Before taking CS 247G, I have always thought of games as a way to kill time. I rarely played video games, thinking that I would not be able to learn much from it. And when I played analog games, I thought of them as a means to socialize with other people. Given that I didn’t ever approach games with a serious enough attitude, I overlooked the fact that the games were delicately designed systems that had many interesting aspects worth exploring.
Thanks to this course, I mastered the framework to deconstruct games as a way to understand what makes them successful and what makes them unsuccessful. Through critical play exercise, I learned about identifying formal elements in a game and how those elements combined to bring about different types of pleasures for the player. This is also tied to the psychological needs of players, where I learnt about what brings people satisfaction and what makes people addicted to a game. I was also impressed with the potential of games to convey progressive ideas and bring about social changes. My favorite reading from the class is “Play Like a Feminist” by Shira Chess, in which Chess describes games as a playground for feminist ideas. This reading showed me that games do not just bring people pleasure but can also be used to provoke critical thinking about the contemporary social conditions and experiment with progressive conceptions. This enables me to view games in a new light, as something that a tool that could actively effect change instead of a product created to satiate people’s need for entertainment.
In addition to deconstructing existing games, I also had a go at constructing games in this class. On the one hand, game design is similar to other types of design in that it requires user testing and iteration, so many skills developed in other HCI classes are transferable to game design. But on the other hand, there are also aspects unique to game design that I had to grapple with for the first time. For instance, narrative plays a pivotal role in video games, transforming them from mere collections of challenges and mechanics into immersive, emotionally resonant experiences. But at the same time, we also don’t want the narrative to take too much attention away from the game-playing part. So it can be a challenge to maintain a good balance. In our second project, we set the focus of the game to be the series of puzzles that are unified by an embedded narrative, which the player uncovers as they explore the game world and solve more puzzles. Our team first came up with a rough idea of the narrative and then I started to design the puzzles based off of the idea. But through playtesting, I realized that the puzzles were not as closely tied to the narrative as would make the narrative an integral part of the game. So I refined the puzzles by having the player figure out what they need to achieve in the puzzles through interacting with NPCs and understanding the storyline. This way I was able to maintain the focus on the puzzles while making the narrative more relevant to puzzle-solving.
As a non-gamer prior to this class, the biggest lesson that I learnt as a designer was to not be intimidated by a design area that I didn’t have much knowledge of. This class gives me confidence that with the right framework and methodology, a non-gamer can also get started on designing games. This is something that will benefit me in the future when I enter areas that are beyond my comfort zone.
