Final Class Reflection – Kelvin

Before this class I thought about play mostly as something I consumed, and I judged games by whether they were fun in a vague, ambiguous way rather than by how that fun was constructed. I assumed good design mostly meant polish because I was so used to only seeing games that had beautiful art and complex graphics. I had no real vocabulary to describe why a game worked, only the feeling that it did.

But I gained that vocabulary through lectures, sketchnotes, and mind maps, putting it all together through my critical plays. Writing about Hades really helped to solidify many of the concepts we had already learned, which is that Supergiant turned the objective from escape into return, so only by dying can you get more narrative and the chatting/gifting loops make caring about the characters another fun objective. That showed me an objective is a specific design decision rather than a given. Playing The Almost Gone and Tiny Room Stories taught me what I personally dislike and should avoid, where the rotating camera and virtual walls do the work of constraint and concealment, and where missing visual affordances become a real accessibility and enjoyment  barrier that a toggleable highlight mode could fix. MDA tied these together by letting me trace each experience  from how it felt into the mechanics a designer actually chose.

For our first project, we created Find the Farm, which is a Stanford specific hide and seek board game, where a hider picks a square on a campus map and seekers ask geographic and relational questions to close in. This forced me to make the decisions I had been analyzing in other people’s work. We designed deliberately for fellowship by iterating on how players worked in teams while letting map exploration deliver discovery. Our first prototype ran smoothly, yet it surfaced problems I had not designed for, since players needed to record what they learned and mark the squares they ruled out, so information management became a key mechanic.

The hardest lesson arrived through playtesting. When someone outside our team played the hider and told us that the role felt passive and boring, I accepted that a balanced ruleset is not the same as an engaging one, so we gave the hider strategic powers that made the role expressive. Even after the mechanics worked, a later playtest showed the game still failed its goal of social connection, which forced us to move players into pairs and finally produced the discussion we had been missing. I think that by operationalizing the different concepts we had learned in class and being very explicit about what mechanics, loops, or narrative we had compared to what we were going for, helped me learn a lot.

I grew most in learning to hold mechanics and meaning together, to see that a hider power or an object a player can touch is an intentional decision the designer is making, and that the feedback I was surprised to hear was exactly the feedback that pushed the work forward.

When I keep designing, I will prototype more ideas sooner and put them in front of strangers earlier, treat constraints as tools, and keep asking what each mechanic is actually achieving before I worry about whether it is polished.