Before taking Design for Play, I thought of games mainly as something designed for people to have fun in their free time. A game should be challenging, but overall it should give players a sense of satisfaction, pride, and enjoyment. I also thought of game designers as people who mainly try to design a game they have in mind and express the joy they want the players to experience. In other words, I thought game design was mainly about creating something fun and expressing your own idea of fun.
After taking 247G, I started to see game design differently. I realized that game design is actually very similar to design in general. A designer cannot only contemplate what they want to express. They need to consider who they are designing for and how that target audience will actually experience the final design. The same idea applies to the concepts we learned in class. MDA, formal elements, kinds of fun, puzzles, loops and arcs, and narrative architecture are not just concepts that exist separately. They should all work together to create an intended experience for a specific audience. This changed my understanding of what it means to design a game: it is not only about what I want the player to feel but also about what the player actually feels.
My individual work was where I first started making this shift. At the beginning of the semester, I put everything I read or recorded from the passage and video on sketchnotes and mind maps. Over time, I realized that their real value was actually helping me organize my own thinking. For mind maps, it helps me understand different concepts under the same topic, such as the different parts of narrative architecture. For sketchnotes, it is useful when I need to follow a way of thinking, such as how to define a cursed problem and how to approach solving it. Sketchnotes and mind maps not only simply help me collect information, but they also guide me through how to structure and connect ideas.
Critical play then gave me an opportunity to apply those organized ideas while actually playing games. One of my biggest challenges I faced at the beginning of doing critical play was that I was still thinking primarily as a player. I write down all my observations and experiences rather than analyzing why the game produced that experience. However, as I became more comfortable with the concepts from my sketchnotes and mind maps, I noticed that I started applying them automatically while playing. For example, when I play the game Tiny Room Stories, I pay attention not only to whether I enjoyed solving a puzzle but also focus on how the puzzle connected or disconnected from the narrative. I am not just asking, “Did I enjoy the game?” but also, “What design choice caused me to feel this way?” This shift in way of thinking was an important step in changing from a player’s perspective to a designer’s perspective.
I saw the same growth in my group projects. In our first project, Veil of the Throne, our main problem was not that the game was based on a familiar Mafia or Werewolf structure. The bigger problem was that our mechanics did not fully support our intended experience. We wanted players to build connections by discovering that they shared similar traits, but simply sharing a trait did not necessarily create a connection. The mechanic also felt somewhat abrupt because we were adding it onto an existing game structure instead of making it feel like a natural part of the whole game. This makes me realize that having a design intention does not mean the players will actually experience that intention. Designers cannot assume how the players will actually feel during playing. We cannot just cover our eyes and run forward with our heads down; we need to hear others’ voices and see their reactions.
In our second project, I think we showed a much better understanding of this lesson. We developed the game concept ourselves, andwe created both an enacted narrative and an embedded narrative. Players were discovering the story of the character’s former owner and the hidden story behind the car accident, while also creating their own present story through their roles in the town. More importantly, we did not rely only on our assumptions about the target audience. We tested the game repeatedly and used those tests to identify what worked and what did not. There were still moments where the feeling we intended was different from what players actually experienced, but the difference became much smaller, and we were able to fix many problems through iteration.
Looking back, I think my biggest growth in 247G was not simply learning more game design concepts. It was learning to separate my own experience from the experience I am trying to design for someone else. My sketchnotes, mind maps, critical play, and projects all contributed to this shift. I became more comfortable looking at a game from the perspective of a designer and asking what its mechanics, structure, and narrative are doing for its players.
Next time I work on a game, I want to carry this mindset with me, but I also want to improve how I manage the project itself. One important lesson I learned is that scope and time need to be considered from the beginning. In future projects, I would rather make a smaller game that is complete and well-tested than create a larger idea that becomes overwhelming and only ends up as an unfinished slice. For me, good game design is not only about having a strong idea, but also about creating enough space to test, iterate, and make that idea actually work for the people playing it.
Lastly, I want to thank all the teachers in 247G! Thank you for giving me such an amazing experience in exploring game design. This class was not only a further exploration of my interest in design, but also helped me see how broad design can actually be. Design can appear in games, in problem-solving, and in many other parts of our lives, and I am starting to see how these different forms of design can be connected. Even though they may look very different from each other, they share something important: they are all made for certain people and their needs, experiences, and perspectives.
