Before this class I thought of game design was synonymous with game development, which required deep coding knowledge and a lot of gameplay experience under one particular game type (first person shooter games, arcade games, gambling, etc.) I’d heard from other people that the game sector was one that was entirely based on passion, with very little pay, and that game development experiences were usually unpleasant and monopolized by a couple familiar faces as team leads, as opposed to being a more democratic free market of ideas. I also was not particularly familiar with game play, not because it didn’t appeal to me, but rather because I didn’t have time to play games at all growing up and haven’t had the time even now to learn a new system/way of engaging in fun from scratch. There was also a hesitancy to start something new, knowing that I would be bad at it whereas most of my peers had largely reached a level of expertise for at least one type of game.
The learnings we had around feminism really stuck with me, especially because I had only ever seen men in my life playing games and personally witnessed the social sinkholes of homophobia, extreme sexism, etc. that they were drawn into from gaming communities. I’ve also seen videos online of women explaining their experiences of multiplayer gaming, sometimes having to hide their identity to avoid threats of violence and assault. However, based on the learnings from class, I now understand that this was a misconception – that the harms experienced in gaming are societal ills that cannot be pinned on the gaming sector as a whole. And to overcome this misconception, we should imagine feminist games as a potentially liberatory space, in which we can de-center the focus against DEI and instead implement feminist ideals into the roots of the game.
I experienced personal mindset challenges in this class as I usually have really strict compartmentalization of work and play/academics and fun. Similar to when I took a creative writing class in frosh year, I had a lot of difficulty at first in acclimating to having fun for a class but also then trying to have structured learning from that fun. I also had some trouble with keeping track of all the things I needed to analyze while playing any given game, especially since gameplay is often not easily repeated. I remedied this by starting to record my gameplay from the beginning, as opposed to experiencing something and then trying to write it down or pause the game after it’d already happened.
If I keep working on games I will, map out the decision tree for how users enter until when they exit and then write out a consolidated list of materials/screens/experiences to make sure that there is no scenario where players get stuck in a rut that is not engaging/fun but also that players don’t have a shortcut experience where they accidentally speedrun the game.
