On Being Selective

[Patrick]

For a few decades now, "information overload" has been a popular catch
phrase. But it's not just information we're bombarded with; we're
often overwhelmed with a variety of product choices as well.

It's good that we can each find something that suits our individual
needs or preferences. But sometimes we need a computer nowadays just
to get us through the everyday business of shopping. And sometimes I
miss the days when I could just order a cup of coffee at a coffee shop
and not be asked any questions. Or when there were only a couple
brands of toilet paper available and all the rolls were the same size.

When it comes to games, it seems to me the tremendous variety has some
sad side effects. In an earlier age, you could count on many people
knowing how to play backgammon, checkers, rummy, or dominoes. So, if
you were looking for someone to play with, chances were you'd have
some game knowledge in common. Today, that's not necessarily so.
Though I hear it's popular, I don't have a clue about World of
Warcraft; and I have only the slightest clue about Magic: The
Gathering. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of other games around
too, only some of which I even know the names of.

How does one choose a game when there are so many options?

Well, maybe you just experiment a little and then settle on something
you like. That's how I handled the coffee-shop thing: I got tired of
trying to memorize all the coffees of the day and choose between light
and dark roast, so I just started ordering Americanos (espresso and
hot water). Now I get pretty much the same drink every time I order,
and the only question I have to answer is how much room to leave in
the cup.

So, if Squad Leader is the most exciting and satisfying wargame I've
ever played, maybe the thing to do would be to just stick to that--or
find some similar game system and settle on it. Or if I take a liking
to cribbage, maybe I should just play cribbage every day unless I
someday get tired of it and feel I need a change.

Choosing a game is more complicated, though, if you're not playing
solitaire. Then it's a question of what you like *and* what someone
else likes too. Often it becomes a matter of just playing what
everybody else is playing. If your friends all seem to be into World
of Warcraft, and you want to play a game with them, you'd better learn
to like WoW. Otherwise you're going to have to look for new friends
to game with.

I've always been weird when it comes to selecting things, though. I'm
not content to do any of the above. What I want to do is explore and
experiment extensively, sampling every game in the world, and test
every game against my internal "quality gauge." And, via a process of
elimination, I want to weed out all the games I deem inferior, finally
arriving at one or two or a very few games that are just right for me.

There are two problems with that approach: (1) the options are
extensive and ever growing, so the experimentation and sifting never
end; and (2) I exclude other people's preferences from my evaluation,
so I end up with a small selection of games that suit me--but which I
may never find opponents for.

Still, in my case, that process seems both necessary and desirable.
I'm far too interested in games to just ignore most of what's out
there; I have to read about them all and sample anything that looks
promising. I'm also intent on finding an optimal fit between me and
the games I play; I want to feel I'm playing the games I consider
best, not settling for lesser games just because it's easier to find
opponents for them.

That's my story. What's yours? How do you decide which games, out of
the thousands available, to focus on?

[John McLeod]

On Tue, 16 Jun 2009, Patrick <p55ca...@gmail.com> wrote:
>Often it becomes a matter of just playing what everybody else is
>playing.

I'm sure that's what most people do. Only a small proportion of players
have the energy and motivation to seek out a game for themselves and
then persuade other people to play it with them. That's how local
traditions get established, by people perpetuating the games that are
already played where they are.

People like you and me, who are not satisfied with what we find around
us, and go looking for other games in other countries and in books and
nowadays on the web in the hope of finding something more interesting,
are a very small minority.

But I have always done this. In my experience it leads to:

a) establishing a circle of friends who are willing to try out a variety
of different games rather than sticking just to games they know, and
then building the rest of your personal and social life around this
group;

b) going on long expeditions to the places where the games you want to
take part in are played.

For the field of card games, I have also tried to help others setting
out on the same quest by documenting the games I have found. I am
slightly ambivalent about this. Am I encouraging a kind of cultural
pollution whereby elements of games from all over the world get mixed
together and valuable local traditions are thereby lost? From this point
of view it's a good thing that only a small proportion of gamers would
bother search my web site for a card game to play and switch to that,
and most would rather carry on playing the games they grew up with.

