W. Eric Martin: Hidden Depth

I recently ran across a quote from Greg Aleknevicus, editor of The Games Journal—a fantastic (and unfortunately defunct) online gaming magazine—that struck a chord:

I’ve come to the conclusion that the vast majority of games have depths that are hidden to those who play only a few times. So much so that I think it’s unwise to assume that you’ve seen all a game has to offer after your second play, no matter how simple the game appears. [For example,] I agree with another gamer’s assessment of Coloretto—there just doesn’t seem to be much there—but experience has taught me that this is most likely due to the fact that I don’t like the game enough to seek any depth it may have.

Many gamers complain about a vast flood of games being released on the market, claiming that they can play a game only once or twice before their fellow players (or they themselves) move on to something else. While this habit is, of course, self-imposed and one that players could eliminate if they really wanted to, I understand the desire to try out new games and see what designers have created. Who am I supposed to be, and how do I interact with others? How are we moving the bits around this time? And so on.

One consequence of playing games only once or twice, however, seems to be a willingness by some to categorize games quickly and be done with them. I experienced this recently with Galaxy Trucker when two first-time players started discussing the game’s flaws the minute it ended. “It’s too luck-based in the spaceship construction,” they claimed. “Maybe you should be able to ignore the component connections and just place pieces anywhere. And the adventure cards are too harsh. There’s no way anyone can survive their intergalactic journey.” (For details on the game play in Galaxy Trucker, you can read my first impression of the game here on BGN.)

Sixty minutes after learning about the existence of this game, they had already dissected it, catalogued its flaws, and filed it away mentally. They knew the game cold.

To be fair, both of them said they’d be willing to play the game again. They didn’t think it was awful or even bad; they had merely detected certain problems with it. What fascinated me, though, was that rather than change the way they played the game, they wanted to change the game itself.

I’ve played Galaxy Trucker all of three times, but even with that meager level of experience, I could see what would improve their chance of success in the future:

• Knowing the components I: The first time you play a game with a puzzle aspect, such as Galaxy Trucker’s building of a spaceship in real time in which you grab components from a central pile of parts, you’ll likely stink at it. You don’t know what type of components are in the game; how common the different type of connectors are; whether you should settle for a piece with two smooth sides (cutting off future building possibilities) or put it aside and keep looking; which parts you should hold in reserve for use later in the build round; whether to add the laser cannon now or hope to draw a piece that will fit between it and the rest of the spaceship; and so forth.

  After three games, I now have an idea of when sections of my spaceship are good enough, but I’m sure that my opinion of when to settle will change after more experience with the game.

• Knowing the components II: A game of GT lasts three rounds, and the adventure cards you encounter in the second and third rounds are tougher than those in the first. Until you see those cards, you don’t know what to expect during the spaceflight, which means you don’t have a good understanding for how to build the ship.

• Using the tools the game gives you: During the spaceship building round, you can spend time examining some of the adventure cards that you’ll encounter in that round, which can give you a huge advantage over other players.

  In the first game I played, my opponent looked through all the cards he could, then loaded up his ship with cargo holds, especially ones that held hazardous cargo. I focused on building my ship and paid no attention to him, so I was surprised by the slow, barely defended ship he had built—but once the round started and we turned up planet after planet, with him grabbing lots of high-scoring goods while I had almost no storage room, I could see the advantage of planning ahead while building your spaceship.

  (I relearned that lesson in my third game after we encountered pirate after pirate in the third round and all died. None of us had installed many cannons on our spaceships, and once laser fire knocked off a few of those cannons, we were easy prey for the pirates that followed. If I had thought to look through the cards, I would have installed cannons on every possible surface.)

Perhaps a better example of Greg’s statement in action is the way in which people dismiss the abstract game Qwirkle as not having much there or of being an exercise in who draws the best tiles. I’ve played the game more than sixty times, mostly with my wife and a friend in my local game group, and our playing has definitely evolved over time. We’ve become better judges of what the other players are trying to do when they make a certain play: Is that all that he can do, or is this a set-up to encourage me to play something that he’ll add to again? We can block off scoring opportunities better. We know when to throw away tiles in the hope of something better and when we’re better off dumping junk on the board. We manage our hand of tiles better to shoot for the endgame bonus. We create a tight board with more interlocking plays, akin to expert Scrabble players.

I happened to teach Qwirkle to a Scrabble fan recently, and although he’s a smart guy, it was interesting to see him make sub-optimal plays similar to what other first-time players do. He was blessed with multiple hands that had four matching tiles, but he made long, spidery rows for few points rather than sit on the tiles and build toward larger scores. Despite his awesome draws, I beat him because I knew the game better and outplayed him.

