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silveradeptSixth prompt time! The ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
sunshine_revival team has been providing some different topics to ruminate on.
Looks like there's also a new writing community atfan_writers and some of my older December Days posts appeared as writing meta, so hello to anyone new poking around.
Let's get to the prompt.
I grew up in a game-playing household, with a game-playing extended family, and therefore I have had plenty of experience with American board games, Euro-style board games, card games, and significant amounts of console and computer games as well. Board and card games have always been social games. They were also sneakily educational for me and my siblings, because if the board game required someone to do maths (usually because there was a bank), the children always had to do the banking part. And we also played a fair number of word games like Boggle or the Trivial Pursuit, which does give you a lot of strange pieces of information that come back when you do other quiz-related materials. I found out as I advanced in age and the various "Genus" versions advanced that the game got easier for me. Mostly because I had now experienced the things that were part of the trivia repository, instead of having to learn them. I suspect now that if I were to play the most current Genus version that I would once again be in the position of having to learn, rather than having experienced so much of it.
My father was banned from playing Clue(do) with the children after he successfully won the game on seeing one player show another a piece of disproving evidence. We didn't particularly care that it was an exercise of good logic and figuring it all out, if you can win in one turn for a game, then there's no challenge for you and we move on to other games.
Cards were the usual game of family and extended family. Quick-fire rounds of euchre, then cribbage (more of that maths counting, and significant amounts of skip-counting, because you don't count by ones) and if there were plenty of people, we'd play hearts (affectionately called Nasty Cards for the attitudes that skilled Hearts play can engender), Oh, Hell! (and the variation of it called Wizard which adds four Wizard cards that take all and four Jester cards that lose to all), and then eventually Pinochle (double deck, rather than single). While there were Bridge players in the extended family, I didn't pick it up past the beginnings of bidding. Having read the occasional Goren (and successors) column, I have mostly come to the conclusion that playing out most bridge hands is a formality if the bidding has gone appropriately, but that there are several hands where the bidding has gone appropriately and then the declarer and/or defenders have to figure out which trick is actually the hinge of success and failure and navigate around that one. Those kinds of situations happen in Hearts and Euchre, too, but I just didn't want to put the effort into learning the complexity of the bidding. And we had enough fun playing the other card games, as well, and there was much bitching and bellyaching about the way the cards were dealt and the process of the gameplay. "Who dealt this crap?" is a common complaint among everyone in the family, even when we know the answer was "You did!"
The paucity of good hands playing among family also engenders a certain amount of conservative gameplay within the games. You might have the potential for ten points, are likely to get six and will bid four, because four is what you're guaranteed and there's a high probability that all the breaks are against you and you will end up with four, even though you tried to play for six. Games based on luck and good rolling or good drawing are ones that I can play, but there's a lot of "well, you'd have to roll a one for that to happen," and then a one gets rolled. (And then there are games where all the rolls and draws go extraordinarily well, just to annoy us and be inconsistent. They do happen, but they're usually met with disbelief and the occasional "oh, this one's going well.")
As the kids got older, we started playing word games, like Boggle, but not the small 4 squares by 4 squares Boggle, but the 5 square by 5 square Master/Big Boggle version. I don't know whether it was a house rule or an actual rule in the Big Boggle version, but we insisted on a four letter word minimum for points. Having discovered the Android app Lexica, I am now regualrly playing boards with at least one of my siblings again, according to the same 5x5, 4-letter word minimum grid from home, which is great to have and a fun way of re-connecting with the sibling.
During the time period where everyone was working from home and not seeing anyone, because they were taking the then-novel coronavirus seriously and trying not to spread it, my siblings and I, as well as some other friends, also developed a regular practice and love for playing Jackbox Games' Jackbox Party Packs. They're all simple concept games and they play well for audiences that have web browser access and at least one person broadcasting the main screen. They work well for in-person gatherings as well, and we've had a lot of laughs with the kinds of things that we've come up with for Quiplash and managing to describe some very interesting things, people, and places in Blather Round.
