Play Make Write Think

Player Narrative

Growing up in the early 2000s allowed me to experience the rise of modern gaming, as we currently know it. This unique opportunity builds upon the fact that at a young age, my only options from the toy store were board games, Legos, or action figures. Naturally, a child can only build many lego kits and imagine with so many figurines before they want to explore new trains of thought. This new outlet was playing against my parents in board games.

Board games were a quintessential part of my young life and early cognitive development. The earliest I can remember is with a classic for most children in my generation, which is Candyland. This sugar-coated game involved little strategy but a great number of counting skills. For me, it allowed for a great amount of fun when I could skip half of the game with the luck of the draw. Also, it balanced me out because whenever I landed on a licorice man square, I would be penalized for RNG sake.

Then I grew out of these “baby” games and played more advanced games that require strategy. My personal favorites, when I was younger, were Chess with my Dad and Scrabble with my Grandma. Both of these higher-skilled games boosted my abilities to be able to optimize choices to benefit me. This optimization came at a cost because these games allowed for a younger me to use copious amounts of time and energy because every move was a give it my all strategy. This led to a young me feeling drained after an hour-long Chess game or having to maximize points every turn in a game of Scrabble. Eventually, after years of practice, I moved to where I am currently.

Now, as an adult, I choose to favor games that are strictly played online. This is due to my friends and I attending schools that are so far away, but also due to their popularity in the gaming scene. Out of all of the online multiplayer games that are played on a global scale, my personal favorites have to be Counter-Strike Global Offensive and Rocket League. These games were built with an Esport in mind meaning that they are complex in two ways. They have a mechanical side along with game sense. These mechanics that I am referring to are the way that you move in a game. For Rocket League, you have to move your car on the ground as well as through the air. The game is designed for you to use a combination of buttons to lift and move how you need to. This combination and timing for button-pushing are difficult to achieve, and only a few out of the player base have mastered this skill. The other skill that I refer to is game sense. This is the intellectual basis for how to play the game. In Rocket League, the knowledge required to perform has mostly to do with how a player rotates through the field because, at its core, this is just soccer. As someone who has never played or watched actual soccer, learning this was a private dedication that allowed me to enjoy myself in a cut-throat online environment. Now, most games I play are here for me to relax from my real life. I can still learn from these games, but it is not as applicable as they once were to my younger self.

This is one of my favorite pro players Rizzo’s 3’s rotation video. I drew the possibilities that a player has to consider when looking at a still of this game.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JapoPLWrBYI

Game Comparison Reflection

https://samwordgrantden.wordpress.com/2020/12/12/game-comparison-essay/

This essay allowed me to figure out what components were necessary to make such games carry out deep emotion. In games that I analyzed, Gris and Depression Quest allowed me to see failure through a new light. As instead of just playing these games, I analyzed them to understand their deeper meanings. The new structure of writing a comparative essay without an introduction was annoying for me because I still felt as though I wrote an introduction in my first paragraph. It was brief to help a classmate see my perspective on this, but felt necessary. It was difficult to make such a “slim” essay. What I mean by this is that I explain my points and conclude. For my first time, it felt like a literary version of a PowerPoint presentation. The claims that I used were more so dealing with how the player was supposed to play and what causes were to be found. This thought process taken by both games explains how we can heal ourselves while in tough times, emotionally.

Game Comparison Essay

Gris and Depression Quest vary in their portrayal of how one can recuperate from injury over the long run. Gris proposes that casualties can create a more grounded and stronger rendition of their past self while Depression Quest suggests that injury turns into an undaunted occupant in casualties’ brains. Initially, the medium through which each game is played speaks to the vicinity of injury to the person in question. Gris is adequately a platformer, similar to the first Mario or Donkey Kong games that highlight persistent development to one side or up. Despite the fact that there are a couple of circumstances where one should move somewhat in reverse, which can be contrasted with difficulties in the recuperation stage, the following stage is regularly at the right-most area. Moving constantly right, Gris goes through the phases of despondency and closures at acknowledgment, and in doing such, she builds up many apparatuses for pushing ahead. For instance, rushes of outrage, encapsulated by angry maroon breezes, can be met with versatility, as change into an inflexible square. Each stage carries new capacities to the characters, eventually expanding the distance among injury and the person in question while debilitating the impact of injury. The game even finishes with a lovely cutscene of a foul dim snake animal, overpowered by the light, filling the divided lady’s body and restoring the shading and succeeding to the game’s setting. This is met with a last tear from the revamped stone lady, proposing injury builds up an advantageous relationship with the person in question, filling in as a dismal token of both their passionate strength and enduring scars. In Depression Quest, the game’s consummation presents to you, the player, a little further on the way to recuperation. Sensations of pity, void, and defenselessness have not continued as before – snapshots of satisfaction have traveled every which way – however there has been no conclusive pattern towards the sensation of harmony present at Gris’ perfection. Moreover, while Gris adventures a feeling of association and control – players move left and right however they see fit the job that needs to be done, it turns out to be clear, finishes development to one side – Depression Quest makes no such concession. There are no gamely assignments, such as sorting out levels or taking a troublesome leap, leaving the player scrambling to fulfill their feeling of play and waywardly giving a valiant effort to have their game character comprehend discouragement and discover achievement. Here, the snare snaps shut, as the engineers constructed the game to maintain a strategic distance from any similarity to the application Episode or The Sims. An illustration of this lies in the annihilated choices: instead of simply eliminating ways the player can’t follow, the game keeps them in the blend however crosses them out, just facilitating one’s battle to prevail as every open door for development is met with inevitable relapse to the starting point, entirely all the way to the finish. While Gris permits you to wander out of the dull spot, Depression Quest keeps you endlessly at battle with its numerous heads, each game contributing an alternate image of the consequence of recuperation from injury. 

