Exploring “Bad at Games”
Why does a person feel they are “bad” at a particular game? People say they’re “bad” at a given game all the time (I live in Minnesota, so you get a lot of this in general). I say it pretty often, usually as shorthand for “I lose this game often” or “I don’t want you to make the mistake of thinking that my being a game designer makes me good at this; please don’t be disappointed when you completely stomp me.” So this week, I’m going to take a look at a couple of ways I’ve personally felt “bad at a game” or encountered community discussions of “bad play,” and what considerations these experiences might raise for a designer.
Inexperience, a Time of Joys and Frustrations
Photograph of my hated enemy provided under Creative Commons Share-Alike Unported 3.0, courtesy Wikipedia
My Experiences: The first formalized game I remember playing is t-ball, at the encouragement of my dad. I was a five-year-old with underdeveloped gross motor skills and no practice at hand-eye coordination. Unsurprisingly, I could not hit the ball, despite it literally sitting still in front of me. This lead to me crying every game. I did not play t-ball for very long, and my dad learned a useful lesson about my prospects for athletic scholarships.
Why was I “bad” at t-ball? Because I was five, and had spent most of my life so far developing the ability to talk my parents’ ears off about dinosaurs. That did not help me hit a ball off a post in the slightest. I lacked the basic skills to engage in the activity, to say nothing of the emotional perspective needed to cope with failure.
Everyone starts off as this kind of “bad” when they start doing something totally new; they start out unable to execute sufficiently to win due to inexperience. When I got into Magic, I was “bad” at it because my cautious nature lead me to want to defend myself with life-gain and blockers rather than, you know, actually do things that make you win. When I started playing squash, I was “bad” at it because I didn’t understand the importance of holding the center of the court, nor could I reliably hit shots where I wanted. When I got into Warhammer 40,000, I was “bad” at it because I hadn’t memorized the relationships between ranges and ability to attack (although my friend Paul setting up his Tau opposite my Space Wolves on a flat, terrain-less table 48” long and 24” wide did not help me in my first game. Thanks, Paul!). These days, thanks to overall experience at games as a field of activity, I can usually fairly quickly assess why I am not winning at most new games I encounter. But even that capacity for assessment was a skill I had to learn over years of playing games.
But the funny thing is, t-ball aside, I enjoyed these games a lot during this period of “badness by inexperience,” because although I wasn’t good at winning the game, I was constantly discovering new things. The joy of the game wasn’t the thrill of competition, but the dopamine hit of novelty. Even as a teenager, I noticed that I had enjoyed Magic more when every opponent’s deck contained secrets unknown, and enjoyed squash more when I and my opponents were “worse” at the game but played more creatively as a result, using strategies and tricks that an experienced player would quickly dismantle with reliable basics everyone is taught to master.
And why was t-ball the exception where I was “bad” and also didn’t enjoy my time being bad at the game? It’s admittedly hard to cast my perspective back almost three decades, but I think it was because I wasn’t meaningfully playing the game. If I’d been able to get on base by hitting the ball, I might have been able to persevere long enough to develop basic skills (although who can say, really; I was five). Physically, I wasn’t ready to deal with the challenges involved, and emotionally, I didn’t have the patience or inclination to learn the basic skill (hitting a ball off a stick) needed to even participate in the game. The game wasn’t accessible enough for me to feel like I was playing. It just felt like an exercise in frustration. As an adult, I’ve bounced off plenty of other games with a high barrier to entry for the same reason (though usually with less crying).
Design Considerations: Almost everyone is going to start out to some degree “bad” at your game by virtue of their inexperience. And in terms of “how often do they achieve victory/whatehaveyou,” many people will stay there. Games are (largely) recreation, after all. I have a lot of board games, and I don’t play most of the ones I own often enough to consider myself “competitively good.” If your game can’t be enjoyed by an inexperienced player, it’s probably going to struggle to reach people. If it punishes the “badness” of inexperience excessively, it will drive people away. I don’t think that any game should strive to be everyone’s favorite game (and attempting this generally leads to a bland game with no real identity or flair), but striving to be at least playable by as wide a swath of people as possible is valuable. If people can play a game, they may even find new ways to engage with and enjoy it that you never considered - but that usually won’t happen if they can’t hit the ball off the tee at all.
Beyond this, it’s important to consider what unique perspectives inexperienced voices bring to a game during development. Andrew Fischer said it very well: “Fresh eyes are only fresh once, so welcome, encourage, and support them!” Much like an inexperienced player will play the game “badly” in ways they find enjoyable, an inexperienced designer will often explore a space without regard for boundaries or conventions, and this can lead to brilliant breakthroughs. Of course, there’s a value in tempering this with experience, but that can come into the project in numerous ways, whether it be design mentors, colleagues, or rigorous playtesting.
