Final Reflection – Andreas

This is the story of when a game is more than a game.

I played a lot of video games growing up. It started with the Wii, and then we got an Mac Mini when I was 6 or 7. My cousins came over one day and downloaded Minecraft for me and set up an account. My gamertag was FireFalcon. The rest was history.

I played video games quite relentlessly up and through high school. Then when I got into Stanford, I decided to put the video games away and not bring my console when I moved in as I felt like it would be a distraction.

I got to Stanford (as a recruited rower) and underwent a pre-participation physical. During it, the doctors found an abnormality in my heart. That fall, I ran a bunch of tests, and it turned out that my heart just didn’t work right. In the winter, I started getting sick. By spring, I was in the hospital.

While in the hospital, I got weaker and weaker. Although a lot of friends visited me, there was a lot of time spent alone with either just me or me and my parents in the hospital room. As I slowly couldn’t take walks outside anymore, I thought to myself that maybe I might turn to video games to keep me company.

But it wasn’t that easy. Trying to play for more than 10 minutes while on six IV drips and 30 pills a day left me with crippling headaches, and I had to put the game aside. I lay in bed all day, unable to play games, barely able to read, and mainly just trying to chat with my parents or rewatch Star Wars for the fifth time. In the end, my heart got so bad that I ended up needing a heart transplant, which I got on May 1st of that freshman spring.

A heart transplant sounds incredibly daunting (which it is), but the really hard part isn’t the actual surgery – it’s the recovery. As I sat in a house in Palo Alto, unable to travel, relearning how to walk, I tried not to focus on the things I couldn’t do, and instead I found solace in the things I could. I re-downloaded Minecraft on my Mac, spent about an hour trying to remember what my password was, and finally logged back into FireFalcon. That summer I spent hours on Minecraft, playing both by myself and with friends from home and school. There is more to recovery than just the physical aspect, and I think playing games was a big part of that other.

So, what is my final reflection from this class?

At one point in my life, I just thought of games as something fun to do. Then I thought of games as something that could help me get through something hard. And now, I still think video games are both of those things, but I also think they are something whose creation I can be a part of. I think I realize just how thoughtful game designers have to be when they make these games. When we talked about accessibility and the ethics of game design, both in class and section, at first I thought “This is so silly.” Then I thought back to being in the hospital and not being able to play because the game was just too much for my medicated brain. And I started thinking about how games maybe could be different to accommodate for things like that. I started thinking about how a game is more than just a game. It’s more than just fun. And it’s more than just an outlet to get through something hard.

It sounds a little cheesy, but I think a game is what you make of it both as a player and designer.

Thank you for an awesome quarter!

Andreas