I signed up to take this class because I spent a lot of my childhood playing video games; so, despite the fact that I hadn’t really played games that much in recent history, I knew it was theoretically an interest of mine. Taking this class and playing games again has reminded me just how much I love playing — and it has also given me a more critical understanding of what that means. Three months ago, games or play would have been hard for me to define, but it felt specific to youth: a form of relaxation or entertainment that, in my experience, is replaced by socializing or other forms of media as you grow up. Game design was intimidating to me, as all design is to me despite my recent interest in trying it. This class not only helped me better understand play but let me stretch my design, and game design, muscles.
Being analytical about games through critical plays was a completely new experience for me that has reinvigorated my excitement about games. I had always played games passively, just having fun and never probing at why I was having fun. Doing so in this class illuminated the structure of mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics underlying all game design. In turn, when I designed my games, every decision about the games’ rules or structure or balance was made with the consideration “How will this make people play and what feelings will that kind of play inspire?” Additionally, it was really cool to have the vocabulary for those feelings — the different kinds of fun — to be able to align design visions with my teams and to identify my own taste.
In particular, a lot of my attraction to games comes from the narrative and the feeling of fantasy. I had a very active imagination as a kid, and games provided an environment in which my imagination was a little more real. It was really cool to learn about different ways narratives are structured in games, to identify patterns of narrative architecture like emergent narratives, evocative spaces, enacting stories, and embedded narratives. It was really cool, also, to see how puzzles can tell stories. I’ve now started thinking about puzzles and narrative a little like lyrics and melody; sometimes you know the story you want to tell and find the puzzles to tell it, and other times you have awesome puzzles and “skin” them with a narrative. It was cool to experience each of these with one of my games — the former with “Wandering” and the latter with “Rumors.”
One challenge I encountered was playtesting — particularly with our analog game where the rules and structure were less intuitive. I didn’t expect it would feel so vulnerable, and at first I really didn’t want to do it! I wanted to run and playtest another game instead. But, my team encouraged me to take the moderator role, and gradually I got more comfortable sharing an unfinished product and receiving, even asking for, critical feedback. It’s still uncomfortable, but I now feel capable of facing that discomfort, a skill that will be indispensable as I hope to continue to work in design-related fields.
Lastly, the discussions about toxicity in gaming and applying critical theory, particularly feminist theory, to games helped me examine my own relationship with games. It helped uncover previously buried ways in which games and playing games with others both uplifted and injured me as a young gay boy. It has been really cool to rediscover this part of my identity and development.
Generally, this class has been an awesome opportunity to reconnect with games as an interest and “gamer” as an identity and to create something that I am proud of — my own game, an artifact of that identity.
