I decided to take CS247G during my senior spring because I’ve played a pretty good number of games. I’m no hardcore gamer, but I was an only child, and a lot of my free time in middle and high school was spent playing video games, either alone or with friends. Before taking this class, I assumed that meant I knew how to make a game fun. It stood to reason that, because I’ve had fun playing games, I could figure out how to recreate that fairly naturally. This confusion of recognition with synthesis is the same as that of artists who think that, because they can recognize that the Mona Lisa is a masterpiece, they must be able to paint something comparable without any real training. You can imagine my surprise, then, when playtesters of my P1 team’s work at our first playtesting session didn’t actually enjoy the game. Despite my confusion, however, I’d also been learning a lot of new concepts during those first few weeks that helped explain the reasons for our dilemma. There are a lot of frameworks and principles that go into game design, something that was also unexpected. Taking note of things like a game’s formal elements or its mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics, I started to get a sense of how you could really judge a game as a designer rather than as a player. I also learned pretty quickly that anyone who debates the merits of video games as art clearly have no experience in their creation, as my appreciation skyrocketed for the amount of hours, thought, and love that have to go into making even one of our most beloved games.
Through those same hours and thought, our game got better, almost entirely through the extremely helpful feedback we got during our playtesting sessions. While I was familiar with user testing as practiced in CS147 and other, more “standard” HCI classes, I was not prepared for how invested I would be in the result of these playtests. I was excited to do more tests, and all responses to our questions on how to improve the game were of great interest to me. Likewise, I wasn’t expecting how satisfying and rewarding it was to hear people laugh or enjoy our game for the first time. It was, though, and I realized that games are fundamentally made for people, and that the reason we iterate and rework and go through the entire design process is to make them better and more fun for those we get to share them with.
In general, I feel like there were a lot of challenges during my time in this class. The learning curve of a brand new game engine, figuring out team and project management in an entirely new context, making decisions on how to structure our work intelligently and in a way that could be expanded upon later, as well as taking our vision of our ideas and turning them into tangible products were all brand new, but I feel like I learned a lot about each one and what works for me moving forward. My appreciation of the field of game design as a whole has grown immensely, and I feel like I’ve also gained the ability to see games through the eyes of a designer, not just a player. Although I don’t have any plans in my immediate future to go into game design, I’m definitely interested in continuing to practice my new skills and try my hand at making more. And, beyond anything else, I know now I can say more about games than that I’ve just played a lot of them.
