Week 7 was Reading Week, and there was no significant new content output or new lessons. Most of the feedback from teachers and classmates has been directly reflected in the subsequent iteration. Based on the feedback from my teacher, I began to think more seriously about the need for research.

Before that, I understood research more as “supplementary references” or “justifying designs”. But looking back at the feedback I’ve received recently, I’ve realized that the problem is not whether the design is complete, but that it’s often understood in a type framework that doesn’t belong to it. This made me realize that if I didn’t actively define the context in which the project was set, others would naturally interpret it in terms of the types they were familiar with.

Therefore, I began to consciously choose to study games that were close in temperament and awareness of the problem to my project, rather than works that were similar in mechanics or scale. I’m not interested in what these games “do”, but how they handle player choices, failures, and state interpreted by the system.

Works like McPixel and Stanley’s Fable don’t provide direct design answers for my projects, but they make me know one thing: I’m not exploring an isolated direction, but rather a design genealogy that has been tried and tried.

During Reading Week, I realized that the role of research is not to justify design, but to help me understand what I am already doing and what I am having a conversation with.