Today I was catching up on a recent Dice Exploder episode about the chit-based inventory mechanic in Mausritter – which is a great system, which the hosts come up with some excellent extending ideas for – and found myself pausing at a statement near end. In talking about the fun of setting up little item chits to give players, Sam says:
What struck me about it was how little I agreed – indeed, how oppositely I felt. Which isn’t to say that Sam is wrong here in any capacity: I believe the report of his internal emotions and couldn’t possibly describe it as a negative way to look at games. The statement merely revealed how different we are in how we experience tabletop games as a hobby.
To me, going out to play a tabletop game and going to a party are two different activities that ask for rather different mindsets. Playing a game is about the satisfaction of skillfully engaging my brain: when I play a board game I’m trying to win, when I crawl a dungeon I’m trying to problem-solve, when I roleplay I’m trying to entertainingly embody a character. A party, on the other hand, is about the relief of turning my brain off: it’s an invitation of have a drink or two, talk with friends, do some dancing, and sing karaoke. I might end up doing some thinking along the way (and usually do, as I find that hard to stop) but it’s on my own terms.
Both of these pastimes bring joy, but along different angles. I start eyeing the exit if someone pulls out a card game at a party, because it means I’m going to be locked into performance mode for the next while, which isn’t what I came to do. It’s entirely likely that I’m among the outliers here, as party games have been popular as far back as we have records, but there’s a reason why they’re typically quite simple and short. Even so, I’m rarely interested in games that are too simple or too short: if I’m going to play a game I want to sink my teeth into it a little.
I imagine there’s a personality dynamic reason for this: potentially something about my natural trait of relative introversion. A number of years back there was a study that found, somewhat unintuitively, that extroverted people were more likely to play games with lots of action in them, clustered together with seeking games with social elements. This can be explained by the fact that although sociability is what people think of as the core element of extroversion, underlying that tendency is a relatively high level of excitement seeking, energy, and dominance. I can see how a more extroverted person would find games to be peanut butter to party chocolate, simply another way to fulfill those same desires.
For my own part, though, I see the game designer and party-thrower parts of myself as separate spheres. There’s a joke in there about adventuring parties, but I’ll leave coming up with that for the next time I’ve had a couple drinks.
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