Before this class, I was already pretty familiar with the world of games, specifically videogames. I thought about games as a portal into an experience that can afford someone entertainment, socialization, catharsis, escapism, competition, learning, et cetera, since games as a medium have afforded me all those things. I thought about game design as an artform combined with pragmatic thinking (think ‘civil engineer’ skillset) that creates these experiences.
After experiencing and being part of the community of this media, both for entertainment and for art, I was decently exposed to and wanted to learn a lot more about game design. As a player, it has always been interesting to play a game and immediately understand how to play it due to the design choices that are echoed and built upon as games have evolved and influenced one another. Now, as a more jaded player, twists on similar systems or out-of-the-box mechanics and dynamics that result in a new kind of fun completely blow my mind. I’ve grown to really enjoy identifying the core parts of the games I play, and talking about that with fellow players, all for the reason of celebrating the games we love and the experiences they bring. The reason I took this class, in part, was to learn how to formally communicate game design.
Now, at the end of the journey that has been 247G, my appreciation and love for games has only grown, and a huge reason for that has been me being able to connect the experiences and thoughts I’ve had while playing games back to the course material we’ve gone through, as well as from seeing how my peers interact with games. I really enjoyed the course concepts we discussed regarding theming of a game and how we want to present it. I really love the MDA structure for breaking down a game, and ever since learning about that, I can’t help but mentally break down the games I play into those components. A large reason for this, I think, is because I find it very fun to think about what makes a certain game better than another or to identify how much a certain game has contributed. For example, if I want to discuss why a game like Enter the Gungeon is (IMO) a better rouge-like than The Binding of Isaac, now I have better tools to describe exactly why the movement and dodging mechanics create a more fast-paced game-play loop (dynamics), resulting in a more frantic aesthetic than The Binding of Isaac, all while giving more weight to the skill of the player than having the player depend on the RNG of the crazy items you find throughout a run.
The MDA structure proved really useful during development of the games in my projects, since as long as we all understood it, even someone who has only played a handful of games can identify the important components of any game they play and be able to discuss on build on top of those. It took me a long time of playing games for me to develop my own intuition on deconstructing and understanding them, so I can really appreciate MDA and how it elegantly breaks things down clearly. The formal breakdown of the different kinds of players was also really eye-opening for me, since I default to viewing games things from the perspective of the ‘bucket’ of players that I’m in.
My biggest challenge was definitely in being able to communicate my experiences with certain games to my teammates. In both my groups, I felt that we made the best progress in creating and implementing our vision for our game when we could tap into shared experiences. For P1, a lot of us shared similar experiences with casual table-top games, but not so much with the mechanics and dynamics brought up by card games, where balance is created through probability and resource-management, which is where we struggled in our part of the game. At times I had so much that I wanted to talk about from various different games to add to the discussion for our game, but I was not able to convey what I want in a way that was quickly understandable so it fell flat or I didn’t bring it up. Again, the times that were ‘hits’ worked great and the ideation was all about navigating to those ‘hits’, but the process was a little hard due to this sometimes. Communicating any game I’ve played to a person who hasn’t played it is something I want to work on.
If I keep making games, which I plan on doing to some extend, I will definitely tap into the course concepts brought up in this class, and the collaborative game-making experience has been invaluable. Thank you!
