Reflect

The Research and Communication Skills part of the course was very challenging and enriched me with a bunch of new skills which can be useful in the future.

I find topics in general quite vast. There was no simple answers to the problems we discussed and I could not construct a satisfying answer to any of them without a thorough research. Each of them required a complex solution and sometimes finding sources of information was the most difficult part.

Very good thing about the essays were question pairs making me have a look at different problems concentrated on the same topic and see which one is the most appealing to me so I can expand it. I really enjoyed few of them but to be honest if I was supposed to answer all the question pairs I am not sure if I would manage with it. I found them really diversified in terms of difficulty level.

Answering for the topics I was not very familiar with such as Human Computer Interaction or Copyright was definitely not my favourite part of the course. Both of them needed a lot of research and thinking every decision through a couple of times. Nevertheless, this kind of topics was probably the most useful in my development.

The more pleasant part of essays was focused on describing the particular features of games I have already played because I was free to use any example I wanted. The work about User Interface in the game I really like was definitely the one which improved my skill of analysing. I would be happy to see more topics like this in the future because they make me look at games I knew before from completely new perspective and find some details I have not noticed before.

I have to mention the essay about indie game developers because it definitely changed the way I used to look at games. Before the course I was only admiring the graphics but this time I was forced to pay attention to creative process and see how much experiments with various styles does it cost to create not only good-looking video game, but also to adjust the style to game’s atmosphere.

As an international student I find another advantage of the module in improvement of my English language skills. It is very easy to pick up some slang words around here but there is no much opportunities to learn specialized vocabulary. Doing research of games related topics gave me a bunch of new words useful to describe my ideas and thoughts.

To sum up, I think that Research and Communication Skills module made me more engaged and experienced in different topics associated with games design. The other useful skills I learnt are analysing, researching, selecting essential points and academic writing.