My Thoughts on the Creativity Game

The creativity game was an unconventional and rather tough assignment to do. It was probably one of the hardest assignments I've had to do in my course, mainly because of my relative lack of knowledge in the topic involved. Granted, HTI has always been about exploring unknown, thought-provoking topics, but its assignments always had some kind of "guide", in the form of topics. This one just throws us into the topic of creativity and let us roam freely, so it was difficult planning for this assignment, because there was a fairly large amount of thinking we had to do.

It would've been a rewarding assignment if we had more time to do it. I think it was quite a tall order for us to have to produce a prototype in the time frame given, especially since the submission sort of clashed with our other assignments. By the time we were finished with our other assignments, we were left with a mere 1 week to put a prototype together with only a proposal that outlined the game's concepts. As a result, the entire project was quite a rush. We did not dare to explore too much, and we did not have time to do proper playtesting. If we had the entire holidays to do up the prototype (with an interim in between), I felt the end result would've been much better.

I also feel that this is an extremely demanding assignment. Making a game is a lot of work, and we're given only our holidays to complete it. While it would've been fine if we had no other assignments lined up for the holidays, this isn't the case. There are things of heavier priorities, like our studio work and portfolios, that we have to touch up during the holidays as well. Our studio work takes up a big portion of our final grade, while our portfolio is a very big determining factor in our job attachment at the end of our next semester. One of the things that I liked about HTI last year was how it was relatively light, and yet very rewarding. Most of our assignments were medium length essays that only took an hour or two to research and another hour or two to write. I feel that HTI2 has been the complete opposite, especially in the second semester--we're given so much more to do, but the things we explore always link back to some aspect of creativity. I also feel that we're guided alot less--the journal entries (especially the later ones) and this creativity game have plunged us straight into very in-depth psychology topics that took me alot of effort to understand.

If it is possible, I hope that next sememster's HTI2 can be lighter, both in terms of assignments, and in terms of how "layman" the topics we explore are. Lessons tend to plunge into the heavily philosophical side very quickly, faster than we are able to comfortably attune ourselves to the topic. I think that having a more layman approach would be more conducive to our learning, not only because we learn faster, but also because it is easier for us to follow these lessons.

I apologise if any part of this post has been offensive, but I wrote it in a very direct way to make sure I conveyed everything I felt. I can see that you put effort into designing our lessons, and I'm thankful for that. I just feel that conveying whatever I felt wasn't right about this lesson to you will make the lesson better.