I learned about…
Prototyping
Before this class I didn’t prototype narratives at all, or consider physical prototypes for interactive storytelling. During this class I enjoyed fast paper prototyping sessions, especially for narrative games. It really forced me to be creative with what I had, and to simulate a game experience with prose and pictures from various sources other than my own work. It felt like improv, or DMing but with visuals and and drawing. I enjoyed ad-libbing interactions and narrative paths in response to the player’s desired actions. It was surprisingly easy to explore different narrative possibilities, and get immediate feedback, and it was fun for me — I felt like I was playing make believe. In the future I’d love to find a way to make physical/improv prototypes a part of my storytelling process.
Brainstorming
I learned a lot from my teammates in this class… which cannot be said of most other CS classes. Even when I had less chemistry with teammates, I really enjoyed my group projects. I am definitely stealing Ellie’s timed post-it brainstorming method for future group endeavors. I think I am seeing how, when being creative together, there are times to diverge and times to agree. Both speech and silence are valuable. I really appreciate how my teammates pulled through and actively brought their unique contributions to the team.
Creating games for behavior change and education
I found the MDAO reading especially insightful (more so than the SOPHIA talk, sorry!) I feel like it helped me come to an understanding of how and why games/toys can be powerful teaching tools, by creating a sense of play instead of obligation, and by using feedback loops to both teach and create a “lusory state.” I wish I read this while working on the SmartPrimer project (Ian AR educational game/research project) Part of me also wishes we got to collect some real data/ run experiments and crunch numbers to find the true effectiveness of our games. I think if the goal is education, research skills are really important.
Twine!
I really appreciated being forced to finally use Twine, and bring a creative project to some milestone of completion. It was fun to make a serious effort at crafting a narrative. What if the class had guest lectures from creative writing come in to give a crash course on narrative? I really enjoyed the creative writing courses I took here at Stanford. I also appreciated the Videogame Zinesters reading. The reason why zines are so personal and so specific is that they are cheap to produce and not intended for profit, or intended for a general audience at all, and that’s what gives a zine its character. They are not intended for profit, social media, and in most cases publication. Many kinds of games can’t embody this spirit because of the monetary support required to create it, but a Twine game is perfect for this analogy. However I think that the structure of the assignment is contradictory to these ideas, especially because we have to pitch our game, and stick to a plan very early on. Effectively, this makes our TA’s / professors our publishers. Food for thought?
Sharing my work
Before P2 I was very scared of showing writing to others, and the more I put my heart into it the more hesitant I was to show it to strangers, if anyone at all. For me there was definitely a fear of being vulnerable and revealing the contents of my mind, the nature of my imagination, and fear of feeling inadequate and invalidated. Post P2, I simply do not care. I really loved sharing my writing with others, and growing out of that fear. My game definitely didn’t appeal to everyone, but that’s the way it should be — if the contents of my imagination were generally appealing and commercially viable, I would take serious issue with that. One of my peer reviewers was confused, but I can’t say I’m upset about it. I found my reviews to be really interesting.
Having fun while developing… creates fun games?
Working on a P3 was a valuable experience. What started as a simple idea: dragging cats into different areas to change stats and food count — evolved a lot after we got the foundational systems in place, and implemented them in a way that was scalable, as well as understandable and legible to our team. From there, we could easily add new mini systems, such as: battle, events, shops, abilities, death, etc.
Especially with the introduction of abilities, which allowed any element of the game state to interact with other elements in interesting ways, I felt that we moved on from “coding a game” to “designing a game.” Or, from “implementing a system” to “playing with a system.” It was really fun to see players put together mechanics in unexpected and dynamic ways— creative and expressive ways, even. Im actually very pleasantly surprised that how robust our game is; We did a pretty good job of designing expandable systems and using inheritance and scriptable objects where we could. Go team!
In the future when I am making games I will…
Prototype with paper, do AB prototyping, and throw in some ad libbed designs if necessary. Continue to delight (or displease) my player with writing of varying quality. Continue to have fun with systems, laying the foundations and then adding interesting interactions. Take a more scientific approach to collecting user reactions.
