Shannon Appelcline: I Play From the Gut

Stephen Colbert once quipped, “Your gut is the pope of your torso – it’s infallible.” It’s a part of his bit, his mockery of political pundits. For him, all decisions should come from the gut, not the brain. It should be the heart of reasoning thought – or unthought as it were.

I find Stephen Colbert pretty funny, but I also find that this bit has some connection to reality. That’s because there are some activities that should genuinely be undertaken with the gut in control and with the brain, if not disengaged, than at least in low gear.

And for me, one of those activities is gaming. You see, I’ve come to realize that I play games from the gut.

A Draconic Aside

I came to this conclusion recently. I was playing a game of In The Year of the Dragon, my fourth to date, and as we neared the end of the game, we began to talk about one of the player’s strategies. He’d been hanging back in the worker order for the entire game, and now he trailed by 20 or more points. In talking about how he’d continued to do well despite that deficit, he pointed to his money lender and said, “If you’re going to trail in workforce size, you have to have a moneylender early.”

What he said made perfect sense. If you have a low worker count in In the Year of the Dragon you select actions late. If you want to take an action that someone else has already taken, you need to pay money for the privilege. Thus, a moneylender indeed sounds like a near requirement: it’s what keeps the game from entirely spiraling out of your control. After we talked about the money lender, there was some talk about how other workers could help other strategies, but what struck me about them wasn’t the cleverness of the ideas, but rather the fact that I’d never even considered them.

Now I suppose you could just shake your head and say I’m not a very good player because I don’t consider such things, but I am. I win, at the least, more than my fair share of the time, and I’m pleased to say that’s against some very savvy opponents, including the gentleman who was talking about money lenders in ITYOTD. However when I win games, I do so instictively. Sure, sometimes I’ll make a simple cost-benefit analysis, but as often I’m likely to just glom on to the first shiny thing I see, and it often works out for me.

That’s what I mean when I say I play from the gut.

Pros and Cons

When I talked about the topic with my wife, she nodded sagely. She’s a more careful and considered player than I am, much more likely to think through all the permutations of a move before she makes it. Sometimes when playing against someone who makes game plays slower than I do, I think they have an unfair advantage. I feel like I’d be making superior plays if I thought about them longer. I believe that there are genuinely games which will almost always be won by the person who takes the longest on their turns, all other things being equal.

However, if I go with the assumption that I’m actually a pretty good player when playing from the gut, then that implies that I’m the one who has an unfair advantage if we’re all playing quickly and casually. Is it fair to ask other players to play on my own preferred battlefield? I’m not sure.

There’s another side to this. Accepting that I play from the gut finally explains why I have troubles with certain games. In the Year of the Dragon is one. Brass was another until I sat down and really analyzed the game (while not sitting at the table, I’ll note). Absent that sort of analysis, I have a lot of trouble doing well in those games, and I think it’s because they’ve sufficiently layered (or obtuse, or whatever) that my gut check fails. I can’t play them intuitively, and I don’t know how to play them otherwise.

Pros or cons aside, I’m perfectly happy playing from my gut. It lets me play lightly and thus lets me enjoy my games more. Perhaps it’s not as optimal of a play style as truly analytical play and perhaps it means that there will be some games that are beyond me reach, but so be it.

So how do you play? Gut or Brain? And what do you think of those other folks?

Around the Corner

Over in my Trials, Triumphs & Trivialities column, I recently continued my look at the game design of reality TV game shows by talking about The Mole. I’ve also recently reviewed the Goblin Skirmishers pack for Battlelore at RPGnet. I’ve been slacking a bit in my reviews lately, but you should see some discussions of Caveman and Cash ‘n Guns: Yakuza in the near future.

I’ll see you back here in 14, when my gut says I’ll have another article for your perusal.

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