Before this class, I thought about play and game design largely from the perspective of someone who identifies as “a gamer”, and I appreciate that this class asked me to think about those same subjects from a variety of perspectives with various and other relationships to gaming as a concept and an identity.
I particularly learned a lot about what games can be (rather than what I think they are or ought to be) and I am appreciative of that lens. As an example of this, in the final playtest of my P2 game, a dear friend of mine (who also is likely to identify as a “gamer”), when encountering a mini-game in level 2, jokingly said “finally, some gameplay!”, as most of the game to that point had been text-based. While I understood that he was just joking, it made me realize that my own perceptions of what counts as a game or “gameplay” has definitely been altered by this class, and that will definitely lead to me being more open to different types of game experiences in the future, both playing and making.
I was most challenged in this class by the sketchnotes and critical play assignments. I very strongly disliked the sketchnotes, as I felt that it took far longer, far more effort, and produced significantly worse results (in terms of my own comprehension and memory) than my typical notetaking / organizational strategy, which is heavily text oriented. I dreaded doing the sketchnotes because it is just simply not how my brain works; I respect that they may improve comprehension for many, but I felt like I was grasping at straws when doing them, and it didn’t help that the feedback I got was mostly “use less text and more images” (which again, directly counteracts the way that I prefer to take notes and consume information) and “make your handwriting more legible” (I’m sorry for being left-handed). Additionally, while the teaching team often reiterated that “you don’t have to be an artist to do good sketchnotes”, every example shown in class of “really good sketchnotes” just so happened to also be quite skillfully done artistically, which made that claim fall a little flat. Ultimately, it just isn’t for me, and I regret that my ability to digest the readings and other course content was hindered by the requirement to take notes in this way. While I deeply enjoyed the process of playing & writing for the critical plays (in fact, it was one of my favorite parts of the class), I can only hope that I managed to improve my writing via guesswork because, at the time of writing this, I don’t have any grades or feedback for any of my critical plays beyond mysteries and escape rooms. For the four critical plays after that, I have pretty much been flying blind with regard to if my approach was working and what the teaching team wanted to see, so I just hope it was alright.
I learned a lot about working in a group in this class. I have never been a huge fan of group projects, because I am typically the person who is a bit anal about everything and has to run around making sure all of the boxes are checked that everyone else has forgotten about. In this class, as luck would have it, I had a great team (for both P1 and P2) that was on top of it, so I didn’t have to occupy this role as much as I am used to. As a result of this, I enjoyed the work a lot more, had more fun, and gained a genuine appreciation for the benefits of collaborative projects that I didn’t have prior. While I am still more of an introverted person, and I don’t think group work is my preference, I certainly understand now how to work better in a team and play to my strengths, and allow others to play to theirs. I am very grateful for this experience, because it was unique in my time at Stanford to have teammates who were really invested in the work, and were willing to put in time and effort to bring their unique perspectives into it.
In the future, I think I will continue to try to look at developing a game from a variety of designer and player perspectives, and not just ones that are familiar to me, or that I myself share.
