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Given the opportunity, players will almost always optimize the fun out of any game they seemingly want to play.



It's a flaw in the game design. Truly good games anticipate and mitigate or embrace this.


Some games can do that, but not all.

For some game concepts, you have to engage in the equivalent of 'suspension of disbelief' to keep yourself from falling into these unfun traps.

It's hard to come up with an example at the top of my head. But here's an attempt: many people like to play chess competitively, but some people also like to have a casual chess match with a friend.

Competitive chess matches use a timer to keep things moving. But adding a timer to your casual match would (probably) not work. But you also want to keep the game moving.

That's where, even when you are tempted sometimes to over-analyse a board position, you have to show some restraint and just make a move after a reasonable amount of time.

(And the vagueness of 'reasonable' is part of the point I am trying to make. Exactly how long that is depends on you and your friend and the moods you are in.)


Reminds me of the old "Nethack devteam has implemented a brutal punishment for pudding farming" joke. If you want to play in a boring way, expect to have no fun.


Yes, though the first one or two times it can be fun to farm puddings.


I quit playing a lot of games for that reason. Once the meta becomes "memorize a lot of specific moves" like chess or "spreadsheet simulator" like a lot of computer games, I just quit and move on to something else. I play a lot of board games with a group of guys and the best ones have multiple paths to victory, the worst ones only have one path and the winner is whoever got a lucky break at the beginning.




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