Before this class, I used to think play and game design had some value in real life — simply in the way they instill competition, collaboration, and provide great environments to blow off steam. I thought games could teach people things and bring people together, but I did not really think deeply about how the design of a game itself could intentionally produce certain behaviors or emotions in the player.
I wrote critically about certain games and I learned very valuable things about myself and my own experience playing games. I have a very hard time with thinking critically about experiences I go through — for the most part I am very happy go lucky. Being able to first confront how I might feel about something, see where things can improve, and then write about why and how those things can improve via their mechanics was a great journey. Especially learning about how certain game mechanics can contribute to certain dynamics which lead to a certain aesthetic — that framework was important in learning the language of why I experienced a certain thing in a game and really gave me the confidence to explore playing around with different mechanics to produce different dynamics and therefore aesthetics in my own game, The Cold City.
Playtesting also taught me how much you can learn simply by watching someone else interact with something you designed. Players would sometimes understand mechanics in ways I expected, but they would also find strategies, misunderstand systems, or interact with the game in ways I had never thought about. Hearing someone explain what they thought was happening while they played made it much easier to see the difference between what we intended as designers and what the game was actually communicating.
Playtesting also made me pay much more attention to whether the game was communicating our mechanics clearly. When players misunderstood cover, struggled to understand parts of the interface, or tested something because they assumed it would work a certain way, those moments were just as important as hearing that they liked something. I learned to look at those moments not as the player doing something wrong, but as information about what our design was communicating.
Going forward, I want to keep thinking about game design through the relationship between mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics. Instead of just asking whether a mechanic sounds fun, I want to ask what behavior that mechanic will encourage and what kind of experience that behavior will ultimately create for the player. I think about this all the time now even in products I encounter in the wild.
I also want to playtest earlier and more often for everything I build. One of my biggest takeaways from making The Cold City was that I can spend a lot of time imagining how someone will interact with a system, but watching another person actually play it can immediately reveal things I would never have noticed myself. I want to continue being more critical about both the games I play and the things I design.
