It was so so lovely to have the opportunity to make games with this group and in this class! Thank you so much, Christina and Amy, for all of your support and guidance throughout the quarter. Here are my main takeaways from the class!
Dystopias
One of my biggest mental blocks was on the idea of dystopias in games. I was uncomfortable with the idea of creating a fantasy dystopia. Our actual world is pretty dystopian, and I didn’t want to discount people’s actual experiences in the name of brainstorming how things could be worse. For instance, one straightforward dystopia is an escalation of the climate crisis—we can imagine cities underwater, 100 years from now. But that felt to me that it was dishonoring the people who lost their lives in floods and hurricanes because they could not afford to evacuate. Who am I to say “how could things be worse” in the face of that?
I then I decided I wanted to make a game set in our own world. The problem this created is that there are far too many overlapping systems of oppression to recreate these systems within a game.
When I talked to Amy, her explanation of picking a dystopia resolved both of those problems for me. We don’t create a fictional dystopia because we can’t imagine a real-life dystopia—we create a fictional dystopia because it allows us to adjust the parameters of the world (resolving some problems, exacerbating others) such that we can communicate a specific message/experience. I think, as soon as I realized that part of imagining a dystopia is resolving certain issues we face in real life, that things started to click more for me.
This helped resolve my writer’s block, and I will keep it in mind moving forward. That said, I think it is still critical to be aware, when imagining an exacerbation of our reality, to be aware of what is our reality. The Handmaid’s Tale drew particular criticism, for instance, from women of color who were dismayed to watch white women depict the story as a scary possible future instead of a story that is in large part already happening. I think this blog post by Ali Nahdee sums it up well:
If you’re a white woman, this is an absolute, unthinkable nightmare scenario. If you’re a BIWOC, this scenario has most certainly already happened to you or members of your immediate family.
Personally, in my writing and storytelling outside of class, I have a preference for realism. But this was a really interesting exploration into the world of dystopia—which I haven’t thought about since high school, when my worldview was significantly more narrow. So, thank you!
Before the class, I thought… that creating a fictional dystopia with just one issue felt like an uncomfortable oversimplification of the real-world dystopia we live in.
I learned… that creating a fictional dystopia is not about “what if things were worse” but more specifically about “what if the main problem our world faced was [xxx].”
Check-ins
One thing I really appreciated from the teaching team was how proactively they checked in on us and our progress. Being a Stanford student, it is really easy to fall behind and procrastinate working on a project until the last minute. The intermediate deadlines were super helpful for avoiding this. And I think Amy’s check-ins with us were particularly necessary, for two reasons: (1) it is embarrassing to have nothing to show at a check-in, so knowing a check-in was coming was great motivation to create something worth sharing; (2) even if I was behind on work, Amy was super understanding and worked with me wherever I was at! (In particular, with the IFs, she helped me overcome my mental block about picking a dystopia, even though it was days past when I was supposed to have settled on a game idea.) Thank you both for the ongoing check-ins and checkpoints! I really needed them!
In the class, I did… really benefit from regular check-ins, so thank you!
Community
One of my major takeaways from the class is that making games as a group is more fun! I hadn’t thought game design wasn’t collaborative, but I also hadn’t really considered that it was. I’ve only ever made games on my own. So having the chance to work with a bunch of different groups was super cool! And now that I know I really like collaborative game design, it is perfect timing that we are graduating from this class with a big community of cool people who like to make games. I’m feeling super motivated! Seeing everyone’s ideas for games beyond the class is inspiring, and knowing that we now know a whole roster of people who might want to collaborate on a project is really exciting.
So, when I go to make games in the future, I will… know who to text!:)
