Gaming was a huge part of my life when I was a kid. From making omelettes in Cooking Mama on Nintendo NDS to driving Mario Karts on 3DS, I enjoyed a variety of games. However, due to societal stigma that playing games is detrimental to academic performances in Asia, I stopped playing since middle school (fun fact: I stopped playing but my mom really wanted me to play to destress). This course completely changed my perspective towards games–I started to appreciate games again and even more than before. Before taking this course, I’ve always thought that game design is related to visual and audio design but didn’t realize other formal elements that are involved in the design process. For instance, what types of fun does the game convey? What emotion does it evoke in the players? How does it motivate players to keep playing?
That said, the idea of mechanics heavily influenced how I design games. Specifically, I was surprised by how much a minor change in rules or interaction could hugely influence player’s experience. During our playtests in the first project, we made multiple changes to the rules about how players should guess the scenario, characters, and limitations. Adding or subtracting the guesses greatly changed the difficulty of the game and how players acted out their cards. In other words, it affects the entire gameplay experience and the fun it conveys to the players.
The greatest challenge I encountered was constructing a novel embedded narrative through an immersive gaming experience. Unlike games like Gone Home that are entirely digital, how can we evoke the same emotion and create the same ambient in a semi-open space? It was also difficult to construct a compelling narrative as we started to design the puzzles before having a clear narrative direction. However, I appreciated my team for adding lots of visual and audio elements to maximize the immersive experience. In the future, I want to continue working on storytelling, captivating player’s attention and providing unexpected twists.
Due to the pace of quarter system, I learned to make iterations through player feedback efficiently. With the weekly critical plays, I also learned to evaluate games from both designer and player perspectives. While the critical plays were challenging at the beginning, I found myself enjoying writing those as time went on. Each critical play allows me to view the games from a different perspective and dissect it into different aspects, such as player’s psychology, narrative, use of space, etc… I admire how each designer comes up with some unique gaming mechanism to create visually-appealing and captivating games. This is especially true for Florence, since it contains great feminism narrative, unique interactions, and incredible art and music.
Now that I understand elements of games more, I hope to bring the elements that make games engaging to other aspects such as education. In my opinion, gamification has become a buzzword in lots of places, but not a lot of people truly understand what game entails. I hope to embed mechanisms that make games interestingly to education, since play is the natural way people should learn.
