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Tag: Reflection

Podcast Reflection: Valorant

Student Posts

As the Co-producer of this episode titled “Valorant”, I assisted Andy Kim, the main producer in researching, analyzing, drafting, and recording. However, we agreed to let the main producer take heavy responsibility and initiative in shaping the goal and final effects of the episode. Throughout the process of making this podcast, I worked alongside Andy and learned about his passion about the game Valorant. Unlike Among Us, which is a game unfamiliar to us at first, Valorant is a game that Andy and I do play in our free time. Because of that, we spent time to specifically talk about how we should move out of a “player’s mindset” and work on developing analysis and arguing a valuable thesis. And I was thrilled to find out that we successfully switched from the perspective of being a player to the perspective of being a researcher.

In fact, we spent numerous efforts to avoid showing how great or popular Valorant is in the market, but to offer critical analysis about this game, like what messages it delivers, and what skills or qualities it helps people build, and why these things can benefit us in other aspects of our lives.

We met challenges like time management, setting a heavy and unrealistic goal, and overcomplicating our arguments. Under a tight schedule to finish our podcast, we still decided to find and incorporate three good sources from our research. We obviously set up a goal that was too aspirational and grand to manage.

Reflecting on Groundhog Day

Student Posts

As a member of the production crew for Groundhog Day, I played the main idea person in our twine game. The game generated incorporated a large portion of my ideas and thoughts. To make sense of the twine game assignment, my group used brainstorming to develop ideas that wanted to be heard with no negative feedback, then deciding on the favorite images to be brought into the game. The game was designed to the best of our abilities. I did not have to employ any technology or writing strategy for my role; I mainly just wrote down my ideas on our shared google doc, where we all discussed them. In preparing to present our game to the class, we made a presentation and split it according to our development. I feel like the final product could be a great insight into the high school atmosphere of a senior going through the pandemic. If I could do it repeatedly, I would not do a single thing differently about our twine game.
Working on the twine game, I learned to employ group brainstorming strategies that openly engage in the product. I developed new technological skills on twine because it was a brand new platform for me. Throughout the project, my group used an open environment procedure for game development. The development of Groundhog Day was much like my writing process, blurting out all of my ideas for the assignment, then working at what material works well. I am most proud of about Groundhog Day because it allowed everyone to voice whatever concerns or ideas they wanted for the game without judgment. It was a new process for me, and I hope to bring my development style of videogames to my writing in the future.

Twine Game Reflection

Student Posts

My main role in creating the twine game was to create the story. I needed to establish a backstory and key character conflicts for the main character in order to progress the theme of hopelessness, perseverance, drama, and conflict during quarantine. We decided to focus on the story of the game first, and then we would move onto the mechanics of the game and putting it into twine. After the story, we wanted to think of ways we could engage the player in our game. One mechanic we hoped to include was a meter that tracked two different factors, health and resolve. These things were measured by tracking the character’s physical, mental, and social health as well as energy/drive, achademics, trauma, and future. We tried to add as much positive feedback into the game as possible. Since twine is more of a coding program and its difficult to work together, we decided to make Ranjan in charge of putting the game itself into twine, while the rest set up the framework for the game. In our game we did a very good job of involving the player by giving them decisions to make, and allowing them to see their decisions play out in game. By doing this I learned how to portray themes through the actions and decisions a character makes. I had to methodicaly decide which action made which bar go down. This will help me in future writing because it will allow me to analyze characters better because I have experience creating one myself.

Game Comparison Reflection

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The main thesis of the essay is about how the coping of trauma propagates the feeling of empathy for the characters involved who are jumping over the imposing hurdles of trauma.

I thought that writing an inductive essay was much harder than writing a deductive essay. In my writing upcoming, I was accustomed to writing a standard 5 paragraph essay: the introduction states the main thesis of the essay, the 3 body paragraphs each support the main thesis with different reasonings, the conclusion paragraph brings the essay to a natural ending and reinstates the main thesis. Saving the thesis for the very end felt weird to do. From a structural viewpoint, I feel like writing the body, support paragraphs following the introduction helps me as a writer because I am constantly aware how to connect the body paragraph back to thesis. When I have the thesis at the end, especially when the thesis is underdeveloped, writing a thesis statement that forcibly connects the body paragraphs seems difficult to do.

In frank words, I am not sure I correctly followed the Professor Morgen’s intended structure. The purpose of the prompt to compare 2 games—in my case, Gris and Gone Home—I wrote the first 2 paragraphs contrasting the clearly different games. I then dedicated the last 2 paragraphs to how the games involve the theme of trauma and coping of trauma. The very last paragraph continues the discussion of the third paragraph and connects how the characters’ dealing with trauma forces us to empathize with the characters.

I learned about the inductive essay format because it was my first time writing it. I was surprised at how challenging it was for me to write it. I’m not sure if the difficulty originated from the fact that I hadn’t played the 2 games for a long time or because of the inductive essay structure. If I had a choice, I would much prefer writing a deductive essay than an inductive essay.

