Personal Statement
With the current pace of everyday life, as well as the constant barrage of overwhelming problems, many people undervalue taking time to enjoy life. So it may sound weird to admit, but I like playing video games. While many people believe that this is a waste of time or simply unnecessary, I believe that these activities provide so many opportunities to learn and grow as a person; to connect with other people and experience new emotions; to discover new ideas or perspectives.
I love learning. I was once asked in elementary school if I enjoyed school and, after pondering the question for a bit, I concluded that I did. I found school enjoyable for multiple reasons. I was able to learn new things, meet people, connect with friends, and share experiences with them. Some of the most important things that I did with my friends was make video games. When I was 12, two of my favorite games were released, Portal 2 and Minecraft. These games test your brain and creativity in a variety of ways. Despite being completely different genres, these games were similar in that both were easily modifiable. One could, with a little bit of practice, create their own puzzles, mechanics, worlds, and stories. This endeavor forces the creator to try new things, to learn new skills in order to progress, and to build off of the ideas and works of others. Not only were these tools relatively simple to use, but it was also trivial to share your modifications with the world. The ability to see the works of others in the community allowed ideas to spread and be iterated on very quickly. Games like Minecraft rapidly became virtual engines unto themselves; the underlying framework which provided support for 1000s of games, stories, worlds, and shared spaces for communities.
Being that this framework was designed for other purposes, it had certain limitations. Many of the ideas I tried were simply too complex for these pre-existing games to handle. To progress further I began exploring consumer-grade game engines, such as Unity and Unreal. While these engines provided much more freedom in their design capabilities, they demanded more skills which I had not developed. As such, many of the projects which I attempted failed to materialize into cohesive playable experiences. I quickly learned that managing the scope of a project was going to be a difficult challenge and an important ability. Another way to facilitate development was to work in teams of people with diverse skill sets. Throughout high school, I worked on these projects with designers who specialized in everything from mechanics and character design, to story and world-building, to level and puzzle design. This teamwork offloaded certain tasks and greatly improved the rate at which progress was made. Working in teams was a skill that I would take into college and refine even more.
Majoring in computer science with minors in game design and mathematics, college granted me many opportunities to pursue these passions. I worked with dozens of teams on multiple game development projects, one of which was published. These projects also provided me with opportunities to take on different roles, including leadership. Serving as the lead programmer for a published game gave me a new perspective on the development process as a whole and changed the way that I look at team-based game development. Coordinating and assisting a team of programmers taught me how to maintain a codebase, and how to manage the architecture of a project at scale. It taught me how different people approach problems and implement solutions. Working in a larger team also helped expand my view of games as a whole.
As I spent less time and effort working on the technical aspects of games, I spent more time examining their content. By looking at how the characters behave, why the world is the way it is, how the mechanics complement the gameplay to perfect the overall experience of the game, I saw the much deeper, artistic meaning of the games I was both making and playing. As I started to notice these factors in games, I also began to notice them in all of the media I was consuming. In shows, movies, music, games are a form of art and, just like any other kind of art, games allow us to experience incredible, fantastical things. They can show us people whom we can empathize with, new perspectives which ask us to ponder impossible questions. They can tell us stories and provide countless new experiences. They can be reflections of ourselves, of humanity, of what we are, were, or what we hope to become. Even more importantly than that, games are fun. They allow your mind to wander or explore, free of the worries and stresses of daily life. Games have made an incredible impact on my life and I want to share these experiences with as many people as I can, and by working in this field I hope to do just that.
