Exercise #2 - Collaborative Chess - My First Day of Class

January 17th, 2014* (Date Attended)

David Cox's Game 100 (12PM-3:50PM)

This day was my first time attending the Game 100 - Introduction to Game Worlds class. This is also my first time ever being in a class that focused purely on video games. To put it very lightly, I'm excited... 

Unfortunately, I missed the first day of class due to being uninformed. As soon as I was informed, I did everything in my power to be there the second day. Thankfully, Mr. Cox (The Instructor) was incredibly welcoming and flexible. He allowed multiple students, including myself, to add into the class. Due to his adjustments, I am now able to attend the most interesting, pivotal, and most importantly applicable class in my life.

I should have been following my passion like this a LONG time ago.

Back to the point. The first day of class was the most important day of public education I have ever encountered. I was incredibly excited. The classroom seemed electric with motivation and true passion. I saw other people who loved video games just as much, if not more, than I do. My first day in class, I realized, "I'm home. I'm doing exactly what I should be doing."

More specifically, I learned more about video games in a condensed form than I ever could've imagined. It gives me great relief to hear the instructor himself has actually worked in the field in which he teaches. Mr. Cox taught us multiple techniques and values in those three hours and fifty minutes he gave us. He taught us the basics on the history of video games. We learned about what makes a video game good or bad; What makes a video game for that matter. He also discussed not disrespecting your player. Which is important!

After his presentation was over, he taught us how to use programs. More specifically, he taught us how to use a program called Freemind. Freemind is an excellent program because it visually depicts on screen the processes that typically go through a creative writer/thinker's mind. It taught me that an idea sprouts from a single idea and branches outward. It is incredibly important to utilize this program because it helps keep track of the connections within a story. Naturally, many creative writers can keep track of this in their own mind. Unfortunately for me, I am not that smart or talented. This program will definitely help me and be used in the future. I have already downloaded this program and am optimistic of its potential future use.

Now I realize that Mr. Cox's intentions on teaching us the program was to give us the ability to prototype our eventual future game. After we finished our mindmaps, he obliged us to share our ideas to the class. Many people in the class had amazing ideas much different from mine. It made me remember how diverse and unique we all are. And afterwords, we were asked to collaborate in teams with others with similar visions.

Ultimately, I ended up in a group with 5 people, really stretching the limits of groups. On average, most groups in class were of 2-3 persons. Oops. Consequentially, we learned a hard lesson that day.

We were assigned a group project called, "Collaborative Chess." The purpose of this project was to come up with a unique idea for a custom game of chess. The pieces could retain any properties we desired and we could place the pieces however we liked. It was an exciting prospect. I had never been more involved in any project in school like this. In our team was some very talented individuals. One team member suggested making the game's bjective be centered around getting all colored pieces to opposing sides. Another suggested creating obstacles in the center. We had really solid ideas I felt. But one very apparent problem came up. Time.

Time became a very serious factor because of our large group. We as a group made the mistake of using too much time discussing rather than doing. Ultimately, what ended up happening was that we were given five minutes to finish up. In these five minutes, we had to crunch time and quickly and efficiently choose a game type. We had to discard all previous ideas and take whatever idea suited best for the time we were given. We all felt if we had more time, the game would have come out better. However, we did our try our best for the time we had.

I learned many lessons from that mini project. If I ever want to work for a video game company, I must learn these key facts. Is that time is very much a factor. Crunch time in video games is a very real and prevalent thing that I must prepare for regularly; but hopefully can avoid. Another is that sometimes, too many ideas can be, not necessarily bad, but be an obstruction to true progress. Like they say, "too much thought but no action."

In summary, I learned a great deal about video games and lessons abut life itself. I am incredibly excited for this class. I feel that this is the first step. I'm finally following my heart with this class. And I feel like you can never go wrong living like that. I'm hoping that this class is the beginning of something beautiful for me.