Week 1-4

This class was the first ever class I attended at SAE, starting on the 7th of February. I was a bit nervous before class, but also very tired because the class at the time started at 8:30 in the morning (and I'm no morning person, never have been). Thank god it was an online class because I could NOT get to campus by 8:30 in the morning—getting to campus by 8:00 on orientation day was horrible.

This first class was spent getting to know each other and getting familiar with things. Keeping this in mind, our first activity was a breakout question, which was basically being placed in a breakout room by the lecturer (Mark Thompson) with another random person and answering some questions about each other to get to know each other. I was placed in a room with another fellow classmate by the name of Callum whom I met before at orientation, and I wrote down his responses to my questions in my notes (which can be found below in the "In-class Notes" section).

After this, we had quite a philosophical discussion on what exactly a game was before moving on to how we can properly conduct research. This is where prior knowledge came in handy as I had already learned about the concept of APA referencing in high school. While Mark was talking about APA7 referencing with his source, I found a source by Griffith University that I have actually been using ever since I found it on this day, and I have found it to be quite helpful. We conducted a task here of getting into groups and finding solid sources to figure out what game Nintendo's Mario first appeared in, recording those sources using APA7 referencing, and then having Mark challenge our ability to cite our sources as we're reading out our answers to him. I managed to get an alright answer, although I did trip over my words a bit when reading my answer out to him.

After this was over with and we came back from our half-hour break, we then went into preparation for our first brief for this class. The task was to research a randomly given thing in the industry such as a genre, game, company, etc. and create a library of resources from multiple different sources about this thing. I was paired up with a classmate named Zayne who even back then wasn't very easy to get a hold of. Once we got the basics of what to do in the brief and where to find the information for it, that was pretty much where the class ended off for the day.

Honestly, with past experience in mind, I was expecting a bad case scenario in this first class. I didn't expect things to go as smoothly as they did, especially on my end with the way I felt. Sure, I felt nervous at first considering that this was legitimately my first class at SAE, but I got used to it pretty quickly and that nervous feeling went away. Besides, the hot chocolate I prepared beforehand and was drinking during the start of class eased me a bit and left a nice taste in my mouth.

From what I remember, alongside looking at the weekly slides and my notes, this class started out with the two first slides of "Games You Play" and "Scrum". "Games You Play" was basically talking about the games we played that week and what we liked or disliked about them, and "Scrum" was a check-up on how we were all going with projects and keeping up-to-date with everything. I did give some answers for Games You Play, but I can't quite remember what I said, although if I were to guess, I think it would have been DOOM because I was playing through that around that time. I can't really remember what I said in Scrum, but I'm pretty sure I was having a little bit of difficulty taking off with the brief work.

After this was out of the way, we then moved on to a reoccurring topic from last week—"what is a game?" This time, we went more in-depth on the topic (and also more philosophical)

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