Tag: player narrative reflection

My https://muditajainn.wordpress.com/player-narrative/  (player narrative) revolves around how liking board game made me an odd one out in my friend circle and how games inspire me to follow rules. Acknowledging these facts was already big leap for me, leaving the writing part aside. I employed a different strategy while writing. I let the conclusion drive me writing unlike my Literary Narrative. The narrative begins with analysing what my love for games led me to. It is followed by an instance where I discovered how being a player had impacted me. Writing this player narrative prompted my realisation that I had never actually broken rules inspite of not being fond of them.

Image: Clicked by me

Read my Player Narrative here!

My Player Narrative primarily focuses on the role of games in my life as ‘social tools to make connections with people’. At least for the past 18 years of my life, games have always been about the memories and relationships I created while playing them, and not really about how they have directly impacted the way I think and behave.  Although I have to say, I have begun observing the latter more so over the past few weeks, thanks to the thought-provoking discussions we’ve been having in my English writing class in college.

While writing the Literacy Narrative, I believe I was more controlled and structured in my writing. I was afraid of how it would be perceived, and so I mostly steered clear of taking big risks. In the Player Narrative, however, I have really experimented with my writing style. I was more comfortable to write in a way that I’ve never written in before (a choice that could easily and terribly backfire). This time around, I tried to deviate from the 5-paragraph-like structure, to write paragraphs of inconsistent lengths, and to work with a more conversational tone. I’m not sure if this paid off, but it definitely gave me a lot more creative freedom to express my thoughts.

I think that the pre-writing exercise was even more helpful for this assignment. Before I did it, I could not think of anything that I wanted to / could write about. I knew I had to write about playing games, but I had no angle, no viewpoint, no theme. The listing of memories, and then particularly the continuous free writing let me spill out the total mess of ideas from my brain onto paper, and then systematically work through the mess and sort it out.

On the whole, this has not been one of the easier things I’ve worked on. I found myself procrastinating writing it until the day it was due, and even then had to deal with the non-writer’s equivalent of writer’s block. But somehow I finished it and produced a piece of writing I’m pretty unsure and semi-proud of.

In my Player Narrative, I discuss how three games: chess, Minecraft, and Fantasy Football influenced me as a player. Although I played more games, these games were the most important to me because they largely shaped me more than other games in that they showed me particular aspects of myself, such as the desire to explore (I learned this from Minecraft, from example). My literacy narrative reads like a story of my overcoming a critical flaw in the way I read and write, but my experience with games is substantially less dramatic, so I approached it in more of a “how did each game change” manner. The primary structure of my player narrative is a paragraph or two dedicated the way each game changed me and the way I learned from it. Finally, a new idea I learned is that games actually do a lot for me than I realized – I learn new things about myself.

While writing the player narrative what I felt, I was happy and nostalgic when thinking about this. But I think sometimes I questioned myself as to what I’m writing, is it right or wrong. Maybe cricket is a game only, I thought sometimes that should I write about a game which more people could relate to such as monopoly or a more common game. In the end I decided I should write about cricket, so that everyone can know that it’s not just a game. Moreover, writing for it was nostalgic as I played for my school team for 5 years, and it has been a very big part of my life.