Plenty of people find fun in very different ways. Some will be happy to play the same simple Magic deck over and over 100 times, not learning anything after the first few plays, and if they win 60 of those they’ll have fun. There’s a pretty good online survey called the Gamer Motivation Survey by Quantic Foundry which asks you a bunch of questions about what motivates you to keep playing. For example, I get the highest score for Mastery (broken down into Challenge and Strategy), closely followed by Creativity (Discovery and Design). But other gamers will get very little fulfilment from Creativity and much more from Immersion (Story or Escapism) or Social (Community or Competition).
Have you ever seen non-gamers playing a game like Apples to Apples? They’re not learning anything or challenging anyone, they’ve forgotten the score system if they ever knew it, they’re just enjoying watching their friends try to work out whether Whipped Cream or Spam is more Cuddly.
They’re not learning anything or challenging anyone, they’ve forgotten the score system if they ever knew it, they’re just enjoying watching their friends try to work out whether Whipped Cream or Spam is more Cuddly.
If nothing is being learned, why does that question sound fascinating to me.
Does playing one deck not have any depth?
This might be incidental, but in both of these cases it sounds like someone is ignoring an overarching game for the sub-games. TCGs for instance consist of a core game (using the deck) and a metagame (building the deck). (I personally kinda don’t like deckbuilding, so I don’t play most of TCGs. I’m the audience for Keyforge). This individual comparison between whipped cream and spam is a small game. And it’s quite common for party games to have overarching games that aren’t really necessary. IIRC, Aella’s “game”, Askhole just dispenses completely with an overarching game, each card presents its own discrete ordeal.
Plenty of people find fun in very different ways. Some will be happy to play the same simple Magic deck over and over 100 times, not learning anything after the first few plays, and if they win 60 of those they’ll have fun. There’s a pretty good online survey called the Gamer Motivation Survey by Quantic Foundry which asks you a bunch of questions about what motivates you to keep playing. For example, I get the highest score for Mastery (broken down into Challenge and Strategy), closely followed by Creativity (Discovery and Design). But other gamers will get very little fulfilment from Creativity and much more from Immersion (Story or Escapism) or Social (Community or Competition).
Have you ever seen non-gamers playing a game like Apples to Apples? They’re not learning anything or challenging anyone, they’ve forgotten the score system if they ever knew it, they’re just enjoying watching their friends try to work out whether Whipped Cream or Spam is more Cuddly.
If nothing is being learned, why does that question sound fascinating to me.
Does playing one deck not have any depth?
This might be incidental, but in both of these cases it sounds like someone is ignoring an overarching game for the sub-games. TCGs for instance consist of a core game (using the deck) and a metagame (building the deck). (I personally kinda don’t like deckbuilding, so I don’t play most of TCGs. I’m the audience for Keyforge). This individual comparison between whipped cream and spam is a small game. And it’s quite common for party games to have overarching games that aren’t really necessary. IIRC, Aella’s “game”, Askhole just dispenses completely with an overarching game, each card presents its own discrete ordeal.