A New Direction: The Semester in Retrospect

New Beginnings
This semester represented a change in my academic focus. When I took on my master's project - designing a roleplaying game designed to teach activism - I knew I would need to learn to critically analyze games and learn how to view them as a designer. I had ambitions, to be sure, that I might be able to do this kind of design, and so I picked classes that would help me to develop those creative and critical 'muscles.' ART108 was the class I chose to tackle the design part of my goal.

I needed to orient myself towards game design and build up my library of texts and concepts, but also to actually *do* some design work. Knowing this didn't necessarily make the work less intimidating, but it made it feel immediate. I've played games for effectively my whole life, and they are still every bit as important to my life today as when I was younger. I play frequently - possibly more than I should - and I figured I probably knew something about what makes a game good, before the semester started. I was right, to an extent, but now I have a much fuller toolbox.

Getting to watch Extra Credits in class was just the icing on the cake

(even if - as we know - the cake is a lie)

Playing my Work
The concepts we studied in ART108 was vital to my project and my future dream of being a game designer. The work of Huizinga, the MDA framework, and Fullerton's in-depth process analysis are among the most valuable materials for my work. I feel like I have a whole new vocabulary to pull from when it comes to the components that come together to make games. Huizinga was an especially good introduction for me, as a social scientist, since the concepts he illustrated - such as the magic circle and the universality of play - meshed nicely with my anthropological training. The MDA framework gave me some tangible terminology and clarification to ideas I thought I'd understood previously, like how mechanics differ from dynamics (I think I probably conflated them in the past) and helped me to look at the different aspects of design from new angles. And the chapter from Fullerton was supremely useful to me taking the steps to conceptualize and iterate on designs - I've since purchased her book, and when I thinking of game design now, I take an iterative view, breaking down the steps and working through them systematically, rather than attempting to create designs from whole cloth.

What really made an impact, however, was getting to actually *do* design work. All the conceptual stuff in the world can't compare to doing something. Once I began doing iterative design, talking about concepts with peoples, and putting ideas together into actual prototypes, my whole way of thinking about game design changed. Since prototyping the game that has since become Spokesgoblins, I have come up with iterative designs for at least 5 other games, some inspired by that initial work, some based on other games, and some just because they sound fun. Now I start with my core concept and build out from there, making documents of my ideas and workshopping them, adding and removing elements, and changing things based on feedback and result.

I've also learned some new skills like doing basic pixel art, something I never seriously thought I could do. I'm still mostly copying other artists to start with and making changes to the initial frameworks, but I have a new eye and appreciation for art assets. I'm learning to work through what styles and approaches might work for different projects, and I have more confidence to do some simple graphic design for my games. Moreover, I've certainly enjoyed the positive feedback I've received when sharing my designs with others.

Someday this symbol may sit next to Zombie Dice and Cards Against Humanity

Takeaways
I found it to be quite gratifying to be able to work on projects with relatively open formats, getting to choose what kind of games we got to make, especially for the final. I had been so enthusiastic about my board game prototype that I knew pretty much right away that I would want to keep working on it for the final. Now that I have finished the version for the assignment, I am looking forward to creating a new prototype version to show to ever more people for playtesting, and I hope to get the game on some crowdsourcing site with the hopes of producing a finished retail version. I have a great deal more confidence in my design now that it has been played numerous times and had hours upon hours of time put into it. Hopefully before too long, Spokesgoblins will be a finished, printed reality.

The most interesting lesson I have learned from the course material is the amazing level of similarity between game design and social science research. Many of the concepts of good game design - iteration, hands-on approaches, workshopping ideas with others - have fascinating correlations to ethnographic approaches and anthropological theory. In anthropology we often have to go into the field to gather data and create hypotheses, which we test through iterative studies. Because of the varied nature of human behaviors, we have to constantly prepared to make observations and alter our theories to adapt to new data, just as game designers vigilantly test their new games on their peers and fellow players. I feel like game designed seemed so natural to me from the beginning, because I had already been learning the concepts from it for years - just under a different name.

In the end, there can be no doubt that I was able to envelop myself in games this semester - playing, designing, reading, and certainly writing, about them. It was an immersive experience that I feel made me grow both as an aspiring game designer and social science researcher. My goal now - besides making games that might someday see the retail shelf - is to take these lessons into my graduate research and to make Affinity - the game I am designing with Dr. Larry Bogad and fellow SJSU graduate student Chelsea Halliwell - an impactful game which will help to teach people about activism and social movements, which seems more and more to be a timely goal, given current geopolitical and environmental situations.

We can only hope - and design

A History of Violence - Playing Super Columbine Massacre RPG

Background
I chose to play this game for extra credit for a somewhat personal reason - in 1999, I was a sophomore in high school. I wore black clothes, listened to 'strange' music (see: heavy metal), played violent video games, and watched a lot of dark movies (for the record, little of this has changed since, besides maybe adding more color to my wardrobe). When April 20th rolled around, and news of the Columbine massacre began to dominate the airwaves, I was, naturally, horrified at the events, scared for the victims and their families, and emotionally distraught by the overall implications of the events. This was the first major school shooting that I was personally aware of, and it certainly colored my perception, permanently altering my own - and many others' - sense of safety and security while at school.

