To further help us with our ideation, we were given a task to create a blackout poem. But what is a blackout poem?

Blackout Poem –  A form of found poetry created by taking an existing text (like a page from a book, newspaper, or magazine) and blacking out most of the words to highlight a new poem formed by the remaining words

However, for our blackout poems we were given texts to do with humanitarian crises. Thing such as: Sea life in danger, Poverty, Covid, Global warming, etc.

The following is the blackout poems that I created during this session:

How did this blackout poetry exercise help me?

Blackout poetry allowed me to think outside of the box. Taking a text and subverting expectations is quite fun and creative, it also lets me entirely change the meaning of a text by something as simple as blocking out words.

This exercise helped me think out of the box when it came to researching topics and approach these topics in a more interesting perspective.

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Furthermore, we were tasked with giving the second years advice for the year ahead of them.

Honestly second year went by in a flash and I felt like I didn’t really experience it that presently. But if I could go back in time and give myself advice, this is what I’d say:

"DO NOT OVERSCOPE, Quality over quantity every time. You can do more in-depth research and go into more de- tail with your game's design and direction the smaller it is.

It's all fun and games designing GTA 6 until you have to research, map-out, design etc. a WHOLE open-world map with multiple playable characters, hundreds of NPCs, multiple endings etc.
But also HAVE FUN, design a game YOU would want to play."

I don’t know if the second years really read the advice we had to give, but I sincerely hope I was able to get someone to think twice about the plans for their projects.