It's been an awesome week back home, seeing faces that I haven't in weeks since my expedition to Salt Lake City for a career in video games had begun. I used this time to rest my mind a bit and think deeply about what I had learned about games in the past 6 weeks in the Master Games Studio. Did I learn anything of profound use? Find out the true meaning of Christmas? Or did I meet Damon Lindelof's creative coherence? Read on folks!
No, my answer does not involve any of those sadly but I won't let Mr. Lindelof down ( I kid, I kid).
To be honest, I have always thought of games mainly as a conduit for telling stories. The game mechanics and such were really just a means to an end. Lately I have been feeling that this is really the simplest part of games. Any game can have a story in 25 minutes. I could simply re-write Mario as a narrative where he is a low income plumber who is in a coma and what transpires in his head is Super Mario Brothers. There, a totally different narration of a video game classic that took me a whopping 2 minutes to come up with. Stories ARE important, do not get me wrong. After all I am a massive Hideo Kojima fan and all of his games revolve around massive storylines, sexy robots, and doomsday devices. However, stories are simply icing on top of what games truly offer - a game.
In my younger years, I mostly played games to see what was going to happen to my avatar or the virtual world in general. I would dislike games simply because their story element did not hold up. Now that I am designing games myself, my perspective has changed quite a bit. I took games for granted by not acknowledging how amazing and thoughtful their mechanics were developed. Composing a game is just so challenging. Stories are as well but one could make a story (quality aside) just by narrating their actions. Games on the other hand are more thoughtful. They take a bit more time to finesse. Sure you could come up with aspects and rules of a game but one that works is a whole other story.
Essentially, what I am trying to say is that I have learned to think like a game designer and I'm sad I was not born with this thought process.
Fall Break: A Reflection on Games
