Blog 17 - Interview 3 Reflection

(Click Image to listen to Interview 3)

1. What is the most important thing I learned from the interview?  

Without a doubt, discovering that educational games - or, as my mentor puts it, games for learning - aren't limited to curricular subjects has been very important thus far. I honestly feel ridiculous for not having realized this sooner, especially since it seems like an intuitive thing to pick up. To some degree, I DID know this, but I never realized how this knowledge could have helped me for my Independent Component. 

As I was completing the pre-production for my video game in my IC1, I had settled for having the educational aspects in the game be put in the 16 puzzles that are intended to be in the game. However, I couldn't help that, in a very distant but still connectable way, this was basically another setup for a "glorified quiz"; there were basically 16 questions, with 4 for each core subject (Math, English, Sciences, Social Sciences). When I said that I wanted this to be a puzzle-horror game, my true vision for the game was to have the 16 puzzles to be ACTUAL puzzles - critical thinking problems, riddles, unconventional problem-solving that can be artistic or downright gruesome. However, I also wanted to educate something (hence it being an educational game), so I thought I should settle by having each puzzle in each of the 16 classrooms simply be a problem that is related to its respective classroom (for example, in Estrada's class, the "puzzle" will be a problem that must be solved using basic algebra). I couldn't help but feel unsatisfied by this, because it felt almost like a sort of rushed addition to make it into a game. 

But it never occurred to me that not all educational games have to be curricular. They can teach a concept, and or situation. 

That's where this comes into play: in addition, the actual narrative of the game had taken a direction that I didn't initially intend, which was addressing mental illness. The main character, Sunny, will be revealed to suffer from depression, and this in itself is one of the factors that fuels the nightmarish environment our protagonist must endure for most of the game. 

Everything in the game will remain the same in terms of my IC1 and IC2. In fact, surface-wise, nothing has changed. But I have a much more defined and uniform objective now. I'm no longer constrained in making the levels/puzzles mere conventional word-problems, but actual puzzles like I originally wanted.  Moreover, my goal now will be to handle the addressing of mental illness more carefully in the game now; rather than it be a type of plot device, it will actually be essential to the underlying message. Mental illness is often faced with a lot of misunderstanding, but I have friends who battle with it constantly, and I think it would be good if this game's goal was to educate people about misconceptions about depression. 

2.  How has your approach to interviewing changed over the course of your senior project?

I have been much more at ease in my interviews, especially compared to my first one. This recent interview was unintentionally the longest out of all the ones I've conducted, but it had been done so out of sheer engagement with my mentor's wisdom. Especially because we have much more freedom with the questions, I feel more open in asking what I need from my mentor. It's also helped by the fact that, whereas in my previous interviews I was doing general researching, this interview had a much more clear goal, which was to research for my EQ.