To all of our readers and writers – Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! I hope everyone is getting (or has received) a fun game this winter to help make the short days pass by quicker.
If you’re down in the wrong hemisphere, disregard that, and I hope you don’t get a sunburn today while you sunbathe!
While you’re in between bouts of unwrapping gifts today – you can help me think of a new Sniglet for a situation I keep running into.
About a year ago, I coined a term “Chapathy” which I define as that period of internal deliberation when you decide you aren’t sure if you like a book enough to finish it BUT your Kindle tells you that you’re already 70+% of the way through – and part of you just thinks you should finish the book as you’ve already committed so much time to it.
There is a gaming equivalent, when you get far enough into a game that you know it isn’t for you… yet, you don’t want to quit because everyone else is still playing and enjoying it – and part of you thinks that you should just finish it out to get the payoff after investing so much time in it to start with…… What do I call that?
Anyways, Merry Christmas!
gambivalence – you’ve decided you could take-it-or-leave-it, just don’t want to bring others down with your critical observations.
+1 for this, it’s exactly what I had come up with as well.
This gets my vote.
Obligamed.
Happy Holidays!
As always, great reading and great expression of comparative opinion within and across various articles. Hmmm, a term for intra- and interpersonal considerations in finishing a game not compatible with taste for it:
Meeplethy Ludompathy Ludoemptropy Lol!
Tx for the memories all and a Happy New Year !
Cliff Alles-Curie Rockford, MI
Re-turnity?
You’re trying to decide if the game is “Geekworthy”. The reference to the Geek is obvious enough, but the term has an additional meaning to my game group. When I gamed more regularly with Jason Matthews, we all knew he would refuse to let us quit a new game before its conclusion, regardless of how much we were all hating it. His reason was that he wanted to give the game a terrible rating on the Geek and he didn’t feel he could do that unless he had played it at least once from beginning to end!
That may sound harsh, but the fact is that most gamers are pretty stubborn about finishing up a game, no matter how dire it is. That happened to us recently when we played Bremerhaven for the first time. We all thought it was pretty bad, but there was some part of the Gamer’s Contract that seemed to dictate we play it to the end, on the very off chance that it might get better (it never did, BTW). It’s like we feel we owe it to the game to give it at least one fair shot. I think I may prefer Mike Gray’s philosophy, which says that if two people give a game the thumbs down, they immediately quit and play something else. But most gamers of my acquaintance will stubbornly stick it out to be bitter end, out of a misplaced sense of fairness.
Incidentally, the resemblance to the term “sponge-worthy” (ask a Seinfeld fan if you don’t know what I’m talking about) is deliberate.
Occasionally, however, playing out a bad game can help to highlight rules mistakes. I recently tried to teach a group Steam Noir: Revolution. None of us were enjoying the play, but by playing it out we reached such an absurd conclusion that it forced me to re-read the rules and discover an error that had ruined our enjoyment. These are obviously rare cases, but since it was my most recent experience along these lines, I thought I would mention it.
We stopped playing Bremerhaven after playing about 35% of a game, but I felt no hesitation about rating it on BGG. (I didn’t rate Chicago, though, because after setting it up and reading the rules, we decided it wasn’t worth playing.) I feel a non-zero fraction of a game allows me to rate it if its quality (or lack thereof) is clear to me.
I would say you are “Plaboring” (combining “Play” and “laboring” or “play” and “boring”). You are
“Playbored.” Plabor – noun. Plabored – adjective. Playboring – verb.
+1 for Gambivalence and +1 for Geekworthy. Also, what is the word for the game that does not stay in the collection and the word for the game that does stay in the collection?
-note to self from Jonathan’s post: New Year’s resolution add – not be critical of the game for other’s enjoyment!