Obviously not every game is right for every person. For any given title, you’ll find people who think it plays too quickly or drags or is too luck-based or has a rich-get-richer syndrome or benefits the player to the left of the new guy or any of a dozen other problems. But the problems aren’t always inherent to the game; perhaps the game just doesn’t suit your tastes.

Another possibility, and the one that seems the most probable given my experience, is that you’re not willing to give the game a chance to reshape your tastes.

A related story: Back in 1997, I bought an album by The Chemical Brothers called Dig Your Own Hole. I’m into electronic and dance music and had gone nuts over the lead track “Block Rockin’ Beats,” so I bought the album the first time I saw it. While most of tracks were enjoyable, if not all up to the level of the song I already knew, I despised one song so greatly that I would skip past it whenever it came. The track, “It Doesn’t Matter,” exemplifies all the worst traits that people ascribe to electronic music: It’s repetitive, hollow and soulless.

Or at least I thought it was. But every so often I wouldn’t skip the song, and after a few listens, I started to get into its booming rhythm. I was entranced by the droning vocal, which functioned like a vibrating chair for my mind. I like this awful, unartistic song.

Two years later, I bought the next Chemical Brothers album, Surrender, and went through the same process with the opening track, “Music:Response.” Part of the keyboard work sounded like an angry electronic bird from an Edgar Allen Poe adaptation, sitting above your bedframe and emitting an endless peeping that doomed you to never sleep again. Speaking with a friend who sings in clubs helped me listen to the song in a new way, and I grew to love it.

Naturally the next album had yet another song that irritated me ("It Came From Afrika"), but by this point I had learned to trust their abilities and just listen to it in the context of the album.

What I’ve learned from these and other experiences is that I’m a poor judge of what I like. That might seem like a ridiculous statement—after all, who else should be able to judge your tastes better than you?—but I’ve seen it proved again and again with television shows that I initially found unwatchable, books that at first seemed tedious, food that I couldn’t stomach, and so on.

So why should I dump on a game that I’ve played only once or twice? I know that I haven’t seen all the game has to offer, so I try to keep that in mind when writing about it. That doesn’t mean that when a game hits you the wrong way or leaves you shrugging your shoulders—as was the case with Suitors, which is reviewed elsewhere on BGN—you need to build a long-term relationship with it. No one is forcing you to play a game repeatedly until you learn to love it or throw yourself, Alex-like, through a window to escape your misery. Just keep in mind that the game might not be the problem. The problem might be you.

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Comments:

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We played Blue Moon City for the first time last weekend. My girlfriend really disliked it, I kind of liked it. I asked what she didn’t like about it, and it became clear that she was actually irritated by one of the other players, not by the game. So now I have convinced her to try it again some time, as she now recognises that it actually might be a good game, it was just that session that didn’t work for either of us. Posted by Surya Van Lierde on Sep 25, 2007 at 03:09 AM | #

I think this becomes very apparent when you try designing a game.  Although the versions you play during the design and development processes change wildly over time, this is very frequently because you are trying to make sure that the depth of the game is there so that it does reward further play - after all, you are likely to play it far more times than anyone else ever will, and if you can exhaust your own game then that’s probably a bad sign. The side-effect is that this also makes you appreciate the depth of other games more.  Sure, sometimes depth is confused with learning curve: a complex game may only be considered deep because it takes several sessions to learn the intricacies of the rules rather than because of its subtleties.  And, as you say, some games you simply don’t get on with, and are therefore unlikely to play enough to appreciate.  But judging a game by one (often inaccurate!) play seems to me to be doing both it and yourself a disservice. Posted by David Brain on Sep 25, 2007 at 03:53 AM | #

Nice article. I definitely agree with the base point. One of the best games to illustrate this is with basic latin partnership dominoes. It is a very, very simple form of the game, but its depths are quite astounding, and it is enlightening if you read one of the books of strategy about how to play your 7 tiles. And I can’t get many of the Euro folks to go near it. Posted by Frank Branham on Sep 25, 2007 at 06:15 AM | #

Eurogaming & Techno, together @ last :-) My New Years went : Coloretto - puerto rico - bohnanza - Chemical Brothers DJ set in London - sleep - sleep - Peurto Rico. Posted by Steve Finney on Sep 25, 2007 at 06:42 AM | #

