I think I still have one more post to submit, so I’ll take this opportunity to share my reflections on last week’s class.

1) Josh & Ben’s Presentation

I truly appreciate the readings they selected and how closely their presentation was tied to those materials. Most of all, I admire their sincere reflections as game designers navigating the complexities of the industry while pondering the kinds of games they want to create.

I’m still reflecting on Josh’s comment that “games don’t have to be just playful.” Many profitable games emphasize the “win-lose” loop because it’s an easy way to capture players’ attention and deliver the instant gratification of winning or the sting of losing. However, as Josh pointed out—and as their game exemplifies—there’s another layer to gaming: regaining a playful experience(probably there is a better word, but for now I am going with this one ). In their game, players are drawn into the imaginative vision of fish swimming in the sky. I particularly loved this imagery because it resonated with a personal experience I had while snorkeling. Floating on the waves, with schools of fish gliding beneath me, I felt the seamless connection between the sky and the ocean. This beautifully aligns with Jenkins’ concept of environmental storytelling.

Furthermore, the act of taking photos as a core gameplay element shifts the focus away from competition, allowing players to rediscover playfulness in a gentle, introspective way. This reminds me of Unpacking, another game rooted in nostalgic gameplay. In Unpacking, players follow the protagonist through various life stages by unpacking moving boxes and arranging items in new living spaces. For someone like me, who finds joy in organizing and tidying, this gameplay was immensely satisfying. Yet, as I placed objects in their designated spots, I gradually pieced together the protagonist’s life story—a clear example of Jenkins’ embedded narrative. Like The Wide Sky is Running Out of Catfish!, this game avoids linear storytelling dictated by the author and instead invites players to engage in autonomous exploration.

This design philosophy also reminds me of a quote from a Nintendo game designer who said that great level design should encourage players to ask questions, rather than treating them as tools to complete predefined tasks. Good design respects player agency and invites them to co-create the gaming experience. Games are meant to entertain, to provide a sense of achievement, curiosity, and even fulfillment through the concretization of fantasies.

Of course, indie games like Catfish and Unpacking face challenges, especially when it comes to their niche audiences. For example, I loved Unpacking because of my affinity for organizing, but some of my friends avoided it because they found the concept of virtual housework unappealing—especially since real-life housework already feels exhausting.

2) Identification Theory in Games

Recently, in my film philosophy class, we discussed identification theory, which explores how audiences understand and connect with characters and stories in films. This connection can be cognitive or emotional. For example, viewers might identify with a female character who faces workplace discrimination due to her maternity status. The helplessness and sadness expressed by the characters affect our emotions and help the audience better understand the situation of the characters and the social issue. However, one limitation of identification theory is that we, as viewers, remain bystanders. While we might empathize with the character, we are not fully immersed in their experience. For instance, if a character enjoys eating cilantro but we dislike it, we may not fully share their joy. Instead, we substitute cilantro with something we enjoy to better understand the character’s emotions. So, we can imagine their experience, understand them, but cannot truly feel as them.

While identification theory helps explain how films extend our emotional and cognitive worlds, it also has its shortcomings. Our emotions often dissipate quickly because we are aware that film characters and scenarios are fictional. We witness their struggles, but we don’t inhabit their situations. Games, on the other hand, might foster a stronger sense of identification, offering players a more immersive experience compared to film.

Unlike films, games actively position players as agents. Whether you’re playing a Thanksgiving turkey escaping capture or a snake in Snake, you become the protagonist, not a bystander. This agent-based engagement intensifies emotional experiences, making games a potentially more powerful medium for identification.

3) The Power of Language

Travis once mentioned how reading Jenkins’ work helped consolidate his previously scattered thoughts into something more coherent. This remark reminded me of the power of language. While I initially started exploring games as a way to find alternatives to language for communication—preferring mime or dance performances over theater—I’ve come to appreciate language’s ability to shape and refine our scattered ideas.

