Final Class Reflection – Cole

Before taking this class, I’d played plenty of different games: physical board games, sports games, digital games, card games, team games, solo games, and the list goes on. That being said, I never considered myself much of a “gamer”. In retrospect, I think part of this is because I didn’t have a very deep or intentional relationship with game design, game culture, and the like. I knew what games I liked and didn’t like but I didn’t have much of a formal framework to explain why certain games felt like I could enter a flow playing and why others became stale after playing just once or twice. Since taking Intro to Game Design, I’ve been able to match these high-level intuitions with formal methods that underpin the experience of playing a game. Something that has fascinated me while taking this class is the art of wrapping the technical implementation of a game around the psychological wants and needs of a target audience. There are so many levels of which to build a good game, you have to understand and design around! The video we watched about how the creator designed Plants vs. Zombies is an example of just how much intention and fine detail goes into differentiating a great game from a good game.

Another application of game design that I found myself thinking about often is how games can be vehicles for social mediation. I enjoyed the first project so much that me along with a couple of other students who are also in 247G decided to build a social mediation game around music discovery as our final project for another course (CS377U). When it comes to leveraging software to facilitate positive social interactions, games do this so well!

While I don’t plan to pursue a career in game design, I do plan to continue using many of the concepts I’ve learned in this class that are generally applicable to developing a user-oriented product. A skill that I enjoyed learning and honing through this quarter was sketch noting. Somehow I made it my whole life without really hearing about or learning how powerful of a learning tool it could be. Growing up, all of my notebooks were littered with sketches, a byproduct of me getting bored listening to the teacher drone on and on and needing something to do. I was taught that productive notetaking looked like linear structure, bullet points, and words between the lines which isn’t always the most effective way to translate onto paper. I’ve really enjoyed the opportunity to combine my technical and creative minds throughout this quarter, thank you Christina and TAs for making all of his happen!