Reflection – Storytelling

Challenge:

Storytelling helps explain the interconnections among people in situations and settings,  teaching broad lessons that engage real human beings. Listening engages people; and  empathy is an essential and fundamental component in the process. I challenged myself by  taking up storytelling for this reflection assignment. I have an idea for a game that I want to  develop and I tried sharing my design through storytelling.

Selection:

I used story-telling as a design-thinking tool to share my ideas and struggles with my  associates and peers. Stories generate questions and questions expand the breadth and  depth of stories, leading to lots of innovative thoughts and ideas. This helped them  empathize and relate to my struggles on how I went about designing my game. I used  storytelling as vehicle to carry my idea to them and helping them visual my game.

Application:

I spoke to them about my own personal experience and how I witnessed the people around  me. I shared with them my idea for a game that combined a myriad of puzzle games into  one single game with various modes and features to keep everyone engaged. I told them  about how I came about the idea and what it meant to me personally. They gave me their  own feedback on how to improve my design and approach. This helped me come up with a  better model to work with and expand upon my design.

Insight and Approach:

I found out that sharing my own experience through storytelling helped my peers better  understand my viewpoint and helped them empathize and visualize my design for the game.  I talked to them about how my childhood was spent messing around with puzzles and how  my parents encouraged me to cultivate this habit of mine. Eventually, I’d run out of puzzles  to solve, or so it seemed. The reality was that I’d just not discovered and explored all of the  endless possibilities of puzzles and various ways to solving them. This led me to devise my  own mobile/PC game called ‘Myriad’. It combines an endless myriad of puzzles for the user  to solve along with various modes and numerous levels with varying difficulties. I also  wanted to give budding game developers the resources that I myself had lacked in the  beginning and so, I plan on providing a feature in the game where the user, if they so  desired, could try their hand at creating their own puzzle game with the resources that the  game provides for a certain price in an otherwise free to play game.

My peers gave me their own feedback on how to improve upon certain areas of my game  and gave valuable suggestion on how I could market it to the consumers. They understood  my struggles and related to it as they also had similar experiences to myself. This improved  my self-confidence and gave me hope that my game could have a bright future if it is

released in the near future. As of this moment, my game is still under development but the  future for it looks bright.

