After doing this week's reading and attending Kunwoo's lecture on artful games, I feel that I now have a very different understanding and view of games than I did before. Growing up, I had mostly considered video games as something to do when I had free time and purely for entertainment purposes. In my childhood, I played a lot of arcade games with my dad when I was little, and played some PS3 games when I went to my friend's house. As I grew older, I still never really considered playing games as a part of learning or experiencing something, but rather something that was the opposite of school especially as schoolwork became more and more demanding and difficult. I played League of Legends for a while during college but saw it as a way of putting some excitement in my stressful student life or used it as a motivator for getting work done. Although the gameplay was fun and exciting, I would often feel that I didn't get much out of it but rather just wasted a lot of time each time after I played for a couple hours. I would even feel guilty about having spent so much time playing a game that I didn't learn anything from. I think this distinction between playing video games and learning was so ingrained in me possibly because of how the world generally sees video gaming, that it's bad for you and a shallow activity. Even when I was a CA for a virtual reality class in undergrad, I would observe that students either chose to make an entertaining game or an educational experience for their final projects, and the two domains have minimum overlap.

My preexisting views and opinions of video games changed significantly in the last week. The beginning of the chapter states that "play is precisely more than entertainment, it is an active and engaged expression of being ourselves," and I totally agree with this now, after having been introduced to so many games that redefined the meaning and purpose of video games for me. The introductions to That Dragon, Cancer and Save The Date in the book particularly intrigued me because these games are probably as much about real life as games can get. With these games, it really does seem that the focus is the "experience" rather than earning rewards or feeling excitement. This change of view also relieves the guilt factor in video game playing for me. Artful video games that focus on storytelling and lead to self-reflection are just as meaningful to play as movies and books that inspire us in similar ways.