I really enjoyed the P2 IF game design experience! My game afforded Narrative and Discovery types of fun. It was fascinating to see how my initial focus on Henry Jenkin’s evocative narrative style (i.e., Batman-inspired story) shifted to slowly integrate other narrative styles based on the feedback my play testers gave me. Their suggestions, which resulted in a human-turned-bat main character who uncovers the missing memories of their identity and transformation, meant embedded and enacted narrative styles also emerged through the plot and characterization. These styles all interacted with each other to create a more robust game than just focusing on one could.
I also found a lot of joy in the creative writing part of this game. Not only did this game offer a much needed break from writing papers, but it also forced me to have to communicate my ideas, emotions, and beliefs in a different way than academic writing. Thinking about the philosophy of showing and not telling, I couldn’t explicitly just say to my audience, “This is the emotion I want you to get out of my game.” Instead, I had to design an experience that would take them on a journey where they felt that emotion for themselves. With the added limitation of having an entirely text-based game, I had to think even more about how to structure the plot and where to place my choice branches to build this experience.
I see the potential of interactive fiction relating to my capstone project’s topic of cultural heritage learning in informal spaces. I’m very interested in community storytelling. From just playing other classmates’ games, I experienced firsthand the power of well-designed games to open up a space to step into the shoes of someone else (the magic circle). In my qualitative research class, we’ve been talking a lot about the significance that an n=1 can have (in contrast to quantitative research). It’s one thing to just read a report on a community’s sense of belonging or see a graph of the results of a survey about this topic. And it’s another thing to actually humanize that information through individual stories, each significant because they carry information in the form of emotions, firsthand accounts of lived experiences, and implicit value systems. I think games can play an important role in humanizing information, while also sharing it with a broader audience beyond academia.