Even when there’s no audience, the act of articulating thoughts forces abstract concepts into structured entities that can interact with the world. Language allows us to reflect, revise, and uncover the meanings hidden within our thoughts. It transforms fleeting emotions into intersubjective truths that others can understand.

At the beginning of this course, I often questioned the relationship between playing games and reading gaming theories. Personally, I enjoy reading others’ insights, but I also felt conflicted, wondering if theories could truly contribute to understanding games while playing and designing seem more direct and impactful. This internal conflict mirrors my broader experience with philosophy as an academic discipline. Philosophy often feels intangible, existing solely in the mind, in conversations, or on paper, without the accessible, interactive feature of creating a game that can be shared and experienced by others.

However, by the final class, I began to reconcile this conflict. Brandon’s presentation(and every presentation we got) on reflecting on a classic game (even though I hadn’t played it, I’d watched related videos) showed me that playing games and analyzing them are two distinct but equally enjoyable activities. Playing immerses us in the experience, while analyzing lets us extract meaning and share insights with others, seeking resonance. This duality reminded me of literary criticism: initially, I couldn’t understand why it often departed from the author’s intent, but I came to realize that reading a text and using it as material to create new interpretations are separate yet valuable activities. This concept is akin to metagaming.

4) self-reflexion in modern art

In response to the question posed in our final class—”What are games like today?”(I forgot the exact original words)—I see modern games as deeply reflective, embodying the spirit of modernism. They interrogate the medium itself, exploring its characteristics and possibilities. The theories we’ve read and our observations of games are all part of this reflective process, just as playing and analyzing games are part of the practice. Completing this reflective process requires our active participation.

Much like visiting MoMA to view modernist art, the content of the work isn’t always the focal point; the audience’s engagement, thoughts, and feelings complete the artwork. This reflective approach feels like a fitting conclusion to the course. This explanation has temporarily alleviated my doubts about critique and theory, but it might only be temporary…

Though I’ve written a lot here, I still feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface. Nonetheless, this post represents my gratitude for the course and the insights I’ve gained.

1) On the concept of “Metagaming”

Understanding Boluk and LeMieux’s concept of “metagaming” has been somewhat challenging for me, especially because much of our classroom discussion assumes that games are structured activities governed by rules. For example, Huizinga defines games as a free activity, carried out within a specific time and space, according to voluntarily accepted rules, and separated from ordinary life. Caillois extends this definition, while Suits adds that games are the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles, with the rules constituting those obstacles. In past discussions, I have embraced these explanatory frameworks because they effectively encompass traditional games, board games, and video games.

This traditional understanding of games helps explain why players can become deeply immersed in them. In the world of games, players are assigned new identities, given goals, and equipped with methods to achieve them. Even if players don’t pursue every objective, the temporary goals they adopt allow them to experience the joy of play. These traditional definitions view games as closed systems—experiences contained within a specific game.

However, Boluk and LeMieux’s concept of metagaming seeks to go further, expanding the boundaries of what constitutes play. Their intent seems to stem from a critique of the current gaming industry:

“A widely held, naturalized system of beliefs that conflates the fantasy of escapism with the commodity form and encloses play within the magic circle of neoliberal capital… In the same way that the British land enclosure of the eighteenth century transformed public land into private property, so too has the videogame industry worked to privatize the culture of games and play. Games have been replaced by videogames, and play has been replaced by fun.”

According to them, contemporary games limit our understanding and experience of play by reducing it to a purchasable commodity, one that promises temporary happiness through designed narratives, collaborative experiences, or thrilling battles. In their view, being a consumer of the gaming industry means engaging in a passive experience, where players purchase a pre-designed, predictable set of emotions and outcomes. This closed and structured conception of games, emphasizing rules, is narrow and obscures the creative potential of play.

