Jaeyong(Jay) Park
10.31.2021
Music 256A / CS476a, Stanford University
I have a love-hate relationship with games. In this reading response, I would like to reflect on my personal gaming history based on some of the principles of Chapter 6 of Artful Design. Growing up, I was placed in the fierce, competitive studying environment in school. I was only allowed 1 hour of gaming per week. (I sneakily played more when my parents were not around) I bonded with my friends over games, playing mobile games in school and going to the PC rooms in Korea. In a sense, gaming was a liberating, playful experience but it was accompanied by guilt from the stigma that gaming is unproductive. As much as I was in the flow while gaming, I could not erase the feeling that I could have done something more productive in the meantime.
I mostly played indie games and mini arcade games. I would easily be captivated by the game and enter the flow, devising ways to beat the game, but also enjoy the graphics and sounds of the game at the same time. Then came the game League of Legends. I never understood why it was so vastly popular in Korea. A few attempts to start the game never sparked my interest until one day I suddenly became obsessed with it. The experience was amazing at first. I could play 10 straight hours without feeling bored, heavily invested in winning the game. However, due to the structure of the cooperation game with strangers, I later found out that there was a high level of toxicity in the game. Teammates no longer were teammates when someone made a tiny mistake. Surrounding myself in such an environment wearied me off. However, after having played heavily for more than a year, I was addicted to the flow. In the game, whether I felt free or not, I was in a certain trance, detached from the real world, in the game environment. The play aspect was gone, and only a dopamine reaction was left. I would then play LoL to escape from the stress of the real world, only to be stressed even more. That is when I decided it was time to quit.
Coming to Stanford, I had that mindset with me: that gaming is detrimental. However, after seeing Kunwoo’s presentation and this chapter 6, I recalled how much I enjoyed gaming previously. Also, I was reminded of how I gamify a lot of things outside of the gaming world. I would think of assignments as missions in games or characterize the people I meet as characters in a game. I remembered how this habit of gamifying things made me more productive.