Image taken from Mojang®
This is a response to Chapter 6 of Artful Design, Game
Design.
I will be responding to Principle 6.5: Reflection: Games
as a Mirror of Our Humanness
I grew up in Stowe, Vermont; a small town in a small state. I
lived a rural childhood where we grew up playing in the woods,
running through fields, building forts and fires, and of course,
always managing to scrape something and return home bloodied. My
siblings and I spent so much time outside that there was a stage
in my life where I felt like I understood the outdoors better
than I did the face I saw in the mirror.
On my twelfth birthday I asked my parents to buy me a
Minecraft account. At the time, the $25.00 it cost for a
lifetime of access seemed priceless. However, I would come to
learn that the purest aspects of the game, the principles which
drove Notch – the Java programmer of Minecraft –
to create the game, were what gave me a better understanding of
the face staring back at me in the mirror AND the
its place in the world. Building subterranean tunnels thousands
of blocks long, or traversing entire oceans in search of the
famous Mushroom islands were paramount over the pillaging and
combat which many saw as the sole purpose of Minecraft.
Chapter 6 of Artful Design articulates aspects of game
design, juxtaposing the job of a game designer to
that of a puppeteer. I would like to briefly address the
question posed on page 306, “How do we design play?” Just like
great pieces of literature, movies, and music, games may act as
an expressive medium of one's experience – as is the case in
That Dragon, Cancer, as a tool, or as an attempt to
answer the questions of how life is designed; not only that, but
what can life actually be. Kunwoo Kim’s Wednesday lecture
on Game Design similarly stated that we are better
able to put up with sadness, pain, and suffering in games as we
are better able to understand it without fearing it.
While being well versed in bushcraft at a young age allowed me
to live out my Bear Grylls fantasies, video games such as
Minecraft taught me valuable lessons about the importance
of being constructive versus destructive, and the likely reality
of losing everything you desire and starting over in life.
As I dig deeper into our third homework assignment in Music
256A, the development of an audio sequencer, I hope to employ
the principles of game design I found most important in
chapter 6: an articulation of what we believe life to be and a
guess of what we believe life can be.