This week we covered cooperation within games, both in gaming and the designing of. We attempted, important key word right there, to cooperate in games through playing a board game and by playing overwatch. I feel this was something that many, if not all, students within the course had experience with, though none of it really went to good use as perhaps the suddenness of doing so with people we were not wholly familiar with had the opposite effect. Through discussion, we discussed and went over the different roles within game development and the importance of playing our parts, something that we would have to put into effect for our own projects.

                The board game my group played in class was something that took teamwork and really obscured it, making teamwork almost an impossibility throughout the early stages of the game. It did explore different methods of teamwork, as teamwork was something that wasn’t possible in the early game, almost discouraged, but as the game progressed the goal of teamwork with other players would emerge despite the lack of a team objective being present. It explored the idea of teams not needing to be present, just personal goals, and morphing that into working together to achieve those goals despite the game being one where there could only be one “winner.” I feel like the game my group played embodied the idea of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” which within the game setting felt unique when conceptualizing teamwork.

                Something Fullerton briefly mentions in this week’s reading is “everybody does everything.” While we talked in class of people in teams working on what they excel at, we also talked of the importance of actually putting in work individually. Our groups aren’t these large, company scaled work forces; while it is important that we try to put our own knowledge and expertise to use, simply sticking to what we know isn’t possible in small scale projects such as what we are to be working on. These three short words describes our roles as students, and group members, pretty concisely as it covers what we spoke in class about working in groups.

                Sources

Fullerton, Tracy. Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games; Third Volume