>What I want to do is explore and experiment extensively, sampling every
>game in the world, and test every game against my internal "quality
>gauge." And, via a process of elimination, I want to weed out all the
>games I deem inferior, finally arriving at one or two or a very few
>games that are just right for me.
>
>There are two problems with that approach: (1) the options are
>extensive and ever growing, so the experimentation and sifting never
>end; and (2) I exclude other people's preferences from my evaluation,
>so I end up with a small selection of games that suit me--but which I
>may never find opponents for.

How strange. Here we seem to be driving towards opposite conclusions.
You think that exploration would lead everyone in different directions,
and each having their own different favourite. I tend to think that it
would lead to lots of people converging on similar destinations,
resulting in a reduction of variety of games people play.

>I want to feel I'm playing the games I consider best, not settling for
>lesser games just because it's easier to find opponents for them.

Yes, I agree with that.

>That's my story. What's yours? How do you decide which games, out of
>the thousands available, to focus on?

Really just by trying out different games - games I have found myself
and ones recommended by others - noticing which seem to be most
enjoyable or work best, and noticing which seem to have a promise of
greater depth and more enjoyment if one takes the trouble to learn to
play them better.
--
John McLeod For information on card games visit
jo...@pagat.com http://www.pagat.com/

[Sukunai]

I'm a bad boy, I have often used the power of the internet to get that
which I guess I was not entitled to :)

But it is not without cost, and frankly it's kinda ironically funny.

It's been proven, and to my satisfaction if not yours, that if you
didn't earn something, you likely have little devotion to it or
consideration for it.
You probably don't appreciate it much and can casually discard it as
well.

Now on the other hand, if you had to put yourself out for something,
that's often different. The item then becomes valued, as you are able
to recall the effort it took to get it.
You end up with a bond I suppose.

I possess all the wargames out there made for computer. By that I
mean, I have them. I have not obtained them all entirely the right
way.
And you know what, the ones I didn't work for, do NOT mean much to me,
regardless of the actual games worth as a game design.

But they are just so damned easy to get.
And there is so many of them.

Trouble is, if I was rolling in dough, if i had obtained them all new,
and not even used, it wouldn't make my day longer, and my capacity to
play them easier.
Ah for the good ole days when I might own 10 board game wargames, and
that was IT.
When a friend and I wanted to play a wargame, it was likely the same
wargame we played last time.

Today, if you pick say Normandy the Overlord invasion and you say
doesn't matter the mode or scale, well the choices are incredible in
numbers.
Tactical, operational, strategic, board, electronic, miniatures,
cards, turn based, shooters, real time. it would likely take me all
day to compile the choices.
In 1970 your choices might reach 5.

But, people will inevitably see making games, as a means to an income.
And that includes wargames.
And today it is just so simple to produce a product. Too many devices
that weren't there in 1970. Too many marketing options.

It has back fired on me in a comical fashion.
In 2000 I was a board gamer. I had a nice collection of board games.
10 years later, and I am a over whelmed gamer.
Too many choices, too little impediment to getting them.

People say, oh you don't need to get them all :)
Yeah, you leave a kid in a candy shop, and there's nothing to stop the
kid from taking the candy, what are the chances the kid takes one lone
candy and leaves :)

I feel like an addict, and wargames is my addiction.

[Patrick]

On Jun 16, 11:27 am, John McLeod <j...@pagat.com> wrote:

> For the field of card games, I have also tried to help others setting
> out on the same quest by documenting the games I have found. I am
> slightly ambivalent about this. Am I encouraging a kind of cultural
> pollution whereby elements of games from all over the world get mixed
> together and valuable local traditions are thereby lost? From this point
> of view it's a good thing that only a small proportion of gamers would
> bother search my web site for a card game to play and switch to that,

> and most would rather carry on playing the games they grew up with. . . .

