Growing up, I always liked to host games. During recess, I would invent Tinker Bell themed tag games, recruit the fastest kids in class for elaborate races with a bag of Skittles as the grand prize, or build strange Minecraft worlds full of parkour, luck, and PvP before forcing my little brother and cousins to play them. Looking back, I realize I wasn’t just playing around, I was CS247Ging!! There’s something magical about creating an experience, setting the rules, and then watching everyone fall into play. Recess was so magical because a regular playground could suddenly become something much bigger through pure imagination. Play is a wonderful universal human experience.
I enrolled in CS247G because Lucas, Noe, and Leyth all told me about it. And Lucas, Noe, Leyth are all super cool people. The design and creative process has always been mysterious to me, and I thought that game design would be a great starting point, because everyone is familiar with games. What I didn’t expect was that the class would feel less like learning something new and more like returning to something I had forgotten. CS247G felt like being let back onto the playground.
One of the first concepts we learned was the magic circle. The idea that people willingly step into a world with its own rules and meanings immediately reminded me of recess. A patch of dead Vegas grass could become a battlefield, and the slides could become a castle. The game only worked because everyone agreed to believe in it together. Looking back, much of CS247G felt exactly like that. Every week, a room full of grown adults (though I was back in my child element) came together to play games, think critically about them, discuss why they worked, and then design our own. There was something incredibly refreshing about that, and it reawakened a kind of creativity I hadn’t exercised in what feels like forever.
The people who made recess memorable were never the playground equipment. They were the friends you played with. For me, that was Rat Pack <333
Both P1 and P2 taught me an enormous amount about teamwork. More than anything, I learned about what I think of as ideation magic. It’s a creative spark that can only emerge when multiple people are building on each other’s thoughts. Some of my favorite moments were not when we solved a design problem, but when I watched an idea evolve in completely unexpected ways in real time. One teammate would suggest something strange, another would connect it to a completely different experience, someone else would challenge it, and suddenly a brand new concept would appear. It genuinely felt magical. I realized that some ideas simply never come to fruition alone. They require a team. Watching that process up close gave me a much deeper appreciation for collaboration than any group project ever has.
Our team motto became “Rat Pack moves fast,” and I think that captured our design process perfectly. We would rapidly prototype ideas, playtest them, fail, learn, and immediately iterate again. Through that process, I discovered that design itself is an incredibly difficult challenge. I originally thought the hardest part of games was the technical implementation, which is one reason we chose an analog game for P2. Instead, I learned that balancing fun, challenge, narrative, and player behavior is often harder because there is no correct answer. As a game designer, you really could iterate forever…
Perhaps the most important lesson I learned was to go with the flow. Design is messy. I’ve seen entire mechanics disappear and wild ideas emerge unexpectedly. During one of our final classes, Christina showed a messy, circular version of the d.school design process. Seeing that diagram brought me relief because it perfectly reflected our experience. Good design is not linear because the uncertainty is the process.
Most importantly, this class taught me how to enter a flow state. Some of my favorite moments happened when I stopped worrying about outcomes and became fully immersed in creating, testing, and playing alongside others. On the last day of class, Rat Pack gathered together for one final round of Squiggle Monster Battles. Looking around the room, I realized that CS247G had brought me back to recess. It reminded me that creativity is messy, collaboration is magical, and sometimes the best thing you can do is trust the people around you and start playingggggg. And draw squiggles…
