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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   30873 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

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I would counter that lots of games are not meant to be played for mastery. They’re meant to be played for fun, and that might mean some self-expression by picking items you think look cool, or trying to do silly things that probably won’t work, or just playing infrequently and not getting good. It’s not fun if playing with less than maximal seriousness means you get constantly steamrollered by the meta people. At least they should be on a different server.

I’ve had this problem in real life too - often your friend group picks up something like table tennis or a new fps and it’s great fun but after a few weeks one or two people have knuckled down and got good, and now it’s no fun for anybody else because you have to play 1v2 or 1v3 even to have a chance.

With games it’s tricky because the set of your players who are mastery-oriented are going to overlap a lot with the set of loyal fans who set the culture and promote your brand, so you can’t suppress them and you will end up being disproportionately affected by their vision whether you like it or not.

With games it’s tricky because the set of your players who are mastery-oriented are going to overlap a lot with the set of loyal fans who set the culture and promote your brand, so you can’t suppress them and you will end up being disproportionately affected by their vision whether you like it or not.

Not to mention that quite often such players infest even non-gaming forums (including The Motte!) and viciously attack anyone who suggests that the non-competitive version of the game (usually the single player campaign) should not be held to the same artificial limitations put there for the competitive players (eg. making RTSes depend heavily on actions per minute because the player AI has been intentionally left braindead).

I would counter that lots of games are not meant to be played for mastery. They’re meant to be played for fun

Well, they're the same thing for me (and a lot of other people too). I'm not having fun if I'm not trying to attain mastery, so I pick games where playing them at a high level of mastery is also fun.

I’ve had this problem in real life too - often your friend group picks up something like table tennis or a new fps and it’s great fun but after a few weeks one or two people have knuckled down and got good, and now it’s no fun for anybody else because you have to play 1v2 or 1v3 even to have a chance.

Yeah, if you're playing in a social setting you want to pick games that will work well for everyone obviously.

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