Before this class I didn’t really consider myself a gamer or someone who had much knowledge or skill coming into the class. I felt like gaming was a fairly rare but very rewarding experience to me where I felt like I was always getting something out of the games that weren’t necessarily shared by other players. This individual experience is something that I wanted to strive for when making games of my own- making games that were enjoyable for what the player took from their playing experience rather than what a standardized experience that they were given.
I think that initially it felt really hard for me to come up with concepts for the game. I think that I felt a lot of stress for the design decisions I made to make sense in alignment with every other part of the game (Probably because I’m a virgo), which made me feel like my ideas had to be at a certain caliber before I shared them with my teammates. However, once we were a few meetings in, I began to realize that my opinion mattered as much as anyone’s considering we would also be taking the advice of random people who we play test with very seriously, and that the game should make sense for our target audience which I am a part of. I think I had a lot more fun in this class when I felt like I was making valid contributions to the shape and form of the game.
It was really interesting for me to think about game design in a more scientific way and learn all of the most important protocols and whatnot. I think what stuck with me the most was the way that mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics pronounce themselves within every game, as well as the ways that humans’ psychological behaviors are utilized in the digital space of gaming. To expand on that last point, we were taught about the ways that we can utilize humans’ pattern recognition skills, attention spans, and motivations to make appealing games. I think that this translated the most into my applications of game design through me seeking to create a feeling in players that I wanted to get across rather than one specific playing style. When it came to P2 I thought a lot about how the mechanics and imagery if our game should work together to form dynamics to match our group’s agreed upon aesthetics and I went back to my sketch note a few times.
In the future I think I would love to study the archetecture aspect of game design to a higher extent as well as components of narrative. I think there is a delicate balance the process of creating narrative through dialogue with other characters and objects around in ways that re not too obvious, yet allow small details to get across. I’m interested in the ways that both dialogue and spatial archetecture can play into this balance.
