The Forgotten Dream

This twine game is the result of a class I was in called “Non-Digital Game Design” which to me was about breaking the boundaries of the definition of a game.  And it really changed my thinking about games.  The paragraphs below are a summary of what I took away from it:

These alternative forms of game design definitely changed my way of thinking about games a lot.  Before this class, I’d say my view would be… kinda limited in a sense.  I really only saw games as the stuff I played with my friends and family.  The standard board games like chess or D&D, or the video games I played like Monster Hunter or Persona.  But the different kinds of games we made over the course of this class really added much more to my own definition of what a “game” is.  The gamepoems (Treasure Hunt, The Kindness Game, and Practice Makes Perfect) especially did this, as the interactivity of them definitely made me think they were “games”, but they were outside of what I thought a game could be at the time.  As such I really got interested in them, and ended up making my mail games both inspired from that idea (The Mirror Game and Storytellers).  Not only were they interesting and fun to make, but if I ended up liking one of the ideas I integrated into them, I could build up a more standard game from that gamepoem.  So it felt like a fun way to test some of the ideas I had for games, but in a much quicker and simpler way than making the whole game first.

The ritual game (The "What If") was also interesting to me, as it widened my viewpoint on who I could make games for.  My main reason why I want to make games is I want to make people happy.  As such, I’ve always gone into the design process with others in mind, not myself.  This project made me have to think about myself instead, which was a really interesting change for me.  It kinda showed me that I can make games for myself, and others could still relate to and enjoy what I make, which opens up a whole different design perspective I didn’t use before.

While I wouldn’t say that the relational game (Who's in This House?) challenged or added to my current design philosophy (as it kinda already fell in line with what games I like making), It did give me more experience in how to use mechanics to produce different feelings.  Seeing all the different ways people took this game assignment showed me the multitude of different ways to produce emotion.  For example,  one of my friends in this class made a roleplaying game of one terminally ill patient conversing with a friend of theirs over text.  The last rule of the game about the patient being unable to tell the other player the game was over and that they died was super impactful, and captured the feeling of someone in that scenario perfectly.  It  inspired me to mess around with that in my games and writings more.

Finally, the folk game (Ping-Pong Bowling) was just really nostalgic for me, as it brought me back to how I started making games in the first place.  When me and my friends were kids, I used to make little games like that all the time.  We would take our nerf guns and make “nerf hunger games”, or we would make a zombie apocalypse tag game that we played with a bunch of other kids in elementary school.  Making this game filled me with that same kind of childlike imagination and excitement, and reminded me of another reason why I want to make games;  Not only to make other people happy, but because I just have fun doing it.