Find the game comparison essay here

Game Comparison Reflection Post

Student Posts

To structure my essay in a reversed order is an exciting but challenging try for me. I enjoyed the process of simply starting to write without worrying about a big, eye-catchy, and demanding thesis. However, as I went further, I noticed that I lost track of what I wanted to say. I jumped from ideas to ideas and it was hard for me to keep writing, being confused and not knowing where I really wanted the essay to go.

There were three parts of this essay. The first two were two contrasts that I recognized and the last part was a main thesis part…

I learned that writing in a reversed order does not mean that we do not need to know what we’re supposed to write about from the beginning. It actually means that we need to have a better sense of what we’re writing.

To read my Game Comparison Essay, please click here.

Twine Game Reflection

Student Posts

Making a new game was definitely a new process for everyone in our group. We were confused and had no idea at the very first. Approaching deadline, we started to dig deeper in the topic and focus more on the phase “social issue”. It was the breakthrough of our work and we started to brainstorm from there. Since we all watched different dramas from all over the world, we raised the idea that why not we adapted the idea from the Japanese TV drama “Unnatural” to design a game talking about school violence, knowing that school violence is becoming more and more common these years and the power of the internet cannot be ignored. With the consent of all group members, we started to write our original adapted plots. I mainly focused on writing the original adapted plots by rewatching the episode again so that the other team members could revise it into a game format. To make it more engaging, we made it different choices, so that players could be absorbed into the story in the game while playing it and reading some fun choices. The plots are revealed as a conversation format with some dark background musics. The final product took us a big amount of time and we gradually went very into this assignment; we divided each part of our introduction of presentation to our game properly before game. The product looks very good to all of us and we were satisfied about its reflection on the society.

Podcast Reflection – Super Odyssey in Quarantine

Student Posts

In this episode of the series, I serve as the team’s producer. The process of developing and producing our podcast is very straightforward but also challenging. I firstly picked up a game that should be familiar with many people. But this version of the game, Super Mario Odyssey, also has its distinction from the previous version that it sets improvements and builds more connections with the modern world. At first, when we were all still at the older version stage, we were hard to think about the main points we want to talk in our podcast. But once we were becoming more into the game and realizing the connections with the versions and thinking about the game as a series, we decided to analyze our podcast into three parts: something remaining, something new, the conclusion. My primary goals are to not only build connections between the new version of the game with the older ones, but also bring this week’s episode with our last two. We did this by highlighting our points, quarantine, probing, etc. Also, similar from the style of our last few episodes, I tried to remain our podcast as a casual talk to make it interesting and relaxing. And from those processes, I learned more that it is through play, real life, and creation, we are able to create more and more possibilities; the skills in broadcasting and video-editing are definitely new to me and will be useful in my future life.

Twine game reflection

Student Posts

My experience making a Twine game was challenging yet interesting. Since I was doing it on my own and taking all the roles, I had the freedom to steer the story to the direction I want without compromising with anyone else. Learning how to use Twine and making sense of the mechanics was a problem at first. After knowing how Twine work, I immediately thinking of Tangaroa Deep, a game we played this semester, since it involves picking out options to progress through the game. I wanted to create a game that follows a chronological order but at the same time has multiple unpredictable outcomes depending on how a player plays the game. Tieing that idea with a social issue, I made a video vlog type of game in which I show a day in the life of a college student in the pandemic. This kind of daily vlogs were really popular on youtube in the past and I think they are even more relevant now when life satisfaction is low.

Overall, I think the presentation turned out well and I made some progress in writing the plot. The overall tone of the game is depressive and monotonous, which are emotions and thoughts of my character. Going forward, I will make a tragedy happen, possibly suicide of a fellow classmate due to mental health issues and some unfortunate events. This will cause the main character to be grateful for what he/she is having compared to others in these trying times – a roof to stay under, strong internet connection, an education he deserves, etc.

Making a Twine game was also a unique experience. It forces me to think in multiple scenarios and dimensions rather than linearly like how I usually write an essay or story. I find it similar to coding as well, except without an objective. I create the objective for myself. Completing this project is another way I have produced content through written text this semester, as with other methods like writing a podcast episode script, reflecting on my experiences, or liveblogging games. But as stated above, when making a Twine game I have to think of different scenarios and how to connect the branches instead of thinking linearly like in other works. I have learned to think gamefully and write critically through these experiences, and I will carry them to other assignments and classes in the future.

Plague Inc. Podcast Reflection

Student Posts

As the line editor, I would still like to reflect and discuss on the process of making this episode. In our group, we usually evenly split up the work, which mean that no matter the role, we put similar amount of input and ideas into the podcast. The reason why I was assigned line editor was because I am a producer who’s more efficient in editing audio clips. For this episode, we worked on a game that I have played throughout my childhood. The Plague Inc. went viral immediately when it came out a few years ago. At the time, I did not expect an actual global pandemic to ever happen in my life. However, when we brainstorm as a group and played the game together, I realized that all the things that are mentioned in the group had happened and is happening to our world. During the podcast, I tried to contribute my personal experiences and feelings toward this game. I think everybody had a chance to discuss about specific parts of the game that they liked and relate the game to our current circumstances.

Player Narrative Reflection

Student Posts

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.

The Player Narrative: https://royf94.wordpress.com/player-narrative/

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