>
> How strange. Here we seem to be driving towards opposite conclusions.
> You think that exploration would lead everyone in different directions,
> and each having their own different favourite. I tend to think that it
> would lead to lots of people converging on similar destinations,

> resulting in a reduction of variety of games people play. . . .

I never thought of it that way. Or if the thought ever did cross my
mind, I guess I just assumed human nature would tend toward optimizing
the situation.

When I was a kid growing up, I think I played the children's card game
War once or twice. My dad also taught me to play Poker and Blackjack,
but I never played them much (gambling games are generally boring when
you're playing for matchsticks). And we played Rummy (500 Rum) a
number of times. That's all I knew about card games, except that the
name of some other game would come up on TV or in conversation at
times.

But because of a rules dispute, my mother bought a paperback Hoyle,
and we had that sitting around the house. It intrigued me, and I
pretty much read it from cover to cover. I was fascinated by the
thought that all these other card games were being played by
enthusiastic communities around the world. I wondered what it would
be like to look in on one of those communities or try out these
seemingly exotic games.

At the same time, I wondered which game(s) would suit me best. Were
some of them better than Rummy? That is, would I like them better? I
liked Rummy a lot better than War, Poker, or Blackjack. Maybe there
was some other game in this book that would make Rummy seem dull in
comparison.

But I had no one to try out the games with. It was hard enough to get
my family members or friends to play a game we already knew; it'd be
like pulling teeth to get them to play some game I was learning from a
book. So, I just imagined what the games would be like. And the
descriptions and drawings in the Hoyle book fed my imagination. I saw
serious-looking Germans in derbies playing something called
Klabberjass. Cribbage looked like an elegant old game, since there
was a picture of perhaps Sir John Suckling himself playing a game with
a classy-looking woman in a 17th-century hairdo. Poker was
represented by an Old West gambler with drawn pistol, apparently
registering a violent complaint against the cheater across the table.
Sadly, Solitaire (Patience) was being played by a prisoner in striped
uniform.

I played Solitaire anyway, hoping not to end up feeling too much like
the prisoner. And I experimented with a couple two-player games--
e.g., Casino--by playing both sides. But I wasn't enthusiastic or
mentally agile enough to try playing games like Bridge by myself.
Still, I continued to wonder about them--mainly wondering if one of
those games would impress and delight me more than Rummy and the other
games I knew.

Later, in my twenties, I had occasion to play a couple new card games
with friends. One was Casino (I was pleasantly surprised to find that
someone else actually did play that game). Another was Spades, which
I disliked at first--mainly because it was not in my copy of Hoyle! I
didn't know at the time that it was related to Whist and other classic
games; I was peeved that someone had apparently just made up some new
game instead of taking a game out of the book. Also, I had trouble
getting the hang of this bidding/trick-taking game, as those mechanics
were completely unfamiliar to me.

When the home-computer age came along, it soon got to where I could
actually try out some of the games I'd longed to play all my life. I
picked up some Bridge software and taught myself that game (with the
help of a few books on Bridge); and I learned others from card-game
software packages.

When I got married in 1987, the game of Cribbage was part of the
deal. She used to play, and we started playing it together. So I
felt I had stepped into a new card-playing community, and I was
testing the waters there, seeing how well I liked it--how this game
compared to the likes of Rummy.

Later, the Internet opened up a whole world of possiblities. I ended
up playing Cribbage in an online tournament (and winning!), and I knew
I could play any number of other games at almost any hour of the day.
Oddly, it was overwhelming, though, and I guess I've never taken
advantage of the opportunity. It's like what I was discussing in my
first post to this thread: so many choices--how do I decide?

A major discovery was http://www.pagat.com/ --which is essentially a
vast expansion of the old book of Hoyle I grew up with. Suddenly I
was made aware of the limitations of that old paperback. In my youth,
I had believed it held the rules to all the card games in the world--
or at least all that were worth mentioning. Now I could see that
many, many other games and variants were also being played around the
world. Far too many to choose from.