Mismatch between Desire and Outcome
Knights Templar Playing Chess, Alphonse le Sage, 1283
Left Knight’s facial expression says a lot, really.
My Experiences: One of the ways I most consistently feel “bad at” games I actually play often is when I want to play the game one way, but the game heavily incentivizes a different strategy or approach. In Warhammer 40,000, I want the heroes I field to play a big, exciting role in the battle. In the practical calculus of winning the game, however, these models are not special compared to any other unit in my army. They are numerically better at some things, but sometimes they die - and worse (for me), sometimes the right play is to let them die. Like a Queen sacrifice play in chess, sometimes the best play is to give up your coolest toy to make progress toward victory. To win, I should choose to give up that exciting play with a hero (or let them die an ignoble death) when it lets me make strategic gains. But these are characters I’ve invested time and energy building, painting, and creating stories about. I want to see them do cool stuff.
It would be easy to blame the game for this. I could say that it’s a poor match between theme and fiction, or that the game shouldn’t offer a certain fantasy (through giving heroes cool powers and equipment) and then let it be optimal sometimes to sacrifice them. But I don’t think that’s a fair reading of what’s really going on here. In a choice-based, competitive game, it’s important that both players have agency. And if something of mine is a powerful piece, it should sometimes be my opponent’s priority to try to remove it. If they do, then the choice goes back to me: should I try to save it, or focus my limited resources elsewhere. For it to be a choice whether to focus on preserving and using my characters, sometimes the optimal answer has to be “let them die.” One can argue over the specifics of how often this should occur, but the possibility needs to exist for the choice to have meaning. And that means sometimes deciding between optimal and desired play.
So really, the answer is that I make unoptimized choices too often due to emotional attachment to those choices. But these aren’t necessarily “bad” choices from another point of view. What are the moments I remember the most from Warhammer 40,000? They’re times like when my Wolf Lord shoved a Thousand Sons Terminator Lord and his Scarab Occult brute squad into a locker singlehandedly (I lost that game), or when my friend’s Inquisitor Coteaz sent a cyber-eagle to rip the pilot out of a gigantic Chaos Knight, bringing the mighty war machine low (we also lost that game). These moments didn’t happen because of optimal play decisions, but they were great experiences, which is really why I play Warhammer 40,000 in the first place.
Design Considerations: As I’ve discussed before, why people play any particular game is something you should strive to understand. And interestingly, I think the answer is rarely “to win.” People really like winning, don’t get me wrong, but if that was all they cared about, I wouldn’t be sitting here writing about how to make new games, because people can get their thrills destroying each other in lots of great games that have been around for centuries. They choose to seek out new games instead. In my observation, even the most successful competitive players are driven by a number of different motivations beyond merely obliterating the opposition. This doesn’t mean “victory*”-motivated analysis of a game isn’t helpful and important, but it’s not usually the whole recipe for success in creating a new game.
*Here I am using “victory” to mean whatever winning, getting big damage numbers, or generally “optimizing” entails; obviously you can’t win Dungeons & Dragons, whether or not it’s Advanced, but people argue about character optimization at great length nonetheless.
When you’re designing, consider what options people might pursue in your game other than “victory” and whether each one is an experience you want to promote. When someone finds joy in your game when they play it even when they lose, they’ll probably come back for more. If you’re a “victory”-oriented player yourself, you should find collaborators who will play the game less optimally and see what they are enjoying about it. If you aren’t especially motivated by “victory” yourself, fostering the joy in the play of the game is often something that comes naturally, and you might need to outsource the optimization stress-testing. As with anything, know your own strengths and interests, but remember that they aren’t universal and populate your team to accommodate a wide variety of perspectives.
Mismatch between Player Expectations
So, wait, does this go on pizza or not? That’s definitely going to start a fistfight.
Experiences: It’s hard to be “bad” at most tabletop RPGs in terms of failure to optimize or achieve certain results. Fundamentally, the exercise isn’t about winning or losing. If you’re having fun and everyone else at the table is too, you’re doing it right. But sometimes you hear or read about bad experiences with players/game masters and can’t help but think “you know, that person is, in fact, kind of bad at roleplaying games.” Unsurprisingly, no small number of these are truly toxic behavior that shouldn’t be tolerated in the community, but that’s not what I want to talk about in this article. The cases that I think are really relevant here are the ones that boil down to “this person wanted to play a really different game than the everyone else at the table.” Whether it’s the person whose hyper-optimized character stole the spotlight in every scene or the person who really wanted the campaign to be serious while everyone else was trying to seduce the dragon, I’ve heard and observed all sorts of problems born out of conflicting expectations. To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to punch for the biggest numbers or tell serious character drama in and of themselves (and these are the “correct” ways to play in many contexts). But in RPGs, modulating your play contextually to make sure you’re not stepping on someone else’s fun too much is part of playing “well.” Reading the room and/or being open to feedback from others is an important play skill important in RPGs.
