Since starting my Masters degree here at Stanford in the fall, I’ve felt a bit disconnected from my creative side. I have a background in experimental media art and much of my Computer Science education has involved me finding ways to reconcile my passion for art with my passion for CS. In the past, I’ve felt that game design was a deceptively easy solution to this, and have steered clear, especially to the commercial sense. However, this class has made me realize that game design embodies all the most important principles of HCI and design, while still staying true to play and fun.
Being a part of this class has exposed me to games I never would have played otherwise, and I learned just how broad how game design can be. The critical plays each week forced me to think about how games are designed to evoke specific experiences of fun in the players. For example, although I’ve always loved games that involve puzzles, I had no concept of what makes a puzzle. Playing Monument Valley for my critical play helped me to understand that specific mechanics and solvability create engaging puzzles. And I was able to apply the formal principles that we learned throughout class to evoke fun as well. For example, in Project One, my team thought quite a bit about balancing the resources that we gave to players in order to balance challenge and motivation. And in Project Two, we spent a lot of time considering how to onboard players to the mechanics of our game in a manner that is intuitive. These specific principles stuck with me, teaching players how to interact with a game in an intuitive way can be a difficult task, but this onboarding experience can make or break the experience of the game. Similarly, being able to dissect different types of fun is useful for designing games geared towards a specific target audience.
This is not to say that this class was easy for me. As a student coming from a technical Computer Science background, I’m not very comfortable with expressing my ideas through writing and essays. The shift to have to do quite a bit of writing in this class was quite difficult and time consuming. However, it was also very rewarding. Similarly, I don’t have much experience with visual design, so creating content that was visually appealing is an aspect of the game design process that I still struggle with.
Through these struggles in the learning process, I learned how to apply the underlying principles of designing for play, such as the formal elements, MDA, types of fun, and much more. In the past, I had designed and consumed games without any regard to these principles. Any applied principles had been applied by complete accident. However now I can design using these principles directly, effectively creating more compelling games. If I continue to pursue game development, I will definitely learn more about visual design, though.
Game design is very different from my background in art. However, it leverages many areas that I’m interested in, and, through this class, has caused me to approach art-making in a completely new way. Rather than producing art mainly as expression, I’m using game design as a mode of producing art that invites action. Specifically, art that invites play and fun. This class has taught me how to make such art, which I’m incredibly grateful for.
