I used to love playing video games growing up. Nintendo DS and the Wii when I was younger, and CSGO and Valorant throughout middle school and high school. I loved them so much that my parents became concerned and said I wasn’t allowed to play video games during weekdays (despite me finishing all my homework and getting good grades). The message was clear back then: video games are bad, a waste of time, and inhibited progression towards professional goals.
So before this class, I thought about play as something that was looked down upon (even taboo may I say?). Especially in an intense academic environment such as Stanford, I found myself constantly maximizing every minute of every day in order to become the most hyper-efficient version of myself I could possibly be. But I quickly realized that this is not how humans were created to live. We’re not machines, we don’t have infinite stamina. We get tired, worn out, and beaten down by life. Prior to tearing my ACL + meniscus, I used soccer as my main outlet to destress and forget about all the worries of life. After the injury, however, I can’t really remember the last time I engaged in play. Because the injury took away my biggest passion in life (soccer), it meant more time spent in the library.
But then came 247G. Meeting so many people who loved to play games was striking to me, especially at a place like Stanford where I assumed most people were – like myself – so-called “robots” with a million things to do who didn’t care to waste time doing something as unproductive as playing games. But I can confidently say that this class completely upended the way I think about play. Rather than something that takes away from productivity, I now view it as a necessary part of human well-being. Hearing Christina during lecture emphasizing the importance of games in our lives really resonated with me, as I truly began to appreciate their beauty and importance through taking this course. I remember I re-downloaded Monument Valley (after like 10 years) coincidentally before the Critical Play on puzzles was even released. After seeing the sketchnote on onboarding in Plants vs. Zombies, I re-downloaded PvZ (after like 10 years) and now play a few levels of it every night before I sleep. I also loved the weekend nights I spent playing Babbdi and Gone Home for Critical Plays. This is all to say that 247G really changed the way I think about play and brought out my inner child, helping me rediscover how fun, joyful, and essential games can be in promoting well-being.
One concept that I particularly loved learning about was onboarding. After watching the creator of PvZ explain the reasoning behind all of his intricate, purposeful choices in the game, I grew a newfound appreciation for games and the level of thought and care put into each of them, oftentimes going right over my head as a mere player/enjoyer of the game. Reaching the same level of seamless, almost invisible onboarding as they did in PvZ was definitely hard to accomplish for our P2 game, so this is definitely something I would like to work on if I had more time. One challenge I experienced was figuring out how to turn the grand, epic vision I had for a game into a realistic project that could be completed in a matter of weeks. For P2, our group settled on a murder mystery escape room game. After having played Babbdi and Gone Home, I was envisioning a fully digital game in which players could move around freely and explore clues in their surroundings. However, then came the reality that none of our group members had game development experience. But nonetheless, I couldn’t be happier with the way our game turned out in the end. We took on a creative approach to an analog-digital hybrid game that utilized a companion app to facilitate gameplay without the need for human moderation.
I also loved the end product of our P1 game (Actify!). In fact, one of my group members and I were seriously considering putting it on Kickstart or another similar website, joking about the passive income we could be earning in the process (or even making a living off of it rather than having to live a life of SWE). In the future, I would love to further polish + refine our P1 game and potentially release it to the public…stay tuned.
