (unfortunately, P2 is still under development). The two games are very different: Bugs and Drugs has rather complicated game mechanics while Truth or Troll is straightforward and simple to play. While Bugs and Drugs focuses on teaching concrete knowledge (what antibiotics can best treat what common disease), Truth or Troll focuses on mirroring the process of news generation by giving players full agency in creating their own headlines, something that is much less predictable.
In creating Bugs and Drugs, the most important thing I have learned is how to convey rules and game strategies to players when game mechanics are complicated. Even though our game mechanics were solid, we went through a few playtests where players had a hard time understanding what they needed to do and required the moderator to help them play a demonstrator round. We went through a lot of thinking on how to make our rules understandable, from creating diagrams to eventually making a demo video. This experience has taught me not to take everything for granted. Game designers are not as protected as artists, who can easily attribute any confusion to “artistic choices.” For board games, if players cannot understand your rules, they will soon lose interest, no matter how great your game is! This is such an important lesson, and I am very grateful for encountering such a problem in the first board game that I designed.
For Truth or Troll, the challenge lies in finding the right scale of the system to moderate. Our team literally created three individual games to find the one that worked. This again shows how important playtesting is! Had we decided not to playtest preemptively, we could be spending hours making a game that just fundamentally does not work. Because our game is so unpredictable (players write headlines and judge the headlines themselves), it is very difficult for us to model how the game could go and create mechanics to respond to different potential situations. We went through a lot of high-level abstractions (such as distilling a universal set of punishment systems for writing “bad news”) in our P4, which turned out to be successful! We also incorporated more rules to regulate how each player should write their headlines (by introducing roles and secret missions). This experience has taught me a lot about finding the right balance between giving players agency and freedom and creating mechanics that discreetly guide players’ actions to best model our system for educational purposes.
Of course, there are all the other important soft skills that I learned through the class, such as leaning into the process of playtesting, not being afraid of rapid prototyping and iterating, learning how to communicate with others, and managing expectations and reality. At times, it could feel quite embarrassing to present to others our half-finished game made on scrap papers. Even though we have all learned about the model of “rapid prototyping” at some point, being forced to make quick games and present half-finished work for feedback is another story. Only through living the process can one learn to trust the process and realize how non-productive perfectionism could be.
In the future, I hope to continue creating games/experiences that are immersive and “serious.” I believe serious games have so much potential and application in various settings, and people should not shy away from creating games that are more meaningful than commercial. Specifically, I would like to continue experimenting with the “gamification of life” through creating system games that mirror the (dis)functionality of our everyday life. The system game we have created for this class is rather smaller in scale. I want to make more system games that are more complex and could self-adjust based on players’ actions/consequences, whether in analog form (think Daybreak) or digital. I also want to bring the spirits of game design into crafting theater/film/VR/AR experiences that could potentially refresh how stories could be told.
At the end of the day, I am incredibly grateful to be surrounded by a group of passionate students who are always there to support each other. I have learned so much from my peers by playtesting everyone’s games and having others playtest our game. As someone who majors in humanities and does CS more for “practical reasons,” I have always felt that I am standing between two worlds, and there is little ways for me to bridge my creative energy with technological skills except for creating little “art projects” that I will eventually have to give up on when it’s time to seek an “actual job.” This class has allowed me to bridge the two worlds and pointed out game design as a viable future career choice. Thank you so much for a great class, Christina and Amy!
