Before taking CS 247G, I thought of play as something you do for leisure. Throughout my life, I have played games for fun. Some of my favorite games in elementary school were four square and hop scotch. Over the years, I have gotten into many card games like War and Uno and social games like Mafia. I also loved playing ipad games like Swampy and Subway Surfers and have some nostalgic memories associated with these games. Overall, I thought of games as fun things to do to pass the time and ways to get to know other people better.
I took 247G because I had to for my CS 247 requirement for HCI. However, this class has evolved to one of my favorite classes in my Stanford career. One of the last lectures about looking at games through a “feminist lens” stuck by me. I noticed themes I have seen throughout my life as someone who has volunteered a lot for women in computing. Specifically, pointing out stereotypes in games and the lack of time women have to play games really stood out to me. Overall, by looking at games from these lenses, I learned about empathy in games and how games can communicate value and shape behavior.
One of the concepts that definitely stuck by me was mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics. This concept seemed so unintuitive to me, but over time I have started to use it almost everyday. Beyond analyzing games during critical play and playtesting other games, I applied the concept a lot in both my P1 and P2 projects. When making Dealbreakers, I noticed how much mechanics matter to create a collaborative and discussion based game. When making Shrike’s Landing, I learned about how mechanics can sometimes overpower narrative and how the two should work together to create a cohesive game.
One of the biggest challenges I had was understanding how to balance all the different parts of a game, especially in P2. Making Shrike’s Landing was a great struggle for our team. In the beginning, we didn’t have a cohesive narrative, throwing out multiple narrative ideas and mechanics. However, after brainstorming, we soon settled on the narrative. After that, making the mechanics was incredibly hard. It was difficult to balance narrative with mechanics and learning how the two can complement each other to create the dynamics we wanted. It was also difficult to balance game randomness/direction with player agency and is something we iterated a lot with different designs of the board.
Thinking about all these aspects kept me up at night. I couldn’t stop thinking about feedback we received, agonizing over how we could improve our game. This led me to go to many game nights to discuss ideas and playtest. I spent many late nights working on this game and picked up calls from teammates at crazy places, including on the Golden Gate Bridge and Universal Studios.
Despite the challenge of creating a cohesive, balanced narrative game with puzzles, I grew a lot in this class. Besides just keeping up with the rapid pace, I learned how to work more effectively with a team. Most teams I have worked with are technical to some extent (all engineers) or consist of product managers/designers/developers. My team had a more diverse set of backgrounds, specifically from people who come from more creative domains like writing. I learned how to effectively work with them, even though it was hard because some people cared a lot about generation whereas I cared a lot about synthesis. Over time, we found our own niches and were a pretty great team.
However, I do feel like there are still improvements I can personally make. I took on a more “product management” type of role which comes with a bit of proactive thinking. As a result, I think at times I was too occupied with the details and process instead of living in the moment and having fun. In future iterative processes, I hope I can improve more on this.
In the end, I would like to thank my team! It was great working with them and we all brought a unique perspective to the games we made. I would also like to thank the teaching team. CS 247G was a great way to end my Stanford career and 17 years in schooling. I couldn’t think of a better class to end my time with.
My team meeting for the last time.
