Don't Play Everything: The Trap of Knowledge

This article is about finding an equilibrium with one’s quest for knowledge and self-improvement, and the fact that these pursuits often clash with the time it takes to proactively do or create things instead of merely absorbing information passively. I apply this to finding games you enjoy the most and also to game design, which I’m heavily involved in at this point.

But first, I want to talk about LinkedIn. Well, ok, let’s be clear, I don’t really want to talk about it. It’s largely a silly place, where corporate types do their best impression of Instagram influencers – but in button-up shirts and khakis – and those trying to climb various corporate ladders and/or get more clients act overly enthusiastic about every little thing. It’s exhausting.

But I digress.

LinkedIn highlights this problem, which I’ll relate to board games and roleplaying games in just a second. Because many there are obsessed with self-improvement.

They’ll happily tell you how many books they’ve read this year, what improvement goals they’ve had, and they’ll even turn the failures into lessons that can get likes and shares among their network.

It’s performative, for their audience. True improvement comes more quietly, I’m convinced, and has little to do with volume of information but more in how diligently you apply specific insights that are best catered to your circumstances and needs.

I see similar – though happily less pronounced – versions of this in the gaming sphere. And that’s what I actually want to talk about.

My Relationship With Self-Improvement and Consumption

I was originally going to be an English teacher after college. My career took me elsewhere, but education remains a passion of mine. Let it never be said that I don’t see value in education, reading, and self-improvement. Changes to our educational system would actually be priority #1 for me if I had any power to affect change on a societal scale, toward what I believe would be a more equitable future.

However, I see that LinkedIn trap elsewhere, and it grinds on me. Volume is not equal to quality, and it can often actively combat the quality of your efforts.

It’s better in my mind, for instance, to read a single book that you really want to learn from, then spend an entire year implementing its principles into your life, than to read 20 books and never take time to implement them before racing off to read the next.

But reading 20 books in rapid succession will get you more attention on social media platforms. Which, often, is the true end goal of these efforts. And that’s unfortunate.

I’ve been subjected to this in corporate America, which is obsessed with self-improvement. Or rather, I should say it’s obsessed with the idea of self-improvement. The obsession is surface-level only. They want to point to empirical markers that look like progress, regardless of whether or not they truly are.

And so I’m wary of similar messaging.

The Bevy of RPGs and Board Games

Have you played a narratively based RPG, as opposed to a more crunchy, mechanical, combat-oriented one like Dungeons & Dragons?

Have you played one with cards as action resolution? Dice rolls from a table? An active GM (game master)? Have you played a fantasy roleplaying game? Sci-fi? Steampunk? Noir?

Probably few of us have done all of those. Now board games…

Have you played a game from every genre? Do you even know every genre? Are you a fan of a particular designer? Have you played all 25 of their games? Or if they’ve designed 300, have you played at least 100 of them? You have so much more to explore.

Oh, you like an introductory wargame, yeah? Here’s half a dozen sub-genres of wargame you might not have even known existed. Understanding the full sub-hobby of wargaming will require that you play a representative sample of each of them. This will likely take you years.

I could keep going, but hopefully you get the point by now. One more stat though:

Over 5,000 new board games are produced every year!

Numbers for roleplaying games are harder to collect, so we don’t have estimates there. It’s likely that the number is in the thousands for that style as well.

Ok, so my guess is that some of those new releases are new editions of existing games, and I also know that the number has hovered under 5K even in recent years occasionally due to market forces (like COVID, international tariffs, etc.).

Even still, if that number were only 2,000, it would be more than any of us could realistically play across several years (or for some, a lifetime), let alone a single year. And game production has been in the thousands per year for well over a decade at this point. It’s not slowing down.

To Get Better, Play More?

So how do you refine your preferences as a gamer? How do you expand your knowledge and skills as a designer? Is the answer just to play more? And then even more?

To throw a bone to the “just play more” advice I’ve seen from many reputable sources, a large portion of their audience are gamers that are new to hobby gaming. And by new, I mean they’re mostly aware of popular titles from the last few years.

In these instances, yes, just play more. If you are talking about all the games you’ve played and it’s under three figures, or your game knowledge only extends back a handful of years, you have some enormous blindspots for trends in game design and the experiences they can create.

It’s not your fault. It’s just the size of the industry.

There will be diminishing returns eventually, sure, but the best thing you can do is just expose yourself to as many new and different ideas as possible.

You’ll more quickly learn what you like, why, and also gain ideas if you want to turn it into design efforts.

However, I often see designers talking about how they need to “keep up” with the latest trends, as though their existing knowledge is going to be invalidated by the latest year’s crop of hot releases. They’ll do this several hundreds or even thousands of games deep into styles of gaming they enjoy.

Their preexisting knowledge isn’t invalid, though. Not even close. Honestly, some of the best “play-as-research” I’ve done in the last few years has been with games from 20+ years ago. Good gaming ideas don’t grow stale over time. And there are diminishing returns on playing, say, your 100th deckbuilder game when you already know the tropes of the genre and what you like about it.

At that point, if you’re exploring more under the guise of improvement, it’s largely performative. To tie it to the self-improvement analogy from earlier, it’s 20 self-help books per year rather than honing in on those few you truly want to grow from.

In nutrition and diet, you’ll often hear advice like “don’t drink your calories” and “eat more fruits and vegetables.” Health gurus will tell you this is shallow before launching into, say, ways to track your macronutrients for optimal health. Or they’ll tell you that most fruits are actually too sugary.

