Why I game
All my life I have played games of one form or another. It
all started when the neighbors across the street got a PlayStation, the
original one. I hung out with them a lot and they were always more athletic
than I was. So any athletically based game they won, I had no chance. But here
came this amazing machine. This machine where suddenly I was the one winning
some of the games we played. The great equalizer.
From there my own interest in gaming did not diminish.
Eventually I got my own Playstation and eventually a Game Boy to join in the
hand held craze as well. When I was in Boy Scouts I saw some of the older boys
playing an interesting looking card game with fantasy characters that looked
very intense and interesting. I learned the game was Magic: The Gathering and
thus began my journey into card gaming as well. During my first year in college
some of the people in a club I joined invited me over for “game night” where we
played a myriad of board games that I had never imagined even existed, from
games of superheroes teaming up to beat a villain, to murder mystery games to
games where you attempt to build the best train line across a continent.
Each different type of gaming fulfills a different need but
they all share a universal joy for me and have become a passion of mine. Gaming
creates a field where all start out as equals, using only skill and luck to win
the day. For me this battle of the wits, the pitting of strategy against one
another is one of the greatest draws to gaming. Seeing how others strategize
and plan gives real insight into who they are as a person, where they see
strength and weakness and what aspects they like to develop. For example I have
a game where you acquire and use cards to spread influence on a board, trying
to take the most territory for yourself. At the end of the game the value of
your territories and your deck is added together and whoever has the most
points wins. There are varying approaches you can take to acquiring the most
points. For example the way I play I like to acquire as much territory as
possible and play a very aggressive strategy. I enjoy the feeling of
overwhelming an opponent while I play and so my go to strategy for this game is
one of conquest. Another one of my friends likes to see cool things happen and so
while he will never have the best position on the board or the most powerful
deck his cards will interact in ways that will lead to interesting and
sometimes powerful effects happening. He likes seeing each of the different
parts come together to form a potent combination. Another plays for the long
game and tries to ignore the board completely instead trying to build the most
valuable deck possible. If the game goes on without end his strategy would be
the most powerful revealing that he likes to think in long term plans but can
sometimes oversee the benefits of short term planning. Often if the game comes
to a surprise ending he will have the lowest points as his strategy got the
most disrupted by the sudden change.
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