Before this class, playing games was all about how I felt while playing the game. I loved exercising my creativity in Minecraft, losing track of time to destress while playing Candy Crush, and the thrill of competition while playing Super Mario Party with my brother. The early lectures and first critical plays were my first introduction to playing games while thinking like a designer. Learning how to identify the different types of fun that shape a game and the exact mechanisms that are thoughtfully chosen to create these types of fun was incredibly enlightening. Learning about things that I had never thought about before, like “what is a level?”, was a common experience throughout the entire quarter. One of the class concepts that struck me the most was actually the video that I watched for the extra credit sketchnote on cursed problems. It was interesting to learn about how two seemingly unrelated player goals and promises can actually conflict with another.
Throughout the quarter, I was able to implement a lot of the ideas I learned from readings and lectures into P1 and P2. For my P1, The Mark of the Witch, I focused a lot on the mechanics of the game and paid attention to small details with finetuning the card draw mechanism. My biggest takeaway from this project was that the most important thing about game design is making sure that the players have fun! Even though I spent so much time thinking about the mechanics of the game, the initial playtests were humbling as players struggled to buy into the game. I realized that despite how complex or specific the mechanisms were, we had to really zoom out and think about what elements would help create the fun that we wanted our game to have. With P2, I got to exercise my ability to build narrative and craft a compelling ending to our story.
One of the greatest challenges I experienced in both projects was dealing with conflicting visions for a project. For example, in P2, our group had different ideas for the final milestone challenge. What I really valued about this class was all the built in time we had for playtesting, because when we had these conflicting ideas, we were able to actually test out different versions in our playtests and then use the feedback from them to decide on which direction to pursue.
Overall, in this class I grew as both a designer and a player. As a designer, I gained the skills and tools needed to analyze a game from the mechanics up. As a player, I gained a greater appreciation and eye for detail in the games that I play and the various types of fun that I get to experience. I loved being able to play so many new games throughout the critical play assignments—many of the games I have continued to play and even shared with friends. This class has been more fun and rewarding than I could have imagined, and I’m also grateful to be coming out of this class with new friends that I’ve met along the way. 
^One of my favorite quotes from the quarter
I love that you used playtesting as a way to end direction arguments. I always remember a book I read about CEO’s, where one said “if we are arguing with opinions, my opinion wins.” Having data, even small data with a few playtests is super useful– yay you!