But here’s the thing: the fruits/vegetables/liquids advice is good for a LOT of people whose diets would be vastly improved if they took this advice. The more in-depth guru analysis is only going to be useful for those who are already at or above that level of nutritional aawareness.

“Play more games” is good advice for some. But there’s going to be a limit, and many are already at or past the limit where tons of new research will help them hone in on their preferences or form design ideas. It’s consumerism run rampant otherwise, and I don’t always think it’s beneficial.

How and Why to Research and Play Games Deliberately

The “why” of this should be obvious:

1. Your time isn’t infinite
2. Your money, space, and willing play partners aren’t either
3. Not every game is going to be fun or useful for you in some way

So it pays – figuratively and perhaps literally – to have a deliberate methodology for research and play.

To go back to the analogy about reading one book and deeply internalizing it, and how that’s better than reading 20 books at a surface level only…the same is true here.

If you’re interested in a particular style of game, some research is in order. Do some Google searches, poke around on BoardGameGeek for similar titles, and make yourself a shortlist. Then find ways to either play those, or simply watch tutorial and playthrough videos, which exist for most games. This isn’t the same as playing, but it’s better than nothing.

Then, reflect on your experiences so that you have some clear takeaways to refine your tastes and/or clear ideas of what you like or don’t like to look for in the future or design for in your own game design efforts.

I’m doing this right now with a sub-genre of wargames in order to try my hand at a design within the style. And there are hundreds of games I could play that match the criteria. I could lose years of my life to “research” without ever making any progress of my own.

Instead, I’m picking those that are going to be easiest for me to explore. Usually because they have good digital implementations on popular sites, so I can easily find play partners.

I may end up buying 1-2 of my favorites that I find (or I may not), but the point is to give myself a sense of the different types of experiences this sub-genre can create. I’m also mentally cataloguing my likes and dislikes.

The ultimate goal is to have a shortlist of those I most enjoy playing, some clear criteria for assessing my interest in others that may come onto my radar, and a list of mechanical and thematic concepts that I think would be interesting to adapt into designs of my own.

If this takes longer than a handful of months, I’m wasting my time doing more research than I should be. Action on the insights I’ve gleaned is the other half of the equation. And at that point, if I never play another game of this style again, I’ll still have a foundational understanding of its qualities and will be set indefinitely on fun games and design ideas.

Deliberate focus on what will be the most useful to you is the key here, though. Reflection and thoughtfulness will often better serve you than volume.

Cult of the New and “More is More” Mentality

I sometimes play classics from the 2000s, 90s, 80s, and even earlier, ones that still hold up today and are among my favorite games. And I wonder how many games the designers of those gems had played when they sat down to design their best games.

Not zero, of course, but doubtless far less than the thousands of games many modern gamers play in the hopes of staying up-to-date on every new title and trend.

It’s a good idea, taken too far. And it’s tautological that many amazing, timeless games were designed without a fraction of the gaming knowledge many modern hobbyists enjoy.

Of course, the consumerist and marketing forces of modern hobby gaming contribute to this as well. We’re sold on the next new shiny thing as the Best Thing Ever by the industry’s hype machine…until it’s hit retail and they’re all onto the next shiny thing that’s the Best Thing Ever. And the cycle continues into infinity.

People who buy into this narrative and hoover up dozens of new games per year into their collection will genuinely ask if “old games” from five years ago are still worth playing, so detached are they from the fact that “new” doesn’t necessarily equate to better or more innovative.

And when the next person over is playing 200 new-to-them games per year, there’s an implicit expectation to keep up, lest you fall behind.

This is illusory pressure, but it’s felt by everyone who gets deep enough into hobby gaming. So it’s worth examining, recognizing, and realizing that you don’t have to be part of this eternal hype and purchasing cycle in order to stay informed enough to both find some amazing games and/or design them.

Reading and Academic Study

If you follow this blog with regularity, you’ll also know that I have read and analyzed several books on gaming and game design. These are fascinating.

Here, too, though, is an endless well of stuff that you could simply consume for years, but without ever applying any of the insights those books gave you.

I fear I actually overreached with the number of books I read relative to the number that I could effectively internalize and apply to my design efforts.

However, I was cognizant of this potential pitfall, and so I deliberately limited the number of books that I read. I could have doubled or tripled the list size easily with books that look and sound interesting (and probably are!). But I’d be doing a disservice to the reason I’m reading them in the first place.

So my reading and analysis was a couple intense periods of a few months each where I was reading and writing about what I’d read in order to better understand and absorb it.

Beyond that, if 12-15 books on gaming and game design – curated from sources I trust and selecting those that seemed of greatest interest to me – if that isn’t enough of an academic foundation for game design efforts, nothing ever will be.

And so this is the trap. You want to do your due diligence to be able to put your best foot forward, so to speak, whether it’s in your creative efforts or simply curating a worthwhile collection of favorites for yourself.

But then the diminishing returns hit, and the negative returns eventually come as well. Past this point you’re just wasting your time.

And so where is that line? It’s impossible to define, but identifying it for yourself will only happen with complete self-honesty. Honesty about your shortcomings and how you need to improve your knowledge or skills. And honesty about when you’ve exhausted most of the benefit of study or research and are no longer experiencing significant benefits.

At this latter point, you should act and never look back, unless it’s because you’ve identified another specific area in need of refinement. Then tackle it deliberately and go back to action.

Whether action is just getting existing favorites to your table instead of buying an endless rotation of new titles, or creating games instead of merely thinking about creating them, you’ll be better off for it.