noodling about board games
Sep. 19th, 2019 11:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaberettThe last few times we've gone to board game socials I've played unfamiliar-to-me games with strangers without my standard preemptive spiel and it's been... fine? It's been fine. I haven't cried! I mostly haven't panicked! I've managed to say "I'd rather read the rules than have them explained verbally" calmly and factually and like it's no big deal!
I'm arriving here from a position of: my family, Mama and Papa and my mother and I, every time I visited the mouldering ancestral pile we'd have dinner, and clean up after dinner, and then every evening or almost we'd move through to the sitting room, and play Scrabble (and very occasionally bridge), the four of us with our own bits of novel or newspaper or whatever to read while waiting for others to take their turns, and we'd congratulate people for nice plays and demand definitions of unfamiliar words and generally exist in companionable quiet while engaging with ritual (while the sun set over the sea out of the window or the gales howled around the edges of the house or or or).
This is a very different approach, a very different style of play, to these socials, but I think I am beginning to understand some more of what people actually get out of this.
See, Adam ended up explaining LARP -- or, well, bits of LARP -- to my mother, on Sunday, over dinner, about systems and mechanics and stories and how these layer and interact.
I begin -- I say, wrapping up before I've really expressed the thought coherently, because apparently I'm very tired again -- to see how this fits together with board games, too: how there's sets of common underlying rules or mechanics, the categorisation of games as Werewolf variants or what have you, with story on top; how at least some of the interest in playing a wide variety of different things, instead of focussing on getting very good at one in particular, is to do with contrast and comparison and variety in flavour and seeing how things fit together and combine and so on, and what can be done with the available blocks, more than it is necessarily anything to do with any specific individual game. The story, perhaps, rather than the elements. The what-happens-if-we-take-a-world-and-emphasise-this.
It's a work in progress (I'm a work in progress), but I might be starting to get a feel for how to enjoy any of this, as opposed to Determinedly Acquiring A Skill. Perhaps.
I'm arriving here from a position of: my family, Mama and Papa and my mother and I, every time I visited the mouldering ancestral pile we'd have dinner, and clean up after dinner, and then every evening or almost we'd move through to the sitting room, and play Scrabble (and very occasionally bridge), the four of us with our own bits of novel or newspaper or whatever to read while waiting for others to take their turns, and we'd congratulate people for nice plays and demand definitions of unfamiliar words and generally exist in companionable quiet while engaging with ritual (while the sun set over the sea out of the window or the gales howled around the edges of the house or or or).
This is a very different approach, a very different style of play, to these socials, but I think I am beginning to understand some more of what people actually get out of this.
See, Adam ended up explaining LARP -- or, well, bits of LARP -- to my mother, on Sunday, over dinner, about systems and mechanics and stories and how these layer and interact.
I begin -- I say, wrapping up before I've really expressed the thought coherently, because apparently I'm very tired again -- to see how this fits together with board games, too: how there's sets of common underlying rules or mechanics, the categorisation of games as Werewolf variants or what have you, with story on top; how at least some of the interest in playing a wide variety of different things, instead of focussing on getting very good at one in particular, is to do with contrast and comparison and variety in flavour and seeing how things fit together and combine and so on, and what can be done with the available blocks, more than it is necessarily anything to do with any specific individual game. The story, perhaps, rather than the elements. The what-happens-if-we-take-a-world-and-emphasise-this.
It's a work in progress (I'm a work in progress), but I might be starting to get a feel for how to enjoy any of this, as opposed to Determinedly Acquiring A Skill. Perhaps.