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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2644 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 20, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Sub optimal play is fine. Sometimes perfectly optimized play is just the enemy of fun.

If I'm not in an actual competitive environment, but rather am goofing off with friends or doing a good ol' comp stomp, or when I literally just want to enjoy myself and not sweat my ass off, then I try to optimize for FUN.

FUN IS SUPPOSED TO BE THE GOAL, if pride or money or some other incentive isn't on the line. Not sure why you'd be 'optimizing' your play without accounting for the "Am I having fun" variable!

So yeah, once a game has become so well understood that 'optimal' builds, strats, items, and such are everywhere, it loses almost all appeal to me because it squeezes out the room for experimentation and the 'game' is now just about following a set strategy with as little deviation as possible. I'd argue that when it is reduced to a contest of who can execute the proper script more accurately/quickly, it ceases to be very game-like, where the challenge comes from the unpredictable elements.

I blame it to a large degree on ELO making skill levels more legible.. Now if you're NOT using the optimal strats, but instead playing around, everyone can see your ranking and make judgments about you.

I don't know if we have a similarly objective framework for identifying how much 'fun' a person is having in a game.

One of my great joys playing old school games was TRYING to force the game into weird edge cases or find a completely unique path to victory by trying less popular strategies and using the mechanics in otherwise sub-optimal ways that could still combine in such a way as to lead to a good outcome. Or setting little sub-goals or handicaps for myself so I have to actually get creative rather than just follow the optimal strats that I've memorized.

I think good game design should make it possible to use largely ignored mechanics or combine weak items in such a way that, with a certain amount of risk, you can 'surprise' a more skilled opponent who was following an established strategy but literally never encountered the scenario you've created and thus either adapts quickly or loses.

Of course said player will immediately adopt that strategy if it replicates, and soon it just becomes the meta. And that takes the fun away again.

And if I'm not having fun first and foremost, unless something else is on the line, I'm just not going to spend time on it.

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