And proceed to have another miserable time. An opportunity to play it presents itself, and I sit down and play. Every time I play it, I resolve to never play it again, but then a year or so goes by and I forget how miserable of a time I had. I don't think I've ever enjoyed a game of Settlers of Catan. See, I have this thing with Settlers of Catan. And once the game is over, you can identify that game or maybe even that entire genre of games as something that just isn't fun and should be avoided in the future. It's hard for me, but I try really hard not to be a dick once I realize I'm stuck in a game I'm having no fun playing. If you're in the middle of a game, you may need to suck it up and just facilitate the fun for others. In terms of board games, I'm not saying to stop in the middle unless no one is having any fun. What we really need to do as gamers, video games or board games, is to identify what games we have fun playing and just play those games. "I'm not having any fun playing this game, so I should stop playing it." It seems so simple, but sometimes it's not so easy to realize. These "free-to-play" games aren't designed to give you fun (outside of the initial "hook" period), they're designed to dangle fun just out of reach, which is just unpleasant.Ĭoming to this realization, however, was liberating. In order to have fun, I need to pay the game money.
I keep losing these 10-minute chunks of my life and there's nothing to show for it. Over and over and over.Įvery time that failure comes, I get angrier and angrier. Right, so everything in this level is great for 10 minutes, then catastrophic failure - make some tweaks and try it again - everything is fine for 10 minutes, then slightly less catastrophic failure. It's another thing to develop a solution and then wait 10 minutes to see if that solution works. It's one thing to consider a problem, develop a solution, and then immediately test that solution to see if it works. Well, okay, I did spend some time trying to perfect one particular level. But did I have hours to spend to do that? Um, no. If I spent hours perfecting my strategy, I could make it through the level unscathed. What was truly insidious about this particular game was that I felt like the failure was my fault. Do you really want to waste all that time and start over? You've been working on this level for a good 10 minutes already. Cue the game asking for some currency for a chance for you to continue. Even more than that, they seem challenging in a balanced way, but just when you think you have things under control, something terrible happens and you lose the level. But then you start encountering levels that are brutal in their difficulty. This is great, though, because my brain enjoys harder and more complex. You accomplish goals and have a good time and things get progressively harder and more complex. Stop me if this sounds familiar: you start playing and everything is easy and fun.
So over Thanksgiving I got sucked into a random, "free-to-play" Flash game, and I became increasingly disturbed at just how not-fun it became. I can play something cool for 5 or 10 minutes and then get back to doing whatever other thing I was doing. I play Flash games in particular, though, because they're typically pretty short experiences. We play games to have fun - to stimulate that pleasure center in our brains, because that's what humans do. And, sure, there's a lot of amateur garbage out there, but there's another side to that spectrum that is pure awesome fun times.Īnd awesome fun times is really all anyone is after. We live in an age where people have the power to create whatever they want. There are a lot of great gems out there made by people with great ideas and a bit of programming knowledge.
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