Gris and Depression Quest offer comparable portrayals of the manner in which injury is befuddling. Despite the fact that Gris gives both a more hopeful and coordinated, story-like viewpoint of recuperation than Depression Quest, the two games speak to how recuperation from injury has much impasse. As it so happens in Gris’ down, the player is given minute guidelines from both an essential viewpoint and from an exacting one: the player basically isn’t given the console bearings for how to move. Testing plays into this, as the engineers cross classes here, infusing an open-world component into an essentially 2-dimensional game. Testing has various neurological advantages, yet the main advantage here is that it powers the player into the situation of tossing their hands noticeable all around and contemplating, in all probability in any event, considering surrendering. Thanks to examining, the game plan powers the player to look cautiously, acknowledge a specific level of dissatisfaction, and be prepared to come up short. These characteristics imitate the befuddling idea of horrible mishaps that frequently leave casualties uncertain of how to push ahead. Melancholy Quest, then again, has no open world components and gives not many occasions to examining (past the previously mentioned want to ‘dispense with’ despondency and be fruitful, which just can freely be classified under testing) since the game is played through the imageless vehicle of circumstances where one settles on decisions. All things being equal, Depression Quest utilizes the ineffective aftereffects of alternatives the player makes as a demonstration of the befuddling idea of discouragement. Initially, the decisions the player gets are frequently founded on eliminating oneself from a condition of moping rather than moving one into a condition of prospering. At the end of the day, the choices forestall torment as opposed to giving satisfaction, which puts a huge strain on the player’s fill-in objective of surpassing their psychological instability. Besides, the dim, soggy overhand that is wretchedness rapidly quenches any endeavors to discover some similarity to unwinding or achievement. You as the player need to succeed, however the current alternatives don’t take into consideration much upward portability, and when they do, the slight improvement is adequately discredited by an attack of decisions that take you back to the beginning stage. The final product of these two perspectives is that the game is equivalent amounts of confounding and disappointing, and keeping in mind that toward the beginning cynics may highlight the game structure itself and battle the story is fixed to paint an unreasonable picture of discouragement (the very unreasonable rationale that recommends those experiencing melancholy attempt to be upbeat), the dismal truth is that downturn works accurately in this style (however, note that downturn influences every individual in an unexpected way): the staggering feeling of injustice and disarray is certifiably not a game-driven component yet rather a genuine portrayal of sorrow. Despite the fact that Gris and Depression Quest vary from multiple points of view, the two of them furnish their players with an unfiltered articulation of how the way to recuperation from injury is overflowing with continuous mental fights that procure solid sensations of disarray and dissatisfaction. 

Gris and Depression Quest at last propose that the way toward mending requires deliberately making a move. The two games show that recuperation from injury is befuddling and disappointing, however the basic contrast in the two games is that while Depression Quest offers a grim viewpoint for change, Gris proposes recuperation is a characteristic game-plan that, while testing, is a fundamental cycle for development. The character in Depression Quest endeavors to take on their psychological instability by settling on decisions, however there is a characteristic mistake. Despondency Quest exhibits that only creation decisions that appear to be correct isn’t sufficient to begin the recuperating cycle. Without effectively playing a part in one’s emotional well-being, injury is an unflinching part of their life, and the closeness of the injury to their every day schedule remains precisely the equivalent. While the facts confirm that both Gris and Depression Quest portray the way to recuperation as confounding and disappointing, Gris shows the significance of conclusive strides toward mending, which exhibits that with complete advances – in any event, when they are entirely off-base and cause the 

character to relapse – one pushes ahead and can take on progressively troublesome difficulties. The main takeaway is that to recuperate from injury, one should be striking and conclusive, just as unafraid of judgment and disappointment, and with sufficient opportunity and practice committed to mending, one may not ‘beat’ injury into blankness, however they can make an adaptation of themselves that is sufficiently able to let it become a fortifying section of their character.

Visual Notetaking

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I am reviewing for a chemistry exam and I also just received an IPad for the holiday that I celebrate. By making these notes visualized, I was able to see the full breakdown of the bonds that were created in such a tricky molecule. These notes although time consuming may be useful in special cases with more visually taxing tasks.

Game Comparison Reflection

Read my essay here.

I had no difficulty starting the essay the way it was structured. I actually thought that it was a better way to write essays, even if the pattern was not the same. I first thought about things that I wanted to speak about in my essay and then I tried to figure out how it had shaped the two games and their journey overcoming trauma. Instead of playing the entire game by myself, I played both games as much as I could before I got stuck at one point trying to overcome an obstacle for a long time. I decided that watching a walkthrough of both games on YouTube, where I could actually concentrate on the characters itself rather than figuring out what to do next and it would be more efficient as I could change the playback speed. The only shortcoming to this way was that I could not stop at one place, look around and just admire the beauty of both Gris and Firewatch, which were games with excellent visuals that even helped in some character development. 

Instead of writing about the things that we discussed I based my entire essay on how I thought this game and the story it was trying to tell us through the course of the game. In doing so I actually had some trouble organizing my ideas and tried to make it not repetitive, but after spending some time just jotting down ideas and then structuring it made me happy with my end result. 

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