The HTI2 Journey

The HTI2 journey has been an eye-opening journey that has taught me many lessons. It has also been a journey that was tumultuous, confusing and sometimes frustrating.

The journey was interesting for me because HTI2, like HTI1, explored many philosophical topics that were of benefit to me as a game designer. The exploration of these topics has opened my eyes to many issues about the outside world and about myself that I would not have known otherwise. The HTI2 journey has also forced me to think about and understand many issues—most notably creative thinking—that I would not have otherwise did on my own. Some of these issues have actually influenced my design philosophy on games and design and helped me make better designs, especially the thought provoking issues about creativity.

The frustration that I have faced on the journey was, for one, to the very open-ended nature of the lessons, as it has given me much difficulty when it came to completing my assignments. As the requirements were very open-ended, I had much difficulty in determining the scope of many assignments, worrying that too small a scope would compromise my grades, while too big a scope would stress me out. Assignments that were given out were also very large in scope—the creativity game and the novums were all works that needed a lot of effort and time if a quality piece of work was to come out of them. I would often find myself in frustration doing these assignments as I would be unable to make these works at the level of quality I envision them to be due to the sheer scope of these assignments. I have a little perfectionist streak in me in that I cannot tolerate work that falls below a certain quality, and yet HTI2 often forces me to hand in work which I consider subpar because of time constraints. HTI1 was a better experience for me simply because it requested work of smaller scope, allowing me to make sure that the works which I hand in are of a certain quality standard.

I believe that having assignments that are smaller in scope will allow for a better HTI2 experience not just for me, but for everyone. I often find that HTI2 is trying to achieve too much given the amount of time. Take, for instance, the cramping of the Creativity Game project and the Novums project all into one semester. If only one project was chosen as the assignment, with many checkpoints given to students across the semester, the final product would have been a much better one for everyone as we will be able to focus on them more.

I feel that there should also be a clearer HTI2 “plan”. The one that we have worked with this year was a little vague in terms of what content we were exploring at the moment.

That said, HTI2 was still a beneficial journey for me. The “softness” of it made me independent in terms of my own learning and planning, and the assignments have made me better in determining the suitable scope of my projects given a certain timeline.