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Playing Games
Jul. 29th, 2002 06:37 pmI like games. I'm not talking about roleplaying (which I love), but competitive board games, card games, computer games, etc. In real life I'm a firm believer in cooperation and sociability, but when it comes to games I really don't see the point in playing unless you're playing to win.
Obviously, you don't want to alienate your friends while doing so, so it's important to be able to switch from "game playing mode" to "reasonable human being mode" (or as close as I can manage to that), but generally I like to indulge my utter cuthroat bastard side and ride to victory on the backs of my downtrodden enemy (or stroll over their corpses, I'm not fussy). I went through a phase at one point of feeling sorry for people as they were beaten, but I realised that this is just silly - if you're not going to play to win, you might as well not bother at all - I mean, any game is an arbitrary set of rules, where the aim is to use these rules as well as possible to fulfill certain criteria. If you're not going to try to do that to the best of your ability, why are you bothering at all (training games aside).
Ahem, anyway, I was delighted when Penny Arcade linked to an article on the games design site Sirlin called Play to Win. It's broken down into three sections 0,1 and 2. Well worth a read.
Obviously, you don't want to alienate your friends while doing so, so it's important to be able to switch from "game playing mode" to "reasonable human being mode" (or as close as I can manage to that), but generally I like to indulge my utter cuthroat bastard side and ride to victory on the backs of my downtrodden enemy (or stroll over their corpses, I'm not fussy). I went through a phase at one point of feeling sorry for people as they were beaten, but I realised that this is just silly - if you're not going to play to win, you might as well not bother at all - I mean, any game is an arbitrary set of rules, where the aim is to use these rules as well as possible to fulfill certain criteria. If you're not going to try to do that to the best of your ability, why are you bothering at all (training games aside).
Ahem, anyway, I was delighted when Penny Arcade linked to an article on the games design site Sirlin called Play to Win. It's broken down into three sections 0,1 and 2. Well worth a read.
