Final Day Reflection – What I Learned in 247G

I came into 247G not knowing much about games and not having played many of them. To me, games were always more of a pastime than anything else, and I hadn’t really thought about all the design work that goes into making them. Worried about not fitting into the traditional gamer archetype, I was surprised to be welcomed by some of the most diverse, untraditional, talented, and creative people I’ve ever met.

The first thing that broke my brain was MDA, it forced me to realize that what I was calling “fun” was actually a chain of decisions someone made long before I sat down to play. Mechanics produce dynamics. Dynamics produce aesthetics. The feeling comes from a team of designers who spent days and months building a successful architecture. And once you see that, you cannot unsee it. I picked up Monument Valley again after about eight years and immediately started noticing the embedded narrative instead of just vibing with the pretty geometric shapes.

The Jenkins reading on narrative architecture was the other one that I think of every time I play a new game. The idea that a game designer is less like a novelist and more like an urban planner, someone who builds spaces that make certain stories feel inevitable without forcing them. When our team built ReelLife, we kept this in mind and aimed to create a world where the player’s story felt like their own idea, that they really feel and resonate with the characters they are influencing.

Speaking of ReelLife: making it was genuinely hard in the funniest ways. The very specific chaos of a 12-hour cram session in Coda basement where we took breaks by throwing Ray, our stuffed Reithrodon, across the room was such a memorable experience. We playtested until the middle of the night and celebrated for small wins along the way, ending up with a piece of work we all feel proud of at the end.

The team was the thing I did not expect to love as much as I did. I will remember how Sabrina gave us the most goated Unity 101 lesson at the start of the project and carried the engineering side; how Brooke physically demonstrated how our characters would transition from quadrupedal to bipedal when they reached adulthood; how Jeffrey responded to the 1am messages every single time and make the funniest jokes; and how Jinyho brought our mascot to sessions and carried both design and code simultaneously.

What grew in me this quarter was something I’ll call design patience. I’m a painter. I’m used to being the only one in the room with the work. Whereas game building is a very collaborative process. I had to get comfortable with iteration and with incorporating feedback from people who saw the work differently than I did. Over time, I found this process to be really beautiful and enjoyable.

If I keep working on games — and I think I will — I want to keep my curiosity towards the endless possibility that fun could bring us and keep trying to produce works that bring joy.