So, complexity, strategies and enjoyment of games

It is very popular in modern gaming to look up optimal strategies for games. 
There are some obvious reasons for it. Major one being why bother trying to learn how to play stuff on your own and trying to catch up with everybody else the hard way, especially if it's a competitive game? That's pretty much like reinventing the wheel. It just makes sense.

I also hate it. 
For me, a big part of the enjoyment of games is figuring them out. I don't mind being somewhat ineffective or less than optimal, if it means I got to that point myself. Sometimes this leads to me discovering strategies on my own and then later finding out they are considered the best (mostly the other way around though). 
But why do I hate it then? Surely I can live (ignorantly) in peace and leave it be. 
Yeah, no. 
If I am playing a highly competitive game like Starcraft, if I am matched against an opponent who looks up and tries to adhere completely to an optimal strategy, while I am in my own Homo erectus phase and I am figuring out fire, such a game is 9/10 times not going to end well for me. 
So essentially I put myself at an disadvantage by using this approach.

But I don't want to change it. If a game is complicated enough and the average player is expected to know the optimal strategy (like Starcraft), I will just have to accept the fact that either I will too, or I'll keep losing. Sadly, for me both of these options have the same ending: I stop playing the game. 
For me, the day I have figured out a game is one of the last days I am playing the game.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

So, Warhammer and recognition

By now this is all old news, but I still want to talk about it.  Several years ago, GamesWorkshop killed of warhammer fantasy via the End Times and introduced Age of Sigmar to replace it. There are... speculations of why this happened and some of them are more or less accepted as truth. I also believe one that isn't as common, but I'll get to it and why it's a double edged sword. The common argument why they did this huge move is copyright laws. Since Warhammer fantasy was mostly composed of common fantasy tropes, they were unable to protect most of the designs... because simply put, they were not their original creations. They simply took a common design, modified it slightly and made models out of it.  Now this has been a thing for many years but why it suddenly began hurting them was the rise of decent-ish 3D printers. There are printers out there that can produce models in extremely similar quality to GW's own. And since the designs their models are based off are co...
Read more

So, two player board games

I like chess. I always did, it's a game that forces people to think and seeing as my winrate against people when I was small was way above average, it made sense for me to like it. I then grew into disliking it because people would take literal minutes between rounds and I'd get bored. There is still beauty to it, but at a certain point, my enjoyment of the game is running out. Now enter two player board games. Some of them are truly great. Amazing even. But they do end up in a chess situation. Let me explain a little. There are two factors of games that go into this: Information - how much information about the state of the game do individual players have  Randomness - how much the state of the game can change between rounds based on a random 'whim' and how much you can mitigate that affecting you. Chess has complete information about the sate of the game and there is no randomness to speak off. All the possibilities are clearly laid out. This causes you ...
Read more

So, Game of Thrones S08E03

I have to. There is frustration inside of me and I have to let it all out in text and reddit is full of similar thoughts so I am doing the original thing and going elsewhere *taps forehead* For some context, I wrote a minor "expectations" theorycraft that turned out totally wrong and while I hoped it would be wrong, I also hoped it wouldn't go this far off. You can read it here  https://pastebin.com/5th9Dt64 For the purposes of this article I will ignore the books exist for a time being. Now I am disappointed. Not by the episode itself, besides some minor things (light cav charging front and center, artillery being the first line of the army...), I actually quite enjoyed the episode. I am however disappointed by the plot. The writing. The everything else than the episode itself to be honest. I have two major gripes and they are quite entwined, so I will be weaving through them both to save some time. First of these things is the character of the Night King himself. S...
Read more