To counter this, Boluk and LeMieux propose that metagaming is a set of practices that occurs before, after, and during play. They include the design process preceding the game, emergent player-created gameplay beyond the rules, and post-game activities such as mods or fan fiction within their broader definition of gaming. I interpret their expanded definition as an effort to emphasize the creative agency of players.

Rather than simply buying a ticket to “play” as a spectator, where the audience’s emotions are guided by a playwright, Boluk and LeMieux envision players as creators of a “play,” actively shaping the emotional trajectory. Similarly, rather than purchasing a prepackaged game designed for predictable completion, creating a game, inventing unique gameplay mechanics, or crafting fan fiction are, in their eyes, more genuine expressions of play.

Through this reflection, I can see that the innovation of metagaming lies in rethinking structured, rule-based play while critiquing a consumerist gaming industry.

However, I still believe that the traditional definitions from Huizinga and Suits retain their explanatory power. Traditional definitions better account for why we become immersed in the experience of games—because the rules, though artificial, provide players with a distinct interplay of challenge and enjoyment. In contrast, Boluk and LeMieux’s expanded scope of game-related activities, while creative, feels more parallel to game-adjacent culture or practices rather than central to the traditional concept of “game.”

2) On Deformance and Interpretation

Reading this article helped deepen my understanding of metagaming and provided insights for my presentation on “words game.” I believe Boluk and LeMieux might view Emily Dickinson’s method of reading backward as a form of play with poetry. When I read her poem “I Felt a Funeral in My Brain” in reverse order, the emotional trajectory shifted dramatically. In its original sequence, the poem builds from reason to madness, with its rhythm accelerating to a crescendo. Reading it backward, however, creates a sense of emotional contraction, from agitation to the calm stillness of death.

Our usual approach to interpreting poetry, whether by seeking the author’s creative intent or analyzing its unique stylistic features, often imposes a goal-driven framework on the reading experience. This is akin to what Boluk and LeMieux critique: treating games (or poems) as isolated products meant to be played, consumed, or interpreted within fixed boundaries. However, by letting go of these constraints—reading backward, focusing only on verbs or nouns, or treating poetry purely as a playful material—one can experience the interactive joys of creativity. This, I believe, is what Boluk and LeMieux see as the liberating playfulness that fosters creative delight.

For my presentation on “word games,” the design I chose sits somewhat between these perspectives. It is a puzzle-solving game with a single correct solution, meaning its progression aligns with a traditional structured play experience. However, its creativity stems from playful interaction with the medium of text itself. By altering the structure of words, players change the text’s content and, by extension, the entire story. This type of gameplay holds significant potential for future innovations.

1)Collaboration and Division of Labor

First, I would like to extend my gratitude to Tasha and Matthew for their efforts in structuring the project and exploring various ways to present the text, which allowed this work to successfully appear on the online platform. They also ensured that overall progress was maintained and managed the organization of meetings. I am also grateful to Melissa for her ideas and demonstrations regarding chapter breakouts, which provided us with concrete directions for implementation. Wictor’s specially designed game significantly enhanced the interactivity of our project.

During our first meeting, we had many initial ideas. Alice in Wonderland is such a classic that it has already been adapted into similar games and several films, so the purpose and form of our version were somewhat unclear to us. Given Wictor’s professional experience in game design, we even considered incorporating elements of shooting games. We also thought about how to present some of the iconic scenes from Alice in a visually engaging way, allowing players to become participants rather than merely observers bound by the text. The first meeting concluded with each person having different interpretations and ideas about the text.

Before the second online meeting, Melissa created a list identifying sections of the book that could incorporate breakout options, based on our previous discussion about providing players with different choices. Using this as a reference, we began to focus on a recurring point from our earlier discussion: Alice’s journey is a strange, absurd dream, where the dream world is filled with illogical statements, akin to the nonsensical ramblings of a dream—seemingly logical but completely irrational upon closer inspection. During this meeting, it was decided that Tasha and Matthew, both possessing coding skills and an interest in trying out platform development, would select the presentation method. Each participant chose a chapter they found intriguing, identified suitable breakout points, and considered how to integrate their own skills and creative expressions.

