Play!
Huizinga described games as ‘stepping into a magic circle’. At the particular moment while you are playing the game, there is the game world and only the game world. Whether you lose or win in the game is all that matters. Of course it depends on the degree of immersiveness of the game in question. But games represent a stunning phenomenon, full of potential for education, business, entertainment and an increasing number of other fields. It might well be the ‘ideal commodity’ of this post-fordist capitalist century as qualified by Kline, Dyer-Witheford, & de Peuter in Digital Play.
I must admit I am not an avid or extremely skilled gamer though. I do not and cannot play for hours on end. Neither have I played all the games you find on the market. Yet I enjoy studying gaming and making games. The ingenuity of game mechanics, the thoroughness of game designs, the dazzling graphics and colours in games are all aspects that fascinate me.
My active attempts to delve into game design started not so long ago, but I intend to continue on this road and hopefully make a career out of it one day.
My Path
Modules I took at the National University of Singapore pertaining to Game Design and other of my experiences in related to Games:-
January – April 2007: NM2218 Critical Introduction to Gaming
This was basically a theory course on gaming. Concepts and theories such as scopophilia, immersion, play were introduced and discussed about.
January – April 2007: NM3216 Game Design
This is from where I learned most of the practical Do’s and Dont’s of game design. We built two games during the course of the module, a board/card game and a computer casual game.
May – August 2007: M2B Game World Internship
M2B Game World is an online games aggregator based in Singapore. It sells e-points, which people buy and then use to play online games like LOTR Online and Water Margin Online. It also acts as the publisher for Elan Online in Singapore. I helped mostly in the marketing department, doing market analysis, producing sales kit, and helping the company to expand into the casual games market. M2B’s websites can be found at:-
http://sg.mol.com/default.aspx ; http://playnetearth.com/
August – September 2007: EE3702 Electronic Gaming
This is a broad course giving an overview on all aspects of game development from the business side to the technical side.
January – April 2008: CS4343 Game Development Module
This module is entirely practical in nature and requires you to create a research-based 3D game throughout the semester. My team produced a casual game called Cloud Guardian (see below).
June – August 2008: GAMBIT Summer Internship Programme
The Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab is a government initiative which sponsors students in Singapore to go to MIT for 2 months to develop a game prototype. All the games developed under the program are based on a research question and the development process follows the Scrum methodology.
The Gambit website can be found at http://gambit.mit.edu/index.php
My Game Projects
DIGITAL GAMES
NON-DIGITAL GAMES
Card Game: Sinfully Happy
What: Card game created for NM3216 Game Design course
When: Created Jan – Feb 2007
Who: Team of 4 (I was in charge of all documentation)
Game Objective: To be the first to finish all your Unhappiness-tokens
Note: Resume available upon request.
Games Research
I am currently conducting my Thesis research on Serious Games and Learning. Please visit this page to view my Research page.
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