Before this class, I genuinely did not think about game design at all. I am a PhD student in Civil and Environmental Engineering, deep in machine learning, graph neural networks in water infrastructure analysis. Games were something I knew existed, but was indifferent. Design, to me, meant system architecture. Fun was not a variable I had ever tried to optimize for. When I signed up for 247G, I was mostly curious whether thinking about design and human interaction might quietly improve how I communicate my research. I had no idea what I was walking into.
The class concepts that stuck with me most were MDA and the idea of critical play. MDA gave me a framework I didn’t know I was missing. Mechanics are the rules. Dynamics are what actually emerges when real humans interact with those rules. Aesthetics are the emotional experience that results. That chain sounds obvious once people hear it, but internalizing it changed how I see almost every interactive system. I implemented it directly across both projects — designing Blind Spot, a social deduction card game where players trick each other while protecting themselves, and a detective mystery game where players piece together clues to solve a case. Every time we added or changed a rule, I started asking: what behavior does this actually produce at the table? What does it feel like to be accused? What does it feel like when the answer finally clicks? Those were design questions, but they were also deeply human ones. The other thing that stayed with me was critical play — the practice of playing games with intention and asking whose experience is centered, what the system rewards, what it hides. I wrote about The Resistance: Avalon, Spyfall, Gone Home, Hollow Knight, and others, and each one revealed how much meaning lives inside seemingly small design decisions.
The challenges were real. My instinct is always to model before I build. Learning to prototype fast, put it in front of people while it was still messy, and watch them play without explaining myself was hard. When a playtester got confused by something I thought was completely obvious, my first instinct was to jump in and defend the design. But over the course I learned to stay quiet, listen to why something wasn’t clear, and actually use their confusion as direction. That shift from defending to listening turned out to be the most valuable thing I practiced all quarter.
I grew in the direction of empathy for the person on the other side of a system. I now think more carefully about what it feels like to interact with something I build, not just whether it technically works. That matters in game design. It also matters in research tools meant for real communities. If I keep working on improving my games, I will playtest earlier and more often, care more about what the players tells me, and stay curious about what the players feel.
