Final Class Reflection – Hunaida Elhassan

Before this class, I thought about games mostly as something people played for fun. I obviously knew that games took a lot of work to make, but I did not really think about how much design thinking goes into them. I did not think closely about things like what the player is being asked to do, what kind of fun the game is creating, or how the mechanics can shape the feeling of the whole experience. I wouldn’t have understood what types of “fun” a game could create before this class. I also saw play as something kind of separate from serious design work, but this class changed that for me.

One of my favorite parts of this class was the sketchnotes. At the beginning, I was mostly just trying to get the ideas down, but over time I started thinking more about layout, hierarchy, symbols, and how to make the notes actually communicate something. Over time I started to see myself getting a lot better at them, using color and contrast in smarter ways and communicating my ideas in creative fun ways.

This class also opened up game design to me in a way I was not expecting. I never realized how connected CS and design are. I realized that a game is not just code, and it is also not just a story or a visual concept. It is all of those things working together: the system, the rules, the player’s actions, the interface, the mood, and the meaning. Working on Myodyssey made that especially clear. We had to think about what the player was doing at each moment, not just what the story was saying.

I especially liked learning about embedded narrative and evocative spaces because it gave me a better way to understand how a game can tell a story through its world. In Myodyssey, we tried to make the forest do some of the storytelling. The player starts in a space that feels safer and more alive, then gradually moves into places that feel more damaged and unsettling. Things like pollution, trapped animals, and the disappearance of moss were not just background details. They were part of how we wanted players to understand the environmental message.

One lecture that really stayed with me was the one about who gets to tell other people’s stories. That felt very connected to other design classes I have taken, especially needfinding and interviews. A lot of this class reminded me of that process because we were constantly learning from players. Playtesting was not just about finding bugs. It was about seeing what people noticed, what confused them, what they cared about, and what they interpreted differently than we expected.

One challenge for me was figuring out how to turn an emotional idea into actual gameplay. It is easy to say that we wanted players to feel urgency, empathy, or sadness, but it is much harder to design mechanics that actually create those feelings. I think I grew by becoming more comfortable thinking about games as systems. I started the class thinking more from the story and visual side, but by the end I was thinking more about mechanics, player behavior, and how small design choices affect the whole experience.

This has definitely been one of my favorite classes at Stanford. It made me take games more seriously as a design medium, and it made me excited to keep learning about them. I am especially looking forward to taking Designing Serious Games because this class showed me that games can do so much more than just entertain.