For me the player narrative was pretty difficult to begin with, since I never have thought or reflected on the ways I play a game ever before. In contrast I was constant taught to do so for movies and books. Through this experience, I learned and realized that games could be as influential and educational as (if not more than) movies and books. As I write more, the easier it had become for me to reflect on myself. I hope that through this narrative I illustrated the message that games do not have to be competitive in order for it to be fun. Writing this piece has brought me back to the memories of putting myself into imaginary worlds of those games I have played, which was beautiful.
I never identified myself as a “gamer”. In my opinion, a gamer would be someone who “feels that their main hobby is gaming, who think about playing their game when they’re not playing it, whose conversation is directed towards video games more so than anything else, who religiously follows game websites to keep up to date with new games…”. In short terms, it means that they would be dedicated into gaming and playing multiple games on the daily. I would define myself gaming habits as a “player”. A casual player of games who gets involved from time to time, finding himself to be fascinated by certain games and only invested in one game at a time.
At a very young age back in elementary school, my grandfather taught me the rules of chess. We used to play at a local park in the morning; slowly, I began to grasp the strategies and gain an intuitive sense of the game. It was the first game that introduced me to all games. I imagined the chessboard to be a real battlefield, where two kingdoms are at war. With 32 pieces on a board, there were unlimited possibilities for me to explore ways to compete against my opponents. I started staying for hours long after the school chess club sessions end in order to learn different tactics from the coach. After a year or so, I could already beat my grandfather and my parents asked the school chess club to move me up an age group because there was no more competition in the age group. Starting from winning against peer members in my chess club, I began to compete among the older members from the local middle school. At the same time, my parents sent me to different local competitions. Soon as I reached this higher level, I began to experience losses. I kept conceding, and there were no peer players whom I could have fun with, making the matter worse. Eventually, I lost interest in playing the game. As I grew up, I shifted towards video and PC gaming just like any teenager in our generation. I started playing competitive and online video games such as NBA 2K and FIFA out of my passion for sports. Even though the gaming platforms had moved from chessboard to X-Boxes and PlayStations, the essence of the game has not changed. I was only involved in games of one on one competitions.
In seventh grade, I discovered FM. FM stands for Football Manager and is developed by the British developer Sports Interactive. I bought the game out of the love for soccer, although immediately discovering its unique qualities compared to traditional soccer video games like FIFA and Pro Evolution Soccer. FM is a sports game, yet the complete opposite of a sports game. In most sports games, the result of the game is the only thing the player gets to decide – through their gaming skills, clicking buttons, and shifting joysticks to score goals. In Football Manager, you get to controlling everything else, except for the outcome of the game. You get to control the transfer and wage budgets, propose different business initiatives for the club, hire and fire all departments of employees, and even attend press conferences before and after matches as well as player signings. Furthermore, FM offers over 500 Gigabytes of player data from all around the world, up to world-renowned teams and down to local clubs’ youth teams that I have even personally played for. The beauty of this game was in its database, its simulations, and its potential for the player to freely explore the world of a sports career while role-playing as a head coach and manager of a soccer club. As a player of this game, I learned that games do not have to be one on one competition that determines a designated winner. In the offline simulation game of FM, even analyzing data could be intriguing. What FM gave me was the ability to sit down for hours to delve into comparing abstract data values.
Gameplay from FM, an important player disappointed regarding the manager’s transfer decisions.
Entering high school, a classmate sent me a copy of The Binding of Isaac, a Biblically inspired indie game. In the game, the main character, Isaac, runs away into a basement filled with monsters in an attempt to run away from his mother’s domestic abuse. I instantly began to play Isaac day and night: for two reasons that intrigued me. The first was its playability. The game was designed in a roguelike manner where players could unlock characters, items, and new levels through auto-generated basement rooms (which look like dungeons rooms modeled after classic 80s games). Due to the vast options for items, new levels, and different monster kinds, the Binding of Isaac could be played through repeatedly and each time with different outcomes and endings. Each ending reveals a little bit more about Isaac’s memories, nightmare, and imagination towards his inner turmoil. This leads to the second way this game has influenced me. The backstory of the game was a conservative and religious family whose father-figure has left the family divorced with a desperate single and conservative mother, who infringes her ideals onto the only child, Isaac. With certain hints, for example, a transitioning of level, players could see that Isaac lost his toys from his mother in exchange for books, was locked inside his room, and forced to study the Bible, etc. Under these circumstances, Isaac began to develop illusions of monsters surrounding him, all inspired by daily items used by his mother to abuse him, as well as names and events that appeared in the Bible. In the game, you get to control Isaac to fight against those monsters, eventually leading to his mother, leading to new levels of heaven, hell, and the womb, where Isaac depicts his hints of depression and suicidal thoughts as a young child. Coming from a family with no specific religious background, I was drawn into the backstories that led to the creation of this game. From there, I began to learn more about religions and spirituality, whereas previously, I did not understand or care about why they were as important as many people consider them to be.
Gameplay from the Binding of Isaac, and its disturbing yet intriguing visual elements within a rogue-like platform.
Here is a picture of what I carry with my bag on a usual day.
My Laptop – I use it for schoolwork, music production, and most of my entertainment purposes.