These sorts of conflicts are actually pretty common, I think, they just usually don’t escalate to the level of going viral online. And they extend beyond collaborative games like RPGs. Individual people play the games they choose to play for lots of different reasons, and this sometimes means that incompatible expectations collide. As an anecdote: when I was in high school, I was playing Scrabble with two of my friends, and one of my friends started using a denial strategy (the competitively optimal way to play). At the time, I was pretty peeved that my friend was refusing to play the game as I understood it (go for big words, open the board without looking at positional advantage) - and what is interesting is that I was actually in the majority at the table; the my other friend agreed with me. This doesn’t mean that I was “right” and my friend was “wrong” but, in some sense, we were both playing the game “badly” from the other’s perspective. I was playing in a suboptimal fashion (due to my inexperience and desire to stretch my vocabulary with large words that gave up vital positional advantage) in my friend’s eyes. But in my eyes, he was breaking the social contract by only playing short words that scored on multiple axes and closing off the board, which made it harder for me to play the game the way I enjoyed. I (and the other player at the table) had taken it as implicit that the point of this exercise was to win in a particular way, which he was ignoring. His way was more optimized, of course, so he won, but nobody really had a great time.
There are countless other examples of this. Whether it is the widespread stigma against unpainted armies in certain tabletop wargames, the ceaseless “roleplay versus ROLLplay” arguments, or the vast swaths of ink dedicated to the “correct” way to list build without crossing into “cheesy,” sometimes the majority of a community rejects raw optimization. In these cases, playing the game against the grain becomes seen as playing it “badly.” That might or might not be fair, but the perception tends to stick, and oftentimes these players are subject to varying degrees of shunning until they either change their behavior or find a community more in line with their own preferences.
Design Considerations: Well, we’re into some real “Death of the Author” shit now: what should the game designer have to say about the “proper” play of their game, and should the players even care about what they have to say? When someone decides to play against the grain of their community, who gets to say they have misinterpreted the text, and on what authority?
Some games have the space to offer a great deal of editorializing about how and why they should be played (whether this should be taken as suggestion or mandate is its own topic for debate). Most roleplaying games, for instance, include GM guidance to explain the pace of the game, and the spirit in which it should be run. Games Workshop has certain standards of hobby preparation and player behavior for its events, and to rebut this mentality, rival game Warmachine published a rather infamous purpose statement about the win-at-all-costs mentality its designers wanted to encourage. While most sports tend towards having an active rules arbitration committee, some, like ultimate [frisbee] have an explicit “spirit of the game” statement in place of a rules arbitrator. But, of course, this is a matter of debate within the ultimate community, and certain events are run with judges to maintain rules decorum. While the designer can set out their case for the game to be used according to their intentions, it’s not something one can easily enforce.
A designer might even fall into the category of playing their own game against the grain of the community that develops. Richard Garfield famously designed Magic: The Gathering with mechanics like ante to prevent simply buying the best cards from being the best strategy, and in 1994 (the linked article is a 2013 republishing of that article), wrote that “This is why there are no marketed lists of cards when the cards are first sold: discovering the cards and what they do is an integral part of the game.” Of course, in the days of frequent full-set spoilers before release, it is clear that the community has pulled in a different direction: one where knowledge rather than discovery is the main pull of the game. A player like me, who intentionally avoids spoilers before drafting a new set to experience the joy of discovery, is both playing the game “as intended by the designer” and “badly.”
There are other factors that can affect how a game will be played. If it is a game that receives official updates, new content and errata can empower certain strategies or remove others. An organized play program often sets the overall tenor of a game - if participation is rewarded over “victory,” then the community might develop in a particular way. If large sums of money become involved, the game will certainly move toward professionalization, which is neither intrinsically good nor bad, but has clear and significant implications. If self-appointed community members become the main rallying points, then their particular tastes and preferences will dictate the outcome as much as the designer’s intentions, if not more so.
If there’s a takeaway from this one, it’s that games may be designed, but once they are out in the world, they often grow organically. “Successful” play might not look like what you think it will during the design stage, or even playtesting. And it can be community and context-sensitive. Testing across a broad spectrum of players can help you project where this might go and guide the game in the direction you would like to see it grow, but nobody can perfectly see the future.