Practicum 8

For my final practicum post, I've decided to reflect on Kongregate as a whole. When I first logged on to Kongregate, I thought about how I was really lucky to get a gaming website and not something that I wouldn't enjoy working on for a semester. The site itself reminded me a lot of game sites I used to frequent like Addictinggames.com. Unfortunately, I spent a lot of time playing a lot of the single player games, which I regret doing because it wasn't until later in the semester that I started to really get into the online multiplayer aspects of Kongregate. I was really interested with the challenges that Kongregate offered. I thought it was a very unique way of getting people to play certain games while also rewarding them with participation and completion badges.

Once I started playing the multiplayer games, I realized there was a whole new area of Kongregate that I hadn't discovered yet. It was interesting to me to see how the people interacted with each other in the games. Because a lot of the games were MMOs with lots of people playing at one time, I can understand how people might make "friends" with other Kongregate users and set up chats and times to play with them or other things like that. But another aspect of the multiplayer games are the ones that are more head-to-head based. While so much of Kongregate has to do with social networking, it was interesting to play people head-to-head since often times they didn't make me want to add them as my friend.

One thing that I started to play around just recently was the actual development of a game. Kongregate offers a number of tutorials, which are meant to help new developers get started by explaining what the steps are to develop a game and how the software used to develop it works. While the tutorials were very informative, it seems like you still need some amount of experience with computers to be able to figure it all out. I played with the program for a few hours and it was not coming along, but I think that if you were to spend enough time working on it and going through the tutorials, you would be able to figure it out to the point where you could at least make a very basic game.

All in all, I really enjoyed participating on Kongregate. I played a lot of fun games and have developed a much greater respect for the people who design and develop the games that I spend countless hours playing.