Phone & Laptop Chargers – I own an old iPhone that runs out of battery quickly
Headphones/Earphones – headphones for music production, earphones for everyday use/ working out
Water – for hydration
Pen x1 – I always carry one pen with me just in case I need it
Chewing Gums – I chew gums to concentrate
Book/Magazine x1 – I always keep one in this bag for better back support
Keys – to enter my house
Since I am studying remotely in a completely different time zone, the set up of this bag is completely abstract and made-up. Attending university on zoom.us does not require me to carry a bag. My daily routine would be to go out with an iPhone and my keys which both fit in my pockets and come home at night to a desk full of notes and worksheet assignments. I intentionally placed those items in the picture because I would agree that they represent and hold some value to my interests and the way I live. It might have revealed that I am a music lover and is not organized enough to carry notebooks, folders or a pencil case. Representing myself in a catalog of the stuff in my bag is definitely a type of writing. However, I do not think that it could fully represent a person as a self-portrait since we all carry various things for different occasions. I intentionally removed some objects (tissues, money, a calculator, etc.) from my bag because I believed that they held little representation values to who I am.
This game has very intuitive control systems. I used WASD to move and right-click to pick up and inspect any object, and it was easy for me to get started. The first thing I noticed was the overall vibe of the surroundings. It was a stormy night and there is nobody at home to welcome the returning protagonist. The first thing I did was to turn on all the desk lamps and lights to make the surroundings easier to explore.
5:56
I noticed the music was not horrifying. Instead it gives off a warm yet sad vibe with strings instruments. From this I can conclude that this will not be a horror game but instead a mystery game about the protagonist’s family, likely her sibling, who left a note on the front porch about trying not to find her.
6:09
I found Sam’s backpack and her voice journal started playing as she wrote to the protagonist, her older sister about her first day in school and being identified as “the psycho house girl”. It certainly seemed like she did not enjoy her new high school experience.
6:19
I went into the protagonist’s father’s study as well as his library. It seems as if he is mostly concerned in three things: his work, the assassination of JFK, and, his daughter Sam. There were many journals and books in his rooms that showed his obsession about JFK. Above his work desk, there was a note saying, “check up with Sam” as well as a book on the library shelves about “Understanding Teenagers”.
I was in my studio when I read the prompt of this side quest. The first thing I saw was my keyboard piano. I thought that that the pattern of the keyboard is very much similar to the pattern of a crosswalk. I found a high-definition photo of a city crosswalk as the main background. Then I had to do some editing for the picture of a Juno Keyboard that I found online. The Keyboard had too much other buttons and features that would not fit in the overall image, which is why I cropped most of the keyboard, only leaving the black-and-white keyboard pattern. I thought the concept of music and street noises is interesting, so my main goal was to connect the two images into one to, making it seem like the pedestrians are coming out of the keys and going over the crosswalk. Therefore, I made the cropped image of the keyboard semi-transparent (around 60%) and merged it with the crosswalk and the pedestrians on the right side of the road.
This image is my name on a piece of abstract drawing of trees on a mountain. I modified the original color scheme to shades of blue and white to look like the colors Traditional Chinese Delft pottery. I modified the image this way because I felt that the background represents my culture’s traditional while the gray font represents a modern simplicity.
My writing process of the Literacy Narrative was natural after the pre-writing exercise. Through writing this piece, I reflected my experiences with reading and writing in English. It can be summed up into the three important lessons I learned throughout the years of learning English as a non-native speaker.
As a child, I did not learn to read in English like native speakers. In elementary schools in China, the common way to teach English was grammar lessons and vocabulary lists, the same way Spanish classes would be taught in any American high school. Hence, I wasn’t too fond of the English language. The rules to English grammar were never consistent, and I found it to be inefficient in expressing myself. This continued until I became an adolescent. When I entered middle school, I started to listen to a lot of western music. The genres I listened to varied from British rock bands to old school Hip-Hop, and artists like Pink Floyd, Nas, and Michael Jackson were the first writers who inspired me to learn English more thoroughly. I was intrigued in researching the differences between artists of various time periods and hometowns and how their lyrics would vary based on those differences. Songs like “Put It On” by Big L, “Pigs” by Pink Floyd or “Castles Made Of Sand” by Jimi Hendrix. As a result, my first memories with reading English were scrolling through music streaming, reading the lyrics line-by-line alongside their Chinese translations, while searching the words up on an electronic dictionary. Each word had its own melody to it and spoke to my heart. The words became much easier to memorize, and my use of grammar became more intuitive. I learned my first lesson: to treat a language as art, and not skill. I became more accustomed to English grammar rules and verbal conventions. My interaction with English remained this way until my family moved to New York in 2016.
Before my first day in an American high school, I have never been required to write an essay in English over 200 words. My experience with writing before was not the same. I wrote for the grades. I wrote in complex sentence structures to demonstrate that I’ve listened in grammar lessons. I replaced short sentences with long clauses full of never-used adjectives to demonstrate that I did my homework of memorizing 50 vocab words every day. And it was a difficult transition. I received unsatisfactory comments from my teachers, yet they don’t point out what’s wrong with my writing. This continued until junior year, when my English teacher asked me whether if a sixth grader would comprehend my essay. My teacher emphasized on being concise. Avoiding all repetitions and confusions over long sentences. Splitting one sentence into two. Two into four. I reached a realization that throughout all those years my goal of writing was to impress, not express. My teacher gave me my second lesson, which is to write for all people. Be more concise. It was to express my ideas in easier ways so more audience can be reached.
Finally, my third lesson of reading and writing came during the college application process. In those three months, I wrote countless essay drafts for admissions officers to read over. The process was a long struggle of trying to sound intriguing while avoiding clichés; trying to display personal talents while avoiding signs of arrogance. Nevertheless I appreciated this experience. By that last word I typed onto that last essay document, I truly had a better understanding of myself. The collection of my essay drafts becomes a full notion of my identities, my passions and traits. From this experience I learned to write in order to reorganize thoughts. Instead of writing for other people to read, I began to write for myself.
