I took this class as someone with a fairly decent background already in terms of games, especially video games, as I had tried to design some myself in the past and have looked into it as a sort of hobby for the future. However, I didn’t have as much knowledge or experience with formalized design teachings. The brainstorming and design process that I underwent in this class to design games was pretty different from the loose principles and goals I would have designed games with in the past. The idea of different types of prototyping and rapid prototyping were new to me, such as prototyping puzzles and narratives on paper with things like sticky notes and drawings. It was surprising to see how much could be learned about how a player could or would approach these concepts through such an approach prior to turning it into a formal game. For my final P2 project, our group prototyped both of our main puzzles on paper before implementing them into the game and that was an eye-opening experience for me in the fact that we could receive feedback and data about the puzzles before actually formally implementing them.
Another aspect of the class that helped and was new to me was working within randomized groups of peers. Sometimes it was challenging to get on the same page as the rest of my teammates and I had to learn the skills to successfully negotiate and communicate with others to get my ideas and desires for the games across. Luckily for me, both my groups were great to work with and I managed to make good relationships with them. Concepts and lessons such as how to brainstorm in a better way by having people individually brainstorm ideas before discussing all the brainstormed ideas once as a group also helped. I was able to directly compare these brainstorm sessions with previous one and could notice the improvement in the quality and amount of ideas presented.
Another concept of class that really stuck with me were the lessons and readings on narratives in games. Though I was already someone who respected game narratives and held them in good regard, it was good to have my thoughts and beliefs echoed by the class reading on narratives in games. I was able to think of a game narrative I had enjoyed that fell in nearly each of the different categories, though I think my favorite had to be embedded narratives. To a certain extent, and the readings echoed this, all games as a medium have great opportunity to sell a narrative through environmental storytelling and spatial elements such as level design and architecture. To that end, I think the pitch of P2 as a game that played with space was a great idea to encourage myself and others to think about how games can utilize the aspects unique to them as a medium to create narratives that can only be fully realized within games. In the future, if I produce games, I would love to play more with narrative elements in games and focus on game mechanics and player choices that can be interwoven and explored with these narratives.
