Week 01 - Intro

Hi, my name is Chase Seabolt and I am taking this class because I am interested in the thought processes behind designing games and the process of designing a game in general. My best friend’s father was on the design team for Bethesda and assisted majorly on Quake Champions and Fallout 4. When he would tell us stories about things going on in the projects and let us test them, I would always be very intrigued to know more about how they were going about creating the games and less about the games themselves. I think that this class will give me a good foundation to know, in a tabletop version, what that may be like. During the chapter, Sicart says that “through play, we experience the world, we construct it and destroy it.” Thinking about how they went through all the testing and building and destroying to create those games never really came to mind until reading the chapter. Like Sicart mentions with building legos, sometimes you just need to go as high as you can just to knock it down and start over. As I play more video games than tabletop games, I am sort of just learning about games such as D&D and Magic The Gathering.

When Sicart mentions that “play is not necessarily fun.” That quote definitely resonated with me as most of the time I am playing Call of Duty I am actually not having a whole lot of fun. It is more so an escape from reality or a break from the world. However, in the next paragraph when Sicart says that “it can be addicting and destructive and may lead to different types of harm…” this quote is extremely relevant because when I am not having fun, when I am losing or just can’t seem to hit a shot. I often lose my temper, whether it be throwing a controller or headset or talking the most trash you’ve ever heard from someone with a .35KD, sometimes you play just to be angry it seems. It seems that CoD always has some sort of piece missing. A large part of that, in my opinion, is realism. While they do strive to make the game realistic, it would be nice to play games in places you have actually been or could actually go. Sicart mentions titles like “the early Grand Theft Auto titles and its fascinating renderings of possible worlds.” When we think about playcentric design, in my opinion, people will be more apt to play a game and spend more time on a game when they feel that they are actually in a space where they can be in real life. We discussed this theory many semesters ago in one of Nick Bowman’s classes in which a study was done on people from Appalachia where they played the Fallout 76 game that was set in Appalachia and they found a sense of space in that game. They have never played the game before but they knew exactly where they were.

I think that is something I find very interesting in this field and I am looking forward to learning more about it in this class!