So that's family games and social games. (And skipping over a lot of Euro-style games played with friends, because there aren't all that many Euro-style board games that have a single-player mode.) My solo game career is much more to the video game department, as I haven't had a whole lot of opportunities for co-op in those realms. Adventure games from the Sierra/Dynamix family were single-player, but also so were many of Atari console games, the Nintendo console games, and so on from there. Younger-me liked to play the kinds of RPGs that requested hundreds of hours, and plenty of other games that would ask for you to play them so long that the console might start overheating and resetting itself before you could finish the game in one session unless you were a lot better at them than I was, and that was with the Game Genie or other such things. I did have some console computer friends, and some local LAN parties, but since my younger years consisted mostly of having dial-up Internet connections, I never really got into the competitive multiplayer of various games. (Outside of beZerk's online games, anyway, which were fun and the Jackbox Games are basically the successor of.) Plus, most of the online multiplayer are first-person shooters, real-time strategy games, and console fighting games. All of which are things I'm not actually all that good at without things like cheat codes or finding useful cheesing strategies. And everything moved toward going faster and faster, such that you're supposed to be able to read and react to an opponent within their startup frames and just instinctively know which combos to perform to punish them. I play those games, but not well. With, perhaps, the exception of the Smash series, and that's probably because Smash is much more forgiving than everything else, and also because Smash contains all kinds of items that are really useful for control, breathers, destruction, and all of that. (I get much more enjoyment about being able to just rampage through levels, without having to worry that if an opponent sees me, I'll get headshotted and dead.)
There's a lot of frustration that comes from "I put this input in, why didn't it take?" that can also snowball into, "Oh, I see, so it's not actually fair to play this with you because I'll make one mistake and get slammed by a ten-hit combo." And while there are a lot of people who would look at that situation and say, "Git gud, scrub, if you want to have fun," I am not interested nor able to put in the amount of time that I would need to develop those skills to be some kind of low-tier competitor, much less a high-tier competitor. I will complain about random number generators in games if I feel like they're stacked against me without that being part of the explicit difficulty selection, and also about game design where the various difficulty levels are really "how often does the computer actually get to make the input it wants to" rather than putting the time into making intelligent mistakes or in making the computer players only work with the information that a human player would have, instead of being able to read the game state, or read the inputs of the player and react in computer time, without the necessity of pushing buttons or moving joysticks. (It's very easy to make an opponent that can play perfectly. It's much harder to make an opponent that plays like a human of specific skills.)
So I've been expanding the types of games that I play, as well as my Steam library, and I think that my favorite kind of genre is a roguelike with permanent progression upgrades. (Althoiugh my actual favorite favorite genre of game is "the achievements are not gated behind beating the game on the hardest difficulty, performing ridiculously difficult tasks, or playing on-line against other players for a certain amount of victories, matches, or other such things." See above paragraph as to why I might be annoyed about such things being required. While someone probably thinks that such achievements are great for separating the really good people from the rest of us, honestly, they have to have generated a game that I want to play on the hardest difficulty and get really good at. Because most of the time, I'll instead be looking for the cheapest, cheesiest way of getting that achievement and moving on from there. I'm getting older, and I have a job, no less, so I don't have the same amount of time to put into trying to grind my way into achievements.) The kinds of games that I can pick up and play for a bit, then put down again, and pick up again, and feel like I'm making progress on even in short gaming sessions, is really making things better for me and means I can play those games more and more often. So roguelikes / roguelites that are friendly to working people are the ones that I'm terying to find more of in my library. Along with kind of casual games that I can clear in one session, or that don't take all that long to make major progress on. I want to go back and full clear all of the big RPGs with hundreds of hours that need to be put into them, but I would have to take weeks off of work and dedicate myself very specifically to doing those kinds of hundred percent runs without having other things get in the way, like life often does. And life with other people almost certainly does. (I wouldn't trade the people in my life for the extra gaming time, however. I like the people much more.)
(What I really would like is the ability to sort my library according to how long it would take to get all their achievements (on average) and then start jamming through many of those games for their full completion percentages, so that I can feel like I'm making a dent in my library. There was a Windows tool that supposedly worked for that, but it was apparently only a Windows tool, so I'm looking for the Linux equivalents of such things.)
So, to wind this all up, I basically play lots of kinds of games, and I'll usually play most games enough times to figure out whether I like them enough to want to keep playing them, or whether I'll just tolerate them or actively dislike them. (Who I'm playing with sometimes influences this. Some games are perfectly fine, but become terrible in the hands of others, and some games are terrible, but they're great with the right kind of audience to appreciate them, or to figure out how they can actually be made playable.
sunshine_revival team has been providing some different topics to ruminate on.Looks like there's also a new writing community at
fan_writers and some of my older December Days posts appeared as writing meta, so hello to anyone new poking around.Let's get to the prompt.
