Disclaimer
You won't find anything about my educations and programming skills here, but if you are interested about who am I and what do I think about gaming in general, this page is all for you.
About Me
Just like many people who want to be a game dev, I love playing video games, especially Indie games that really tries to do something different. Not only because it is fun to see those innovative idea, but also because I could learn a lot from their design decisions and analyze what make them fun, and more importantly think about the mechanics I don't find fun and consider potential alternatives to improve them.
My Story
I played my first game when I was 8, my classmates at the time were all talking about the new Pokemon game release. I watched Pokemon anime, but didn't knew there are Pokemon games, so I begged my parents for it. They agreed to buy me the game only if I promise to play it no more than 1 hour a day. Like one would expect, I kept the promise for the first 3 days and never play for less than 1 hour everyday afterward.
Before criticizing young Daniel's lack of self control, lets ask the question why do parents hate their children playing video games? There is a common misconception that games turn people into addicted antisocial weirdos. To solve this misconception, let us trace back to the origin of "play", according to Raph Koster in "Theory of Fun", playing is animals learning survival skill in a low risk environment, just like cats playing with toy mouse is them practicing hunting.
So if playing is learning, then why almost all educational games turns into chocolate cover broccoli? That is because people really have some difficult time understanding the difference between learning and remembering. For example, just because a kid who memorized multiplication table can do math questions doesn't means he actually understand multiplication. The most important thing that makes learning different from remembering is that there can't be a fixed solution, you need to present the subject a varieties of situation, and based on what choice they make provide tangible feedbacks, and all of these are also essential to game design.
In fact, if you examine a game, digital or not, closely, you almost always could find something you learned from it, Poker make you think about possibilities, Chess make you plan ahead and think from other's position, coop games make you learn to coordinate with other, puzzle games train your ability to observe and make connections, etc. I believe in the future, games will be an essential part of education, because there are things textbooks simply can't teach you. Our current education system really don't want the students to fail because more pass equals more government fund, but learning from failure is a very important skill we all need. That is where games comes in, because you can fail a game as much as you want without any real world consequences. I would make playing through Dark Souls a required course in high school if I could.
But let us also address the elephant in the room, not every game is made with good wills. There are games that uses psychological tricks such as FOMO, habit forming, gambling addiction to keep the player engaged and drain their wallet dry. And those are the reasons why parents blame video game when their kids lock themselves inside their room all day. The nicest way I can describe my altitude toward those games is that I hope there is a clear line between games that tries to make the player have fun and games that tries to manipulate you into spending money, but sadly Magic the Gathering is still one of my favorite game all time even through it effectively invented loot box in form of card packs. So for now what I can do just look for other like minded people who want to make an innovative and intrinsically fun game and help them creating the best game possible.