After the initial horror set in, I began to think about the effects this would have on my life. On an immediately personal level - because of the external profile I fit - I knew I would be in for a bumpy ride. I think I was instantly aware that I would be an instant target of suspicion following the massacre. It didn't matter that I was a gregarious and fun-loving kid. I knew I would be guilty by association. It didn't take long before people began looking at me a bit more cautiously. Within about a week, a bathroom on campus was defaced with graffiti making racially-changed threats of a copycat attack. I actually reported this to a teacher, and was quickly called to the school office, where I found that word had gotten to authorities that I was actually responsible for the messages. It took some explaining to clear things up, and still for quite some time I was treated like a suspect.

So playing Super Columbine Massacre RPG was a deeply personal experience for me.

The Game
For starters, the resolution of the game didn't play nice with my setup, so the text was very difficult to read. Besides that, the music and the aesthetic of the game created an almost whimsical feel that seemed very much at odd with the game itself - possibly an intentional design by the creators. The midi versions of popular alternative songs from the 90s were instantly recognizable, and somehow haunting given the circumstances. Exploring the first house and finding little relics that I instantly recalled from the news media reports at the time was a creepy reminder of all the swirling imagines and scapegoated artists at the time, such as Marilyn Manson and id Software, creators of Doom. The flashbacks to Harris and Klebold's antisocial behaviors, and the manner in which the characters interact in the game, capture a fairly believable retelling of what these two were potentially like, and the integration of their actual recorded words often serves as a striking reminder that this game is inspired by the real-life tragedy.

The gameplay was somewhat frustrating at first - I got 'caught' by cameras and hall monitors as I moved through the halls, and it was annoying to constantly be pushed back to the beginning. The lack of clear instructions for things like planting bombs in the cafeteria, and the constant need to avoid detection, did a fair job of representing how the killers executed their plan, though the lack of real consequences for detection were somewhat laughable. Collecting their weapons in the video game-like "you got CO2 bombs!" matter the game implemented was darkly comic. After that, however - when the game becomes about killing innocent bystanders - it got a bit too real for me. It was difficult to click the attack buttons, knowing that this was based on real events, even if I knew that this game was attempting to deconstruct these events in a critical way. The killers' celebration of each kill made me feel a bit queasy, and stalking through the halls to chase victims was emotionally trying. Honestly, I couldn't make it through much more of the game after the killing started. It shocked me and pushed me a bit farther than I was comfortable, and once I had breached the school again and began working through the halls, I had to call it quits for the time being. I'm not sure if I'll ever play Super Columbine Massacre RPG again, though I feel there is a strange merit to its existence.

Analysis
This game pushed a lot of buttons for me. For starters, it really does an excellent job of retelling the events, and uses plenty of information that will be familiar to those who payed attention to these events following the massacre, Moreover, it made me think deeply about what is usually kind of a under-analyzed concept in games - the implications of the killing we do in games. Slaying monsters in Final Fantasy is practically a non-point, a routine behavior I have done with glee for years. The weight of actions in this game changed that for me, at least within the context of the game.

Seeing the "Trench Coat Mafia" celebrate each kill was quite unnerving

I'm not saying that games make us killers, of course. When I play violent games I sometimes think about the actions I am undertaking - I finished Mad Max recently, and certainly though it was a bit dark that the game is basically about a rage-oholic murdering mentally ill transients in a shattered world. But I can easily disconnect that from reality, since the situation and the context are imaginary. Reality-based shooters like Call of Duty are not generally games I play, though I can certainly feel the inherent ambivalence of killing enemy combatants that seem realistic, though still the scenario is clearly fictional in my mind. In Columbine Massacre, however, it was much harder for me to separate the actions in the game from the stark reality of it, since I was acutely aware that these actions were based in reality, and that the victims were stand-ins for real people. This hit me quite hard. No other games has ever impacted me in such an emotional way that I couldn't keep playing, but this one did just that.

Still, I'm glad I chose to play. This was a powerful, personal experience. I was creeped out, mildly disturbed by the imagery and seeming callousness of it, but really I can appreciate that the creators were not glorifying violence but rather holding a light up to it, exposing the darker side of life through the powerful medium of games. For me at least, the experience was more impactful than watching a documentary film on the events, where I could separate myself from the action. Having to push the buttons to carry out the violence hit me in a profound way. I was no longer voyeuristic, and it was much harder for me to think of the victims in the game the way I would think of maniacs in Mad Max. Even with its cartoonish appears, an hour of violence in Super Columbine Massacre RPG will stay with me much longer than the thousands of hours I've spent killing fictional foes in other games, and I suspect that that was very much the intention of the creators.

Now I need to go do something a bit more peaceable, like reading War and Peace.