It’s game night! Whether for you that means getting together with a group of friends or a quiet evening chilling out on your own with video games, this is where you get to tell us all about it. If you have a favourite game, tell us what you love about it.
Challenge #6:
Journaling prompt: What games do you play, if any? Are you a solo-gamer or do you view games as a social activity?
Creative prompt: Write a story/fic around the theme "game night".
I grew up in a game-playing household, with a game-playing extended family, and therefore I have had plenty of experience with American board games, Euro-style board games, card games, and significant amounts of console and computer games as well. Board and card games have always been social games. They were also sneakily educational for me and my siblings, because if the board game required someone to do maths (usually because there was a bank), the children always had to do the banking part. And we also played a fair number of word games like Boggle or the Trivial Pursuit, which does give you a lot of strange pieces of information that come back when you do other quiz-related materials. I found out as I advanced in age and the various "Genus" versions advanced that the game got easier for me. Mostly because I had now experienced the things that were part of the trivia repository, instead of having to learn them. I suspect now that if I were to play the most current Genus version that I would once again be in the position of having to learn, rather than having experienced so much of it.
My father was banned from playing Clue(do) with the children after he successfully won the game on seeing one player show another a piece of disproving evidence. We didn't particularly care that it was an exercise of good logic and figuring it all out, if you can win in one turn for a game, then there's no challenge for you and we move on to other games.
Cards were the usual game of family and extended family. Quick-fire rounds of euchre, then cribbage (more of that maths counting, and significant amounts of skip-counting, because you don't count by ones) and if there were plenty of people, we'd play hearts (affectionately called Nasty Cards for the attitudes that skilled Hearts play can engender), Oh, Hell! (and the variation of it called Wizard which adds four Wizard cards that take all and four Jester cards that lose to all), and then eventually Pinochle (double deck, rather than single). While there were Bridge players in the extended family, I didn't pick it up past the beginnings of bidding. Having read the occasional Goren (and successors) column, I have mostly come to the conclusion that playing out most bridge hands is a formality if the bidding has gone appropriately, but that there are several hands where the bidding has gone appropriately and then the declarer and/or defenders have to figure out which trick is actually the hinge of success and failure and navigate around that one. Those kinds of situations happen in Hearts and Euchre, too, but I just didn't want to put the effort into learning the complexity of the bidding. And we had enough fun playing the other card games, as well, and there was much bitching and bellyaching about the way the cards were dealt and the process of the gameplay. "Who dealt this crap?" is a common complaint among everyone in the family, even when we know the answer was "You did!"
The paucity of good hands playing among family also engenders a certain amount of conservative gameplay within the games. You might have the potential for ten points, are likely to get six and will bid four, because four is what you're guaranteed and there's a high probability that all the breaks are against you and you will end up with four, even though you tried to play for six. Games based on luck and good rolling or good drawing are ones that I can play, but there's a lot of "well, you'd have to roll a one for that to happen," and then a one gets rolled. (And then there are games where all the rolls and draws go extraordinarily well, just to annoy us and be inconsistent. They do happen, but they're usually met with disbelief and the occasional "oh, this one's going well.")
As the kids got older, we started playing word games, like Boggle, but not the small 4 squares by 4 squares Boggle, but the 5 square by 5 square Master/Big Boggle version. I don't know whether it was a house rule or an actual rule in the Big Boggle version, but we insisted on a four letter word minimum for points. Having discovered the Android app Lexica, I am now regualrly playing boards with at least one of my siblings again, according to the same 5x5, 4-letter word minimum grid from home, which is great to have and a fun way of re-connecting with the sibling.
During the time period where everyone was working from home and not seeing anyone, because they were taking the then-novel coronavirus seriously and trying not to spread it, my siblings and I, as well as some other friends, also developed a regular practice and love for playing Jackbox Games' Jackbox Party Packs. They're all simple concept games and they play well for audiences that have web browser access and at least one person broadcasting the main screen. They work well for in-person gatherings as well, and we've had a lot of laughs with the kinds of things that we've come up with for Quiplash and managing to describe some very interesting things, people, and places in Blather Round.
