Final Class Reflection – Zander

Though I have played games all my life, and they are an integral part of my PhD research, I had never spent serious time designing and creating a game until this class. My view of game design before this class was through the lens of real-time rendering, which was all about making lighting in games look more realistic in 16ms or less. I left that research because I became convinced that there were more important parts of game design to focus on, and this class showed me that I was right.

Among the concepts introduced in class, the MDA framework has been most informative for me because it has allowed me to refine my existing observations of what makes games fun (and what type of fun). For example, early on I wrote a post about playing Smash Ultimate that started with a generic observation—“playing swordies is fun”—and ended with a more comprehensive discussion of how movement and attack mechanics give rise to spacing dynamics that provide serious challenge fun.

Through this class, I learned that as a designer I focus sharply on mechanics. This mechanical focus made the above framework even more useful in both projects because I could take my mechanical ideas, reason about what dynamics were likely to arise from them, and decide whether these dynamics would lead to the kind of fun I wanted to create. For example, in Mark of the Witch (P1 game), I focused on modding card playing mechanics to allow for more information gathering because I wanted to create a dynamic of incomplete but abundant information to support a more structured fellowship fun (i.e. deduction rather than loudly proclaiming guilt) than exists in pure social deduction games. In Astra (P2 game), I focused on narrowing down the exact time travel mechanism in order to support a past-influences-present dynamic that would support discovery and narrative fun. For example, it was the focus on discovery and narrative that made us choose to have the player go through a rift located at a particular point in space to travel through time rather than use a gadget that the player always had access to.

My greatest challenge during the course was time management. Doing research full-time as a grad student (including a paper submission at the end of May) in step with the strict class/section structure of  247G was often uncomfortable. A looser class structure that allowed me to spend (the same amount of) time on this class when best it worked for me would have helped, though of course I realize that my situation is not the norm.

Throughout, this class reinforced for me that the desired player experience (e.g. the fun!) is the most important thing when making a game. When doing computer graphics research on games, it can be easy to lose sight of this in the effort to get a “better” (i.e. more publishable) result. The focus on fun in this class kept me focused on the player experience and how best a designer could provide it. My research was better for it. Going forward, I will keep that focus as I pursue new and improved tools for making the next generation of games.