I really, really enjoyed this class. I have always been interested in games – I played a lot of games like Stardew Valley or Terraria or Overcooked, but I never really considered myself a “gamer” until… I guess, now. I love analyzing media with a rhetorical, formalist lens (I’m an English major) but I’d never thought to apply those same skills to games. Now I feel like I have such a stronger grasp of what makes games feel like games and I also feel confident enough that I can make my own games — pretty easily!
I’ve always wanted to make a game like Undertale or Off — and now I have. My favorite concept in the class is the concept of spatial architecture/narrative architecture, which I feel like I apply in my life all the time. Because it’s not just games that have designed spatial architecture, but actual spaces — rooms, classrooms, campus. I also really liked that video about designing for friendships in online spaces — and I understand why League of Legends (one of my favorite games to watch) is so terribly toxic! It’s actually probably the worst game you can think of for creating friendships; it does everything wrong. There’s just a lot of ways that this class has spilled out over into my actual life because I’m an artist and designer — in my art club, for example, I literally borrowed ideating exercises from this class and got people to start being more creative. I feel like now I have the lingo and the words to articulate things that I had vaguely felt before.
The critical plays were annoying, but they got me to think quite a lot. I found it really rewarding to articulate meaningful, original theses about what games mean. I also think that they should’ve been graded harsher than they were; CS majors are so horrible at writing, and I think it’s good to whip them into shape, especially in the age of Chat. On that note — I hate Chat! Everyone who uses Chat to write should get a zero. It’s so stupid obvious when people do — they use words like DELVE and INTERESTING and UGH! The practice of WRITING SENTENCES is also the practice of CRITICAL THINKING! When people stop having to write, they also stop practicing thinking! Nobody seems to understand that writing is the same thing as thinking! PLEASE implement a NO CHATGPT policy! Chat GPT is the worst ever thing to happen to humanity! CS majors at Stanford are the “leaders of our generation” — and yet they never stop to consider what doing CS means! It’s only in classes like this that they actually are pushed to think formally — and now they can just get away with the worst, most atrocious, MID writing possible! 90% of the time, CS classes just teach you a little toy box and how to play with the tools in that little toy box. They don’t give you the critical thinking skills to wonder — hey, what happens outside of that toy box? (This is my Roman Empire. I will die on this hill.)
Anyways. Usually, when I design, I find it hard to work in teams because I have such a strong creative vision. I like to take control over the most minute details. But working in diverse teams in this class has helped me get over some of that; I also think that it was really valuable for me to have one consistent person that I worked with (Miranda) whose vision I also trusted. I actually found that having randomized teams was very valuable — as long as we wanted to make the same thing, as long as our general vision aligned, all conflicts could be resolved.
I want to keep working on our second game, A New Job, over the summer, now that we have developed the skills in this class. I learned how to do pixel art, and code in Gamemaker, and the learning curve was actually much less steep than I anticipated. I’m excited to take these skills and just do it — it’s really not that hard! And having someone to do it with makes the projects that much more exciting. I’m super glad that I took this class!
