Tag: games comparison reflection

In my Game Comparison essay, My argument is that Gris and Depression Quest demonstrate that success in recovery from trauma stems from consciously and actively working towards healing. I do this by showing that in the way they differ, Gris portrays a better picture of improving oneself while Depression Quest demonstrates the danger of being passive in recovery stages. Writing this inductive essay was weird – I’m not used to putting my thesis at the end, and my final paragraph had reasoning of its own, not just echoes, which was also new. One thing that surprised me about games in this essay is that game development is very complex. From the player end, it seems very basic apart from a few graphics, but there’s a lot of thinking that goes into each character and the decisions they make. Finally, I thought that writing this paper was a very interesting task – I’ve never actually analyzed a game (much less two) in an analytical essay, so this was a new experience for me. I think the discussions we had in class made it clear what evidence we should use in our argument.

I was incredibly nervous about writing this essay, because I was unsure about how I could use parts of games as evidence for my ideas. I also needed to refresh myself on the games, a time consuming process, as I initially played these games some time ago. When I started writing, however, I felt that looking at these games in a critical lens was not entirely unfamiliar. From class and especially from the podcast episodes, I realized I had been analyzing games all semester. 

I also thought the proposed essay structure would be difficult to follow. I actually did find it necessary to break the structure in my first part by having an entire paragraph on GRIS. I wanted to flesh out the analysis without confusing the readers between that and Life is Strange. Otherwise, though, it was incredibly odd to not have my thesis be in my semi-introductory paragraph. On the other hand, I did find that in placing my thesis in my third part, I was able to seamlessly conclude my essay with a sort of “so what?”. In the end, I really liked the way in which I intertwined trauma with the idea of alternate realities in the two games.