Final Class Reflection—Akary Buenrostro

What 247G Taught Me

(The only CS class I’ve ever taken—breaking my freshman year vow to never take a CS class at Stanford. Spoiler: it was so worth it. I’m glad to graduate with it under my belt. But there’s a part of me that’s a little sad about that. I never realized how fun a CS class could be. How rewarding it felt to make something that other people could play. Maybe in a different life, I would have met all these people sooner. Maybe I would have had aspirations to make games earlier. Maybe I wouldn’t be figuring this out in my last-ish quarter.)

Before this class, I thought like a player. I knew what I liked—good music, good vibes, good visuals, stories that made me feel something—but, for the most part, I didn’t know how to make that. I was also INCREDIBLY stubborn. Hyper independent. If I had an idea, I wanted to build it myself, my way, and I didn’t really trust other people to get it right. That’s just my nature.

I did things. I played tic-tac-toe with Jeffery and realized even simple games have invisible systems. I wrote “RETCON” in my notes so many times the word itself became a joke to me. I ran playtests alone to assert that my mechanics would work. I sat in the discomfort of sharing my music—my actual music—with strangers, not knowing if they would laugh at it or ignore it or think it was embarrassing.

Some concepts stuck with me. Not perfectly. Not like I could recite them all perfectly from memory. But the magic circle gave me language for why lying to my friends in Avalon felt okay. And the idea that environments tell stories—that stuck. I started noticing it everywhere.

I grew. The biggest thing wasn’t learning Unity or Yarn Spinner. It was learning to let go. To trust my team, even when they frustrated me or trust that when they were frustrated with me that was okay too. To trust myself—not as someone who has all the answers, but as someone who can sit in the not-knowing and still move forward. I stopped being so precious about my music. I shared it. People liked it. Some people didn’t. And I didn’t die, maybe my heart skipped a beat but it kept beating.

I make no mistake in recognizing that I’m still stubborn, that will forever be my nature (thank you Dad, thank you Mom). But now I know when to dig in and when to let go, what’s worth fighting for. I know that design isn’t about being right—it’s about making something that lives outside your head. And I know that the fear of sharing my work never goes away. I just get better at sitting with it.

Maybe I’ll make more games after this. Maybe I won’t. But I’m glad I got to do it once for 10 weeks when I was 22.

And I will remember that the best thing I made this semester wasn’t a rule set or a radio script. It was the part of me that learned to share.

Thank you all. Truly. Even if I struggle to remember your names sometimes so many of you impacted me in small little ways, like when you would mention something I wrote in a Critical Play.

Love,

Akary <3

p.s KNICKS IN 4 BABY WOOOOOOOOO

SUCK IT WEMBY

p.p.s

Thank you Ryan Li for the team caricatures you drew of us, mine is surprisingly apt.