A closely related question is: Should playing the fun way, and playing the optimal way be the same thing? I used to think think the answer was yes, but Spelunky 2 made me doubt; in Spelunky using a bomb or a rope is rarely optimal, but it can make things simpler and more fun. I think it's a well designed game, so the fact that optimal play and fun play are different is making me think.
> Should playing the fun way, and playing the optimal way be the same thing?
This is something that game designers, especially in roguelikes where there is a lot of procedural generation and combinatorial gameplay experiences, think about a lot.
There are all sorts of related questions:
* What should the space of optimal strategies look like? A single point that players should try to discover and optimize for? A region where there are a variety of equally valid ways?
* What are the discincentives for non-optimal play? Should it just be boring, or should the game actively punish the player for not following an expected strategy?
* What to do about strategies that are extremely effective but not fun? In roguelikes, that's things like "farming" where you find an easy to kill monster that breeds and just mow through hundreds of them to grind XP. Should the game try to avoid those scenarios so that players don't have to make an uncomfortable choice between maximizing versus fun, or should that be up to players?
It took me a decade to realize my best friend and I play friendly games differently. It was most obvious in magic the gathering - he would consistently optimize the same deck week after week, whereas I'd be bringing new decks with new and fairly general mechanics all the time. Similarly, he only ever played one character in smash bros or overwatch whereas I would heavily rotate.
Ultimately his goal was win percentage and optimal play - mastery of specific thing. I was going for fun and interesting wins and variety, and didn't care if I lost 90% of the time of that one win was AWESOME :-)
(Possibly relatedly - he brave a very very good Java specialist fter a decade of specific experience. I became a syaadmim then architect them ops manager type generalist :).
Absolutely! I ended up getting the "Timmy the power gamer" unglued card and put it on a landyard :-P - but in reality I'm a mix: I'm in it for fun like Timmy, but less with big creature and more with deck building and creative wins with unpopular cards that rarely pay off, like Johnny.
