One thing I find interesting about modern board game culture is how many people consider it wrong to learn how to play a game well, e.g., in response to a question about how often people read about strategy, every response (so far) is "basically never", with multiple people considering reading about strategy to be cheating and/or ruining the game for other people.
I don't think I've ever played a sport where this was the dominant attitude, and of course it's also not for chess/go/bridge/etc.
@danluu the lead designer for Magic: the Gathering splits players into three profiles:
Timmy wants to experience something cool (big creatures, explosions)
Johnny wants to express themself (be offbeat, or creative)
Spike wants to win
I think this applies to most games, and people shift between them. For Online multiplayer, I am a spike who reads up on the best strategies. But for single player RPG I'm more interested in a good story than optimizing my run.
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This column will have two distinctively different readers. The first will have read the original article or at least be aware of the three terms. The second will be learning about this R&D classification for the first time. This column will have someth...
Dan Luu
mp01