Final Class Reflection

Before this class, I thought about play and game design mainly in relation to fun and entertainment. I saw games as a way to be entertained or a set of rules to master. I didn’t think much about how randomness, design decisions, or moral questions could be employed in a player’s experience in more deeper ways.

I played a great deal of different things and ideas in 247G that assisted in moving me away from that constricted view. I played deception games, walk-around games, chance games, and live service games like League of Legends. I also prototyped and watched students’ games evolve, and I saw how small design shifts could drastically affect player behavior.

There were a few ideas that stuck with me in class. One of them was the MDA framework. I learned things like how aesthetics can be so incredibly powerful in games and how random chance in games can be wrong. I learned that even a minor chance mechanism like a critical hit system can have huge impacts on fairness and addiction. Incorporating what I learned into our game, I thought deeply about the mechanics behind our first project (particularly how we should handle splitting the acting) and how to design our second project so that players had the most fun, leading to my idea of using a storybook to incorporate our narrative and guide players clearly through the game.

I definitely had some difficulties. It was hard initially to see how these theoretical notions like kinds of fun actually translate to real games. In playtesting, I saw firsthand just how hard it is to get a game balanced so that randomness is exciting, rather than irritating or boring. Another challenge was to frame my thinking about game design no longer merely as mechanics but as something that taps into human psychology, persuasion, and beauty. By enduring these mishaps, I grew a lot. I’m more sensitive today to how my design decisions are impacting players, and how simple it is to get into habits that feel great to me as a designer, but could be poisonous to players. I learned to consider not just if a mechanism works, but if it’s right for my players.

247G in total provided me with the knowledge that game design is equally about responsibility and intent with players in consideration as with creativity. Next time, I’ll take everything I learned here and apply it more intentionally. I want to keep balancing fun with fairness and making sure that every system I build is there for a reason. This class showed me how much of game design is about empathy and careful thought, and that’s something I’ll bring with me to every project in the future.