This seems a good characterisation of the way that “guess culture” isn’t “one echo”, but “one or more echoes”. A lot of guess culture seems predicated on ideas like “we certainly wouldn’t just say X, because that would be frightfully uncomfortable for everyone, but we wouldn’t say Y either, because B would have to reply either affirmative or negative which would make C feel like we haven’t considered how C’s response would make D feel...” I don’t know, I find it hard to model guess culture accurately, but it certainly feels to me like native guess culture speakers model a lot more than one echo in their expectations. You could take this as making ask culture feel all the more revolutionary.
Alex Churchill
Karma: 13
Plenty of people find fun in very different ways. Some will be happy to play the same simple Magic deck over and over 100 times, not learning anything after the first few plays, and if they win 60 of those they’ll have fun. There’s a pretty good online survey called the Gamer Motivation Survey by Quantic Foundry which asks you a bunch of questions about what motivates you to keep playing. For example, I get the highest score for Mastery (broken down into Challenge and Strategy), closely followed by Creativity (Discovery and Design). But other gamers will get very little fulfilment from Creativity and much more from Immersion (Story or Escapism) or Social (Community or Competition).
Have you ever seen non-gamers playing a game like Apples to Apples? They’re not learning anything or challenging anyone, they’ve forgotten the score system if they ever knew it, they’re just enjoying watching their friends try to work out whether Whipped Cream or Spam is more Cuddly.
And indeed there’s an important tenet of game design, which I think is found in one of the essays in The Kobold Guide To Game Design: Make the most fun things to do also the things that will help you win. One key thing to do in playtesting is find the strategies equivalent to your “archer spam” example and rebalance so they’re not so powerful. It’s interesting as a designer to see what players find fun, and vital to test enough that you can empathize those parts.
(Relatedly, one of the pieces of feedback I kept getting on my game Steam Works is that people have lots of fun even if they don’t win. That’s also a great trait for a game to have but it’s rather harder to consistently achieve.)
I’ve found great benefit in using the times when I have high willpower and problem-solving energy to put things in place that will help me when willpower is low. The biggest win I think is noticing that I was staying up too late reading/playing on my phone, and so installed an app that locks my phone after a certain time at night. (“Digital Detox Challenge” is the most effective app I found for this on Android.)
I’ve also found that modern LLM chatbots are surprisingly good at helping find solutions to problems you might not expect.