By the third meeting, as we began piecing everything together, it became clear that each person had a different interpretation of the bizarre and absurd aspects of the story. This diversity in perspectives made the final outcome resemble a strange, unique version of Alice‘s world.

2)My Design

Before the second meeting, I reviewed some previous projects provided on prompt pages and drafted a document expanding on the ideas discussed earlier. At the time, I considered Twine as the game platform, as not everyone in the group possessed coding skills. Twine, as a visual novel creation platform that doesn’t rely heavily on coding, would ensure that everyone could contribute. However, I appreciated Tasha and Matthew for taking on the web development task. Drawing inspiration from Wictor’s concept of a dual-world experience from the first meeting, I saw this as an opportunity to construct our own world-building narrative. In this version, players control Alice, and every choice she makes in the dream world affects a “madness meter”—the more absurd the choice, the higher the madness level. As the madness level rises, the dream world gradually fades to grey, while the real world becomes increasingly colorful. The idea is that people, through playing the game, enter a fantasy world, often drawing creativity and freedom from another world and bringing that joy and imagination back to the real world. This is somewhat akin to Murray’s idea that games attract people by transform them into new identities, offering a sense of control that is less present in the real world, and providing an opportunity for catharsis. This was my interpretation of Carroll’s work (acknowledging that there are many ways to interpret it, I chose to view it through the lens of literary nonsense, which might also reflect Carroll’s satirical take on society). However, as game designers, we needed to give players the freedom to interpret the work themselves. If players chose not to select the more “stimulating” options, the story would be interpreted as a straightforward children’s adventure narrative.

As we shifted focus for the sake of completion, we ultimately did not use Twine and instead concentrated on exploring breakout options within each chapter, allowing everyone to add their personal expressions. Considering my lack of coding experience, I wondered if I could contribute through illustration. However, due to limited time for creation, I designed options for Chapter 11, focusing not on leading the player to the correct path or a branching path but instead inserting unexpected video clips, allowing players to experience strange dreamlike sequences.

I chose video as the medium for insertion because I believe that the levels of engagement among text, video, and games increase progressively. Text, when presented alone on a webpage, can be exhausting for users without a clear reason to engage with it. Videos, on the other hand, convey a larger amount of information per second, prompting viewers to actively interpret their content, even as passive observers. Games, in contrast, offer a more active means of engagement with information that is easily absorbed by the brain.

Additionally, for the first choice involving the March Hare’s proclamation, I included a Dadaist reading video and a video about making fruit tarts (as the trial revolves around the theft of a fruit tart). Dadaism, although entirely unrelated to the story, has a serious yet nonsensical style, which I found to align well with the concept of a dream that lacks logic. The fruit tart video, in contrast, represents those dream fragments that are somewhat tied to real-life experiences but ultimately stray from rationality.

For the second option involving the judge, Bill, I included different animal videos. I thought Alice’s action of taking the judge’s pen was a particularly interesting and childlike act, so I chose to include some cute content.

The third section concerns the Hatter’s testimony, where they engage in a meaningless argument about the time for tea. Here, I included significant historical dates (such as the beginning of some brutal wars) to contrast with their trivial arguments.

In addition to video inserts, I also considered whether illustrations could capture the absurdity of the book’s text. I designed a cyberpunk-style March Hare, a design element that definitely does not belong to Carroll’s era. I also planned to have the screen filled with hats falling during the Hatter’s testimony when he mentions that he is a hat seller. I designed a steampunk top hat, a racing helmet, and a Victorian-style lady’s bonnet with a frying pan on top.

The overall design of this chapter follows Huizinga’s idea that “play is the direct opposite of seriousness”. While serious games can have educational value today, we did not want this to become a vessel for conveying educational concepts. Instead, we saw the book as an act of resistance against seriousness—much like many games themselves.