Before I took this class, I honestly thought I understood games. How hard could they be? I grew up playing all kinds of complex German-style board games, and I was infamous in my family as a kid for reading the rules, playing a game once, sometimes only making it halfway, then deciding that we should play with a new modded version of the rules. My family teased me that I made up rules just so I could win, but I stand my ground that I was just excited about design from an early age, full of ideas about how to make games more interesting or fun.
That being said, making a game from scratch is way harder than I thought it would be. And way more rewarding. It was a really fun challenge to approach a game with the goal of learning, meaning every iteration or adjustment had to make the game not only more fun/interesting but also more informative or representative of a real-world system, closer to the goal of what I wanted a player to take away from the experience. I learned a lot about the strategy that goes into helping a player have fun while learning at the same time, about how mechanics can compliment aesthetics to create an experience where players can learn without even realizing it. On the designer’s side, it’s comforting to be able to make something that is light-hearted and fun while simultaneously making an impact on the world, especially since it often feels like you have to choose either serious or fun and not both.
I especially loved the focus on analog game formats in the class. Given my background interest in board games, it really felt like I was finally fulfilling a life-long dream to make a game from scratch. From a design practice perspective, it makes a lot of sense to prototype in analog forms because of how simple and easy it is to change the rules and mechanics on the fly. Once we had the rules set in stone, it was so unbelievably satisfying to bring the paper prototype to just a slightly higher level of fidelity by laser-cutting the pieces so they had a tactile weight to them. Eventually, designing all the small cherries on top during the P4 refinement brought it to life even more, and I had SO much fun focusing on the details like making the official rule book and assembling the box design. I really enjoyed the lectures focusing on designing rules, boxes, and cards, and it was really interesting to take my background knowledge of UX design and apply it to the intricacies of the cards and cheat sheets to try to ease mental load and allow players to focus on the game itself.
While I’ve been focusing on the analog projects, I also learned a lot in the process of the P2 Interactive Fiction. It honestly came out of left field, and I was surprised by how difficult of a process it was to create: I didn’t expect to have to rely so heavily on my writing skills, but just like the board game was a way of applying my design skills to analog formats, the IF felt like an experience in applying design skills to writing. Because of the limited format, it felt like there were very few mechanics available to choose from to match the story. It was uncomfortable to feel so limited when the analog projects had felt filled with infinite possibilities through infinite combinations of pieces and cards and boards and spinners– the IF was just text on the screen. While it wasn’t easy, it meant we had to focus very closely on what the arcs and loops of the game would be, since that was the primary building block. Whatever your idea was, it was incredibly challenging to distill it down to something manageable to code that still communicated the core premise. I’m not going to say I completely perfected that challenge, but it was a really eye-opening experience about paring down to the basics and still achieving your goal.
I’m especially grateful for the fact that I learned the value of just diving right into the game-making process. Coming up with a whole set of mechanics from scratch seems impossible from the outside, but we did a lot of exercises in class where we were essentially given as little as 15 minutes and told to come up with something, anything. It lowered the stakes tremendously, turning the daunting task into more of a doodle on paper. I learned that all you need is that doodle, no matter how bad, and you can quickly begin iterating on it. Even in such a short time span, you can mod the game countless times until it’s something completely different than you started with. While we weren’t necessarily presenting doodles at our playtests, I appreciated the opportunity to put half-baked work out into the world: whether it sank or swam didn’t really matter because you learned something new about it either way. It made me feel a lot more comfortable with just voicing an idea and being okay with whatever feedback I got. Playtesting low-fi prototypes and getting that early feedback was such a huge part of the class, and I’m eager to take this experience and bring it to my other projects as well.
One of the prompts for this essay is about “when I go to make games in the future.” Before this class, the thought of making games in the future felt like a pipe dream, fun to think about but not realistic, not serious enough. Especially the thought of making board games, which seems somehow an even more quixotic endeavor than making video games. I’m happy to say, however, that it feels much more real now, more like something I could genuinely see myself doing one day. I hope that, at face value, I even get to make games in the future. Should that happen, I feel way more confident now in my ability to realize a game in its complete potential. While even our P4 project could be cleaned up and elevated, I feel like I have a toolbox of questions and experiences and learnings to draw upon.
I’m incredibly grateful that I got an opportunity to dive deeper into game making, specifically serious game making. Being able to pursue what I feel like I’ve always been excited about doing, and learning SO much along the way about prototyping, storytelling, systems, mechanics, and small details, what I took away the most was the real feasibility of game design as a possible future endeavor, and I’m so grateful for that.
