Final Class Reflection

Before taking CS 247G, I had never considered the structures and the planning that goes into creating the games we love. In retrospect, it feels like I had taken a lot of these games and their significance in my life for granted. Club Penguin was my favorite way to pass time as a kid; as a young teenager I sunk deep into the stories of games like “Life Is Strange”; during the pandemic I used Minecraft to stay in contact with friends when we otherwise couldn’t see one another. But, in college, it’s felt like playing is a privilege. It’s rare to find the time to eat meals without simultaneously watching recorded lectures, let alone set aside the time to play the games that used to take up so much of my childhood.

Over the course of CS 247G, I’ve had the opportunity to learn about how to make a fun game and the privilege to play games with the guise of it being homework. Early on in the quarter, I found it useful to learn the kinds of fun that go behind each kind of game. Instead of generally thinking of a game as fun, I could newly articulate why it was so great to play: maybe it was the creativity you could exercise in a sandbox, or the narrative drama of a great RPG, or even the physical feeling and sounds of putting pieces down on a chessboard. With this, I began seeing the 9 kinds of fun in all different kinds of spaces, even beyond games. As I worked on P1 and P2, I would consistently come back to these concepts to understand what it was our players were loving about our projects, and how to make those elements shine even more. For instance, in P2 my team created a digital/physical escape room on a fake submarine full of eccentric characters. We sought to make clever puzzles to add to the “challenge” sort of fun, but unexpectedly saw that players really enjoyed the silly backstories of our characters. We ramped up the “narrative” kind of fun by lending more emphasis to our characters’ stories, which was also fun for us to come up with.

Another course concept that I found very valuable was how games can effectively bring people together.  Following the four laws of friendship formation was helpful throughout P1, for which my team created a multiplayer card game. While my group initially sought to use disclosure to help players become closer, we were able to recognize that it was the close proximity and chances to laugh together and share inside jokes that also left our players feeling closer after their playtest. Keeping this in mind, we let the player’s acting abilities become the forefront of P1: “Elevator Entourage” as they built and improvised product pitches that other players would judge them on.

In this class, I was particularly challenged by difficulties that arose during P1 and P2. I realized the creative struggles of finalizing a game idea that everyone on a team resonates with and feels passionate enough about to continue building. Since there was no strict format our games would have to abide by, this flexibility was both freeing and initially overwhelming as both my P1 and P2 teams underwent a countless number of pivots prior to our final projects. Along these same lines, I was also challenged by the logistical difficulties of divvying up work and ensuring everyone’s output aligned with the same creative vision. However, I believe these struggles gave me the opportunity to become a better communicator as I worked closely with my team members to understand both what they wanted to include in each game and contribute my own preferences along the way. I also learned to document our team’s brainstorms and rudimentary, hard-to-describe ideas thoroughly, as it was sometimes the most outlandish concepts that would ultimately become integrated in our projects.

Now that this quarter of CS 247G has come to a close, I want to both make more time for play in the remainder of my Stanford career while building games that resonate with me and my fellow team members. I am very grateful for this course and the motivation to both play and learn about games in a structured academic format, but now I would love to take this spark to continue explore building creative and gamified projects entirely outside of the scope of a class. Another project I am working on developing is a productivity app for students with ADHD, and I’ve already found 247G useful as we’ve begun drawing in gamified elements to keep our users engaged. Newly empowered by the formal game design principles we’ve learned from our lectures, sketchnotes, and critical plays—and a bit more experienced as a team member and game developer after completing P1 and P2—I’m excited to revive my love for games and kick off future projects with a more playful perspective.