CS247G Final Reflection
Before taking this class, I thought about games the way most people do: you either like them or you don’t, and making one probably just meant coming up with something fun. I had no real framework for thinking about why something feels fun, or what a designer is actually doing when they make choices. Game design was, to me, purely intuitive.
The concept that stuck with me most was the MDA Framework. Breaking a game down into Mechanics, Dynamics, and Aesthetics gave me a language I didn’t have before. I stopped asking “is this fun?” and started asking “what is this mechanic actually producing at the dynamics level, and is that creating the emotional experience I want?” It sounds technical, but it fundamentally changed how I observe any designed experience, not just games. The magic circle also really stuck with me. The idea that entering a game means consenting to a temporary set of rules and a shared fiction made me think about player trust in a new way.
I got to apply these ideas across our projects and critical plays, which is where the real learning happened. Critical plays were honestly the hardest part of the class for me. Writing critically about a game meant holding two things at once: appreciating what a designer was trying to do while also interrogating whether it worked, or what it was doing culturally. We had to write them through such a technical lens as well, which did feel foreign to me at the start.
Group work was definitely the most challenging aspect. There were moments where my teammates were excited about a direction that I didn’t connect with at all, and I had to sit with that. But I learned that my taste is not a design principle in the end, and to be more open to other people’s opinions. The concept of design fixation became very real to me because I kept catching myself anchoring to early ideas and defending them longer than I should have. Letting go of that was a genuine skill I had to practice.
The biggest thing I’m taking from this class has almost nothing to do with games specifically. I came in expecting to have things figured out early, and this class doesn’t work that way. Playtest feedback breaks your assumptions. Your players don’t behave how you predicted. The fun you designed for isn’t the fun they found. And somehow that’s okay. Learning to move with ambiguity instead of against it was the most valuable thing I learned, and who knew that would come from a game design class!
If I keep working on anything from this quarter, it’ll be the P2 game. The second slice felt like we were finally onto something, and I want to see where it goes in the end. Thanks for the great quarter everyone! A huge shoutout to Butch and Noe for being such amazing CAs.
