I’ve played games for the majority of my life. I’ve even imagined myself as a game designer, but was eventually scared off by the working conditions of the gaming industry. To me, game design was separate from design. Game design was something that involved coming up with mechanics and then building something around those mechanics. It didn’t even occur to me that the process of game design: brainstorming, prototyping, testing, and evaluating is extremely similar to the design process I’ve been learning in all of my prior HCI classes. I really appreciate how this class managed to tie the process of game design to the design process. To be honest, I’m pretty surprised that I didn’t realize the similarity before this class.
There are several concepts that stuck with me. The concept that stuck with me the most was the idea of the eight types of fun. It was really interesting to learn about why a game would be “fun” and how we can leverage that in order to create a more enjoyable experience. In my experience, I would struggle to enjoy open world games, but I wouldn’t understand why. After learning about the eight types of fun, I found that I strongly prefer fantasy and sensation games and struggle with discovery games. It made sense why I would find myself drawn to compact level based games instead of one with a large open world.
Another thing that stuck was the importance of constant playtesting. I really appreciated how during every class, we would always have at least one playtest. This was really helpful since the playtester’s feedback would reveal new areas for improvement and also reaffirm if our changes were good or not. I think the frequency of the playtests really helped both for when I was working on P1 and P2. I think this is one aspect of CS 247G that differed from my other HCI classes. In most of my other HCI classes, I would have tested my prototype between three to four times whereas for P2, we tested eight times in total. The rapid iteration in CS 247G was something that I think really helped to polish the games I worked on.
Something that I struggled with was incorporating narrative in P2. For me, I found myself really focusing on the game mechanics and focusing more on how to make the game more fun through mechanics instead of weaving a narrative in. I think this might be a reflection of how I play games in general. I often find myself skipping through the narrative and engaging directly with the gameplay mechanics. It might be because of this that I prioritized game mechanics over an engaging narrative. I think for P2, my group managed to clean up the narrative somewhat, but I’m sure there are more improvements we could have made if we had more time.
This class is another step in my journey of improving my skills as a designer. After this class, I will have completed five HCI related courses and engaged with the design process over five times. I think for this class, the main takeaway I have is the importance of rapid iteration and testing. Whereas in other classes, prototypes typically happened on a weekly basis, the testing cycle for the games I worked on typically occurred two times a week. Sometimes with multiple iterations even on the same day. This really showed me the value of “failing fast” and improving based on feedback.
Although I don’t intend on working in the game industry, I have no doubt that the lessons I’ve learned about prototyping quickly and testing quickly will be carried with me no matter where in the tech industry I end up at. Making sure that user feedback is central to the development of my work (in CS 247G, it was the games I worked on) will be a central core belief I will carry with me even after this class. I look forward to putting the game design skills I’ve honed during the quarter into practice in my future work.
