Before this class, I thought about play and game design mainly as the process of creating interesting mechanics and making a game fun to play. I tended to think of mechanics as separate features: puzzles were something players solved, movement was something players used to navigate, and narrative was something delivered through dialogue or cutscenes. Through this class, I gradually realized that these elements can work together to communicate meaning and create an experience.
Throughout the class, I analyzed games such as Undertale, Monument Valley, What Remains of Edith Finch, and other walking and narrative-focused games. These analyses helped me understand how games can tell stories without relying on traditional exposition. For example, in What Remains of Edith Finch, walking is not simply transportation. The player’s movement controls the pacing of the narrative and creates a sense of intimacy and anticipation. In Monument Valley, architecture, perspective, and puzzle mechanics work together to create both the game’s world and its emotional atmosphere. These experiences taught me to look beyond whether a mechanic is “fun” and ask what the mechanic communicates to the player.
The class concepts that stuck with me most were Mechanics, Dynamics, and Aesthetics, environmental storytelling, and the idea that puzzles can themselves function as narrative devices. I began using MDA to analyze how a mechanic produces a particular player experience rather than describing mechanics in isolation. I also learned that narrative can be embedded in the environment, player movement, level design, and interactions with characters. A puzzle does not have to interrupt the story; when designed carefully, the process of solving it can become part of the story.
I implemented these ideas in my own game work, especially when working on the quest board and subtitle UI. Instead of thinking only about whether a feature worked technically, I started considering how its presentation could guide the player’s attention and reinforce the game’s atmosphere. I also became more conscious of visual consistency, character presentation, and how small interface elements contribute to the player’s understanding of the world.
One challenge I experienced was learning to balance functionality with design. It was easy to focus on implementation details and forget the player’s experience. I also found it challenging to articulate why a particular game mechanic created a certain emotional response. The MDA framework gave me a more precise vocabulary for discussing these experiences.
Overall, I grew from thinking of game design primarily as building features to thinking of it as designing a player’s experience. I became more attentive to the relationship between mechanics, narrative, environment, and emotion. If I continue working on games, I want to design mechanics with clearer narrative purposes and evaluate my work from the player’s perspective earlier in the development process. I also want to experiment more with environmental storytelling and mechanics that allow players to discover narrative meaning through interaction rather than simply receiving information.
