[patrck]

Recognizing the games that others are playing is useful, however refining your own games seems the much better play.

What are your personal win conditions? What are the odds and your confidence in those odds that those will remain stable for the rest of your life? Are any inconsistent with the other conditions?

Are all your win conditions attainable? Can you create a simple-to-follow path that leads to those win conditions and avoids going near loss conditiions? Will that path clash with any other people's win conditions paths?

Makes me respect game worlds designed so people can play however they wish.

[darkerside]

If you understand the other games out there, you may find you are playing the wrong one. Hard to decide that if you don't know all the games.

[patrck]

True. Was angling for that with the "that those will remain stable".

It seems easier to personally define what one thinks winning is, and then evaluate (and modify if possible) the games we come across.

[darkerside]

I've found that constraints breed creativity. In my experience, choosing from existing choices, and modifying them to fit, is way easier than imagining the perfect thing in a vacuum. Although potentially less powerful and transformative.

[patrck]

Definitely. Nobody likes forklift upgrades in PROD. Unless it's a complete wreck and one's much better off moving to a different country or the like.

Even smaller, more incremental experiments can be difficult to imagine. eg. beyond a multitool, smartphone, and computer, what additional things have high value? The multitool has high unexpected utility in that I would have predicted near zero and I now use it all the time. So it's likely that I am blind to other possible improvements.