Brilliantly stated!  I expect some variation of “What I’ve learned from these and other experiences is that I’m a poor judge of what I like.” to show up on Google’s quote of the day someday. With so many flavors out there, I think it’s OK to move on if something doesn’t suit your tastes.  Just confess that it doesn’t match your preferences.  By badmouthing it, you may think you are sounding knowledgeable, but you are probably coming across as a snob.  Here’s an example. Not too long ago, a regular attendee of our game club participated in a maximum-player dive into a new game.  As the game progressed, it was increasingly evident that most of the players really weren’t enjoying the experience.  So, I offered to stop the game, in order to release the players into their natural habitats.  While the game wasn’t particularly to my tastes, it had a few design aspects which I thought were interesting, and I’d have liked to see them played out.  The aforementioned club member, however, was openly put off by how quickly the rest of the players were willing to dismiss and avoid the game, and with how much condescension they mocked its architecture.  I mean, we hadn’t even finished one game of it, and - like you said - people couldn’t pigeonhole and discard it fast enough!  (I feel that maximum-player was not a good way to get to know it - or many other games, for that matter.  That was a very bad call on my part.) That club member has not returned. What have we done?  What have we become? Posted by Nathan Morse on Sep 25, 2007 at 06:44 AM | #

"Eurogaming & Techno, together @ last :-) “ Electronic music and techno aren’t synonyms, I like a bunch of electronic styles, but techno isn’t among them. Some of my gamer friends are very much into the same music as I am, so we can listen to Drum & Bass or IDM all evening while playing a deep gamers game :D Posted by Surya Van Lierde on Sep 25, 2007 at 06:52 AM | #

Surya, I’ve liked most electronic music that I’ve heard, with techno being a branch in that tree. I wasn’t familiar with the term IDM, but a Wikipedia search brings up a list of IDM artists that includes μ-ziq, Aphex Twin, and Amon Tobin, so I guess I’m an IDM fan as well. Drum & bass - also good. Putumayo’s blending of world and electronic music - also good! Einstuerzende Neubauten, Kraftwerk, Conrad Schnitzler, Banco de Gaia - good, good, good! Again, my experience has been to give an album a few listens before I decide what I think about it. Anything less, and I’m probably missing out on something different and enjoyable. Posted by W. Eric Martin on Sep 25, 2007 at 07:33 AM | #

It does seem that the amount of people who like both board games and electronic music are a small minority. Maybe the age of the average board gamer has to do with that? (yeah, we’re all old farts :D) Posted by Surya Van Lierde on Sep 25, 2007 at 07:45 AM | #

Electronica is a very old thing, so it isn’t age. I adore watching Keith Emerson rewire his Moog while performing Pictures at an Exhibition on the old concert movie. And I also got to see Legendary Pink Dots on one of their rare US tours. Techno doesn’t do a lot for me, though it does make for decent Dance Dance Revolution songs. (Block Rockin Beats is in fact on one of my DDR discs.) Posted by Frank Branham on Sep 25, 2007 at 09:01 AM | #

Eric, you are so full of wisdom!  Two quotes really great quotes.... “I’m a poor judge of what I like.” Deep.  That deserves a good drink and an hour of conversation at 2am.  Are we all poor judges of what we like?  What does that do to our choices in job careers and spouses?  Or is the ability to judge what you like a skill that differentiates the people who end up happy in life from the people who end up miserable?  (Sorry, Eric--I don’t mean to imply that your wife isn’t your soulmate or that you hate your job!) “Rather than change the way they played the game, they wanted to change the game itself.” This attitude extends far beyond gaming.  In psychology, this phenomenon is called the self-serving bias.  When we do well, we attribute it to internal causes (I am clever) and when we do poorly we attribute it to external causes (the game is broken). Posted by Valerie Putman on Sep 25, 2007 at 10:40 AM | #

"I’m a big fan of the Chemical Brothers too,” Tom said, entranced. Posted by Jeff Allers on Sep 25, 2007 at 12:00 PM | #

Well written article, Eric.  One of the best this year. Posted by Ryan Bretsch on Sep 25, 2007 at 11:13 PM | #

HUGE fan of The Chemical Brothers… I was pleasantly surprised to see the cover of ‘Dig your own hole’ on this site. Excellent article.  Very thought-provoking.  Over the past year I’ve learned to put some effort in trying to find the good in games, and not just ditch them after a game or two.  And yes, often times, like you stated, I’ll find myself amazed at discovering new things in what I thought was a straightforward game, after more than 2 sessions. Posted by Robert Ramirez on Sep 26, 2007 at 11:37 PM | #

The problem is that time is gold.  And gaming time is platinum.  With so many games out there to tempt us and so little time, it is natural (although not necessarily the appropriate thing to do) that we’ll quickly draw conclusions. Posted by Robert Ramirez on Sep 26, 2007 at 11:40 PM | #

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