P1 Reflection – Leyth Toubassy

I think the biggest thing I realized about teaching games is that they still are supposed to be games. Before actually working on P1, I imagined a learning game as something that would be more like a fun in-class activity than an actual game. I was thinking it would need to be something like flash cards or a trivia game or something, but in reality, I felt that we were able to make an actually engaging and fun game. I think the most important part of making the learning game fun, was making sure that the learning was deeply ingrained in the core of the game’s mechanics. For our game Cook Off, this took the form of the budgeting and meal system. Our game was not designed to teach someone complex facts, but instead to help give people practice in budgeting food. Since the desired outcome here was to give people experience in budgeting, it meant that when we were tweaking and modifying the game, the same things that made the game more fun and engaging to play, were also reinforcing our learning goals. It was really cool to be able to almost “forget” about the learning goals and to instead really focus on the balance of the game. I think this project has really shown me that if the learning is ingrained enough into the mechanics themselves, learning does not have to come at the expense of fun. It was really cool to see others playing the game and having fun playing it, even when there were issues in the mechanics. I think my group got really lucky in that our game was pretty fun even when it wasn’t totally working as we wanted it to, because it meant we could spend a lot more energy on balancing and tweaking. We came up with the broad idea for the game, i.e. ingredient cards and meal cards, almost immediately, and it was very cool to get to make smaller changes and seeing how they affected the fun people had.