When my card-gaming worldview was limited to Hoyle, there was a real
possibility that I might try out every game in the book, evaluating
them and deciding which one(s) I liked best. Once I did that, I
thought I might apply myself to a favorite game or two, practicing and
developing skill--making it a big part of my life. But now, with
hundreds, or maybe thousands, of games available, I found myself
paralyzed with "information overload." No way can I hope to ever
learn or play more than a handful of all those games.

And if I don't try them all, how do I know I'm not overlooking a gem?
What if I'm missing out on a game that, if I knew about it, would
shine as the very best game in the world? I hadn't even heard of
Tarok; now I had to wonder about it--and it was only one of sundry
games I had to wonder about.

The only solution I know of is to just go with whatever catches my
eye, trusting that somehow I'll be guided to what's best for me.
After all, they're just games. It's not a life-or-death decision.
Also, life is short--too short to worry over something as trivial as
finding just the right game to enjoy.

So, I'm now getting used to the fact that I've wasted too much time
already on surveying what's available; it's time to buckle down and
stick with what I know and make the best of it.

Ironically, that puts me back to square one: I'm doing what most
everybody does--playing whatever games I learned growing up, whatever
I'm familiar with, and whatever others I know happen to play. If one
of those games happens to resonate with me, so that I call it a
favorite, that's a plus; but it's not as big a deal as I've always
made it out to be.

From this changed point of view, your Web site serves a more practical
purpose: it's a convenient place to look up what I need to know.
Several months ago, I wanted to refresh myself on the rules to Spite &
Malice so I could teach it to my wife; I checked in at www.pagat.com
and discovered that the most common version of the game is one I had
never read about before--so now I was able to play the way most people
apparently do. More recently, I wanted to know how to play Cribbage
with three or four players, so I looked that up.

And actually, your site provides much better information on card-
playing communities than the Hoyle book ever did. In hindsight, I can
see how misleading that book was. Others besides prisoners play
Solitaire. Cribbage is not just a 17th-century phenomenon. Dominoes
are enjoyed by adults as well as kids. And so forth.

While I'm still overwhelmed to find that the world is a much bigger
and more diverse place than I had once supposed, I appreciate the
reality check and all the good information.

In the end, the answer to my own question about how to select a game
would seem to be the old adage "Bloom where you're planted." Maybe
Rummy and Dominoes (games I grew up with) and Cribbage (a game I
married into) are fine games and as right as any for me. And maybe
there's no reason to force myself to get used to unfamiliar games like
Skat or Tarok, even if fans are justified in claiming them to be a
couple of the best games in the world.

It's good to be willing to try something new. But part of the joy of
game playing is doing something familiar. It seems one has to strike
some kind of balance there: you want a game that's familiar, but not
too familiar--one that provides enough variety to stay interesting but
always keeps its basic features that you're used to. So, if there's a
good game you've been playing all your life, and you've never grown
tired of it, maybe that's your game.

As to your worry that www.pagat.com might lead to a "homogenizing" of
card gaming, I'd say it's the Internet as a whole that does that. And
modern life in general. Baseball is now a popular game in Japan, and
Yerba Mate tea is enjoyed by many people far from South America. The
dominoes game Texas 42 may not be strictly Texan nowadays, but what
is? Any game needs fans to keep it alive; and what does it matter if
its fans are all in one locale or spread out over the globe? People,
voting with their game-playing time, will decide which games survive
and which ones fade into obscurity.

My own concern is more with the individual and the choices he makes.
Especially with myself as an individual wanting to make the best
choices I can. Earlier in my life, the choices seemed fewer and the
decision thus easier. Now the possibilities seem overwhelming, and
I'm just glad my game choices don't matter that much. Still, they
matter to me, so I continue wondering how to select the game that's
right for me.

--Patrick