This week in class, our discussion was primarily focused on remixing/reskinning games and adversarial design. To look into how games get reskinned and redesigned, we looked how the card game “Mafia.” We talked about there are so many different variations of this game with different names and cards to changed up the scene and environment of the game. Games like “Werewolf” and even “Among Us” essentially share all of the same rules and concepts as “Mafia,” but they have been slightly redesigned for the players to get a bit of a different experience playing these different games. We played a round of “Werewolf” to get a sense of the game. At first, a lot of the class was confused about some of the rules, but as the game went on, they realized they had already known the rules from similar games that they had played in the past. We also looked at the game “Passage.” For this game, we downloaded the files of the game to be able to manipulate and redesign aspects of the game ourselves. What was cool about this is that we could take a more adversarial design approach while manipulating this game. What that means is that we could change the game in a way to challenge certain values or beliefs. For example, one of the changes we made was swapping the male and female characters’ places in the game. This made it to where the female was the lead character rather than the male. Females are often underrepresented in leading roles of games, movies, stories, etc. Later, we got the opportunity to use the software “Gimp” to be able to edit the characters’ appearance, but this was a difficult process. We initially wanted to make the characters a racial minority to continue to represent marginalized groups as lead roles in games, but we had some trouble uploading them into the game. We saved the changes that we made to our two lead characters, but then could not find the files after. We took the time to make these changes, just for us to lose the file. Since we lost the file, we obviously could not get them into the game, so our characters had to stay the same. Redesigning a game can definitely be hard. Obviously the physical component of making the game look different by coding it to be that way can be extremely frustrating, but it can also be just as frustrating trying to come up with the initial idea of what you want to do with the game. All-in-all, this process can be very challenging, but also be very rewarding at the same time if you accomplish what you set out to.