So that's family games and social games. (And skipping over a lot of Euro-style games played with friends, because there aren't all that many Euro-style board games that have a single-player mode.) My solo game career is much more to the video game department, as I haven't had a whole lot of opportunities for co-op in those realms. Adventure games from the Sierra/Dynamix family were single-player, but also so were many of Atari console games, the Nintendo console games, and so on from there. Younger-me liked to play the kinds of RPGs that requested hundreds of hours, and plenty of other games that would ask for you to play them so long that the console might start overheating and resetting itself before you could finish the game in one session unless you were a lot better at them than I was, and that was with the Game Genie or other such things. I did have some console computer friends, and some local LAN parties, but since my younger years consisted mostly of having dial-up Internet connections, I never really got into the competitive multiplayer of various games. (Outside of beZerk's online games, anyway, which were fun and the Jackbox Games are basically the successor of.) Plus, most of the online multiplayer are first-person shooters, real-time strategy games, and console fighting games. All of which are things I'm not actually all that good at without things like cheat codes or finding useful cheesing strategies. And everything moved toward going faster and faster, such that you're supposed to be able to read and react to an opponent within their startup frames and just instinctively know which combos to perform to punish them. I play those games, but not well. With, perhaps, the exception of the Smash series, and that's probably because Smash is much more forgiving than everything else, and also because Smash contains all kinds of items that are really useful for control, breathers, destruction, and all of that. (I get much more enjoyment about being able to just rampage through levels, without having to worry that if an opponent sees me, I'll get headshotted and dead.)
There's a lot of frustration that comes from "I put this input in, why didn't it take?" that can also snowball into, "Oh, I see, so it's not actually fair to play this with you because I'll make one mistake and get slammed by a ten-hit combo." And while there are a lot of people who would look at that situation and say, "Git gud, scrub, if you want to have fun," I am not interested nor able to put in the amount of time that I would need to develop those skills to be some kind of low-tier competitor, much less a high-tier competitor. I will complain about random number generators in games if I feel like they're stacked against me without that being part of the explicit difficulty selection, and also about game design where the various difficulty levels are really "how often does the computer actually get to make the input it wants to" rather than putting the time into making intelligent mistakes or in making the computer players only work with the information that a human player would have, instead of being able to read the game state, or read the inputs of the player and react in computer time, without the necessity of pushing buttons or moving joysticks. (It's very easy to make an opponent that can play perfectly. It's much harder to make an opponent that plays like a human of specific skills.)
So I've been expanding the types of games that I play, as well as my Steam library, and I think that my favorite kind of genre is a roguelike with permanent progression upgrades. (Althoiugh my actual favorite favorite genre of game is "the achievements are not gated behind beating the game on the hardest difficulty, performing ridiculously difficult tasks, or playing on-line against other players for a certain amount of victories, matches, or other such things." See above paragraph as to why I might be annoyed about such things being required. While someone probably thinks that such achievements are great for separating the really good people from the rest of us, honestly, they have to have generated a game that I want to play on the hardest difficulty and get really good at. Because most of the time, I'll instead be looking for the cheapest, cheesiest way of getting that achievement and moving on from there. I'm getting older, and I have a job, no less, so I don't have the same amount of time to put into trying to grind my way into achievements.) The kinds of games that I can pick up and play for a bit, then put down again, and pick up again, and feel like I'm making progress on even in short gaming sessions, is really making things better for me and means I can play those games more and more often. So roguelikes / roguelites that are friendly to working people are the ones that I'm terying to find more of in my library. Along with kind of casual games that I can clear in one session, or that don't take all that long to make major progress on. I want to go back and full clear all of the big RPGs with hundreds of hours that need to be put into them, but I would have to take weeks off of work and dedicate myself very specifically to doing those kinds of hundred percent runs without having other things get in the way, like life often does. And life with other people almost certainly does. (I wouldn't trade the people in my life for the extra gaming time, however. I like the people much more.)
(What I really would like is the ability to sort my library according to how long it would take to get all their achievements (on average) and then start jamming through many of those games for their full completion percentages, so that I can feel like I'm making a dent in my library. There was a Windows tool that supposedly worked for that, but it was apparently only a Windows tool, so I'm looking for the Linux equivalents of such things.)
So, to wind this all up, I basically play lots of kinds of games, and I'll usually play most games enough times to figure out whether I like them enough to want to keep playing them, or whether I'll just tolerate them or actively dislike them. (Who I'm playing with sometimes influences this. Some games are perfectly fine, but become terrible in the hands of others, and some games are terrible, but they're great with the right kind of audience to appreciate them, or to figure out how they can actually be made playable.
