I’ve played video games since I was at least three years old. After having just moved to America, a very busy father into technology meant that we had a computer at home, and it was 2005 and my mother didn’t quite fully understand all of the dangers of what that meant for a child at that time. I watched my brother play Runescape and after pleading with him like three year olds do, he showed me how as well. There’s actually a rather cute home video of toddler me crying after dying to a goblin.
Games very quickly became a humongous fixture in my life. You know nowadays, we all understand that it’s really unwise to give your children unlimited unsupervised internet access, but I don’t really blame my parents for not knowing much about it in those early 2000s. And they really did try! Just about a constant conflict throughout my childhood and teenage years was “oh my god Khaled, you’ve gotta stop playing video games all the time.” When I wasn’t playing video games, I was watching video games on super early youtube, thinking about them, dreaming about them. A big part of it was MMOs and online forums, which really are no place for small children, but I honestly credit it with massively accelerating a lot of my intellectual development. I was a tiny kid, and most people didn’t want to play with tiny kids, so I quickly learned how to blend in and got exposed to a lot more intricate thought and discussion than many small children do. I really, truly love video games, and all that they have given me. I’ve played hundreds of different games from all types of genres and must have sunk tens of thousands of hours into them at this point.
But for whatever reason, I had never really tried to make a game before this. Before college I had very limited experience with programming (I had hacked together some weird python based game when I was 12 by following a bunch of tutorials and not knowing what I was doing, but that was about it). It always seemed daunting. Game devs do a great job waxing on about how grueling and difficult their jobs are – and many of them are! The game industry is severely plagued with many different problems, from misogyny and sexual harassment, to crunch, unpaid overtime, generally poor pay, and meddling from publishers. But I love games. And so I took this class to learn a more structured way of games.
I think I came at this class from a very different angle than many people do as a consequence of this. What I really appreciate taking out of this class isn’t really any of the formal elements or structures used to map out game design. It’s the big emphasis on iteration and playtesting and responsiveness, an “”””””agility”””””” (not to invoke the Agile shamans) that can help you slowly iterate on your game into perfection. It’s a lot of the same principles taught in software entrepreneurship and development, but for some reason I always thought games were different. You know a game is a work of art, and it’s not like a painter iterates by showing off their work and changing the contrast or hue based on reviewer feedback (although authors definitely do this with their editors, at least until they’re huge enough to just do what they want), and this design approach to game dev wasn’t something I had ever thought of before. I genuinely had never approached games through this angle, and to be honest, I don’t think many game companies do either! I had a meeting with an engineering manager at CCP games a few days ago (company behind Eve online) and he used to work at facebook, and he told me that the past 3 years all he’s been trying to do was bring the company’s product development cycle out of the stone ages. Before, they’d just propose a feature, get to work on it, get excited, and then it would very frequently come out and be absolutely disastrous! They never even considered this iterative and structured product development approach, and EVE is one of the most successful games of all time!
They probably could’ve used some formal elements in designing this games UI and new player experience.
I learned a lot about working with groups on games. Particularly some of the terrible frustrations that can come of it, and some very deleterious group dynamics which can just poison the development cycle from start to finish. I also learned just how joyous it is when the game actually comes together at the end, and everyone can cheer, and all of the stupid petty stuff that felt so important over the entire development cycle just washes away. On to the next game.
I also got to meet some really incredible people, both through this class, and through Read Write Play, which became easily a highlight of every single week. People who love games just like I do, and have their own experiences and have played many of the strange games that I enjoy as well. Shout out to Anthony and forcing us to play his anime girl fighting game, and thank you Christina for making us play Unpacking! You guys were both a terrific joy to have in every discussion you came around in.
Games are hard. Working together is hard. But you get to work on something that brings people real joy, and can forever change their lives and how they view the world. It’s a work of art that gets a lot mroe intimate with the player than a book, or a movie. Some people play the same games for years, or decades. People get married through video games (I’ve known at least 10 couples throughout different MMO guilds that met and got married from the game, Mabinogi especially seemed to enable this). People form lifelong friendships, or strong bonds that just one day vanish. There’s people I know from video games who just logged off one day, but if they ever logged back on 5, 6 years later, I’d be overjoyed.
And so thank you to this course, for really making me take games seriously again. Stanford has a way of making it hard to play video games. Most people here don’t touch them, and the culture heavily pushes you to do just about anything else. It’s hard to justify playing video games when you’re already trying to juggle socializing, working out, class work, employment, personal projects, clubs, research, and all types of different things. This class gave me an excuse to play video games every week, which I certainly did, even though I was more than degenerate about flaking on my Critical Plays! I must be so honest when I wish I could have just talked about the game rather than have to literally look at a document of formal elements and map them to it. Knowing the structures, especially some patterns like the difficulty curve you showed, the lectures on design and visuals, the categories of players, I actually really enjoyed those! Having to talk about how the Stanley Parable’s Mechanic of Walking Places with Narrator Dialogue lends to the Dynamic and Aesthetics of Narrative and Discovery made me feel like a robot, though.
But I can also acknowledge that this game is super broad! It has to be able to hit people who have never played a video game in their life, and so you have to start with a foundational approach. That’s not to say that I’m somehow too good or whatever for those ideas, but that rather than being a structure that helped me organize my thoughts, they felt more like an unnecessary abstraction. There’s pieces of it that I’ll take going forward.
Oh, also, all that thinking like a game designer stuff? I have started playing games differently! I have started to recognize the beauty and difficulty of things I previously took for granted, like the world layout of Dark Souls 1 and how interconnected they made it, while all still feeling coherent. Or I was playing the recently released indie game of a friend who put so much time into her puzzles, and I was in awe of how great they felt because I knew just how difficult that was for one person to accomplish. I’ll be taking that with me for sure.
Thank you all!
