Back to School

John Scerri
Oct 8, 2016
2 min read

Finally, a new year, the second year to be precise, in Game Art and Visual Design course has started. Strangely enough I’ve been waiting eagerly for the holidays to end and be back to school studying and exploring new subjects. The first week has passed and we are familiarizing ourselves with the lecturers and course units.

The subjects seem to be all interesting and I’m looking forward to get more in depth. Our time table is not the best but it’s not the worst either. Luckily the only lecture we had on Wednesday moved on Monday and now we have a day off where we can focus more on our research.

We will also be preparing the idea for our thesis which we will be doing next year. For now, I feel a bit lost cause there are so many things I would like to explore. But that’s why we learn and do critical thinking.

What is Critical Thinking?

“Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skilfully conceptualizing, applying, analysing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.” (Criticalthinking, 2016)

In few words, Critical Thinking is the way one studies and reflects analytically on a subject. First I will be listing some interesting ideas and research about there subjects. Once I get to know them better, I can start eliminating or focusing more on ideas that are more interesting.

Looking at other people’s work and analysing them makes you realize why a project works best than other and why others fail to do so. Picking and pointing out these ideas will help you in constructing the ultimate, or at least a very good, project.

Apart from research I would like to improve the idea and get even more value out of it. Since our theme is games, I would also like to research more about feelings, reactions and immersion a human mind has towards games. Probably we will be covering this in Psychology of Play but I can focus more my research on the related idea. Once you get to know what triggers the immersion or other feelings, you can include them in your game to take the player into this journey without losing interest.

I am looking forward to this academic year and I’m sure that we will learn a lot and enjoy ourselves doing so.