When I was younger, I used to love playing games: I found so much connection from forcing my friends to text me on Pictochat after school, or asserting to my cousins that I was the best Mario Kart 7 player, to complaining to my classmates that that one guy would always steal my gold in Blooket. I thought of play as something that could easily unify, a medium where you had to engage if you wanted the best experience. Once I entered university though, that quickly faded. I still liked games, but they weren’t something I had the time to engage with anymore. In fact, I could count the amount of games I had tried in the past 3 years on one hand. Coming into this class, I was expecting to not fully delve into the importance of games as a medium. Iteration and Prototypes, maybe, no way the class was about games. I am so grateful to be proven wrong. Every week in this class has showed me not only the respect the medium of games commands both academically and socially, but how much they mean to people.
Every person I have talked to in this class, from the startup bros (no shade) to the PhDs to the people majoring far away from CS, had a massive passion for games and for the joy they created that was palpably infectious. I learned about all different games: board, roleplay, digital. And more importantly for me, I learned about people’s perspectives through how they looked at those games. My favorite Critical Plays to read and write helped expose player experiences that more directly informed what design decisions developers made and what players actually gravitated towards. Fridays reading ruminations on both games I have played and games I did not know existed and everything in between helped me understand what was actually important about them, and the effect they had on the writers and the thousands to millions of players who were also in that community.
I experienced many challenges when it came to designing for fun myself: not only did I find it tough to understand how to create the kind of community that I saw in our class play sessions and that I had experienced as a kid, there were also technical difficulties: trying to grasp different coding software for Myodyssey, trying to figure out how to create compelling cards for Gatekeeping. And of course, the Sketchnotes. The learning curve on all of these challenges helped me grow to not only become a better designer, but a better community builder. I’ll take the concepts I learned in this class and not only apply them to my work, but the way I engage with the communities I am a part of as well. Fun is one of the most powerful forces we wield and I intend to use it to uplift, the same way games uplifted me.
Shout out to Team Myopus (Hunaida, Addis, Violet, Fiona) for being the best team ever, thanks to the TAs for being so kind and approachable, and thanks to Professor Wodtke for a great class!
