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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9209039" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Again: no it is not. It is the most direct path to the goal they were told to value. That is not the same as having fun. That is the whole point here. There is a VAST difference between doing something you think has value, and doing things you find fun.Sure. Point being: no one would be having fun, and yet they would be pursuing victory, because victory is the thing they have been told is valuable. Because, again, there is a difference between "this thing is what you should care about" and "this thing is what is fun to do."Then you should recognize that most people do not feel that way. There is a reason we have the old saying, "life is a journey, not a destination." Winning is a flash-in-the-pan moment. A journey is a whole experience.No it is not. A puzzle, by definition, has a single solution. A game, by definition, does not. It may have a single win state, but that is not the same thing. Further, with a game, there must be some kind of failure state. The only possible failure state with a puzzle is that the participant chooses not to continue trying to solve it--but they could attempt to resume it again at any time, which rather weakens the claim that that is a "failure state."Except I am explicitly telling you that it does not do that.To use your "winning races" example, imagine if you had a teleporter which could instantly teleport you to the finish line of every race you participate in. Each time you use it, however, you must fill out a complicated form, in triplicate, by hand, which gets regular small updates so you can't just memorize how to fill it out.That is what the 5MWD does. It creates bureaucracy, and deletes any actual challenge or excitement in the doing. You win the races, consistently, every time, but that and some paperwork are all you do.Do you not think that such victories would lose their savor after the third or fourth "welp, guess I gotta file my taxes now that I insta-won that race..." event?I genuinely do not understand what that has to do with anything. Especially since taking individual risk is what results in dead characters dramatically more often. The rewards are not commensurate to the cost of failure, because the cost is absolute, while the rewards must always be partial at best--if there are even rewards at all.Humans are, on average, highly risk-averse. The 5MWD is the path to surer, more reliable rewards. D&D making loss a dramatic all-or-nothing affair ensures that that tendency pushes players toward the path of maximum safety every time.Again, no it is not. Because you keep conflating "enjoyable" with "valued." Something can be valued while being genuinely hated. I value the medicine which helps me sleep or addresses my occasional aches and pains, but I do not in the slightest enjoy its use. I value the benefits of socialization, despite finding it incredibly draining to hang out with more than 3-4 people at a time, doubly so if it's 5+ people that I don't really know.Games try to make it so that, in order to reach the thing-that-is-valuable, players must do a task-that-is-fun. But if players can get the thing-that-is-valuable with less risk by doing a task that is boring, tedious, or even actively unpleasant, many will do so. Hence, a good game designer must tailor both the things-that-are-valuable in their games, and the tasks-that-are-fun (or at least meant to be fun), so that the genuinely maximally effective path to the former IS the latter. The players thus do the task which is enjoyable in and of itself, in addition to seeking the valuable end, because it doesn't matter which one you prioritize, you'll pick the same path. To seek the valuable end is to do the task which is enjoyable in and of itself; to do the task that is enjoyable in and of itself is to seek the valuable end.As long as you hold onto this simply mistaken belief that "get the valuable thing" is always fun, you will continue to reach this incorrect conclusion. Getting valuable things is something a person can desire to do, without that desired thing being fun--indeed, it can even be the absolute antithesis of fun, it can be exhausting and depressing! But if the players believe it is valuable enough, they will still seek it despite hating every moment of doing so.That's not fun. That's not even a chore. That's self-flagellation.That you can find fun purely in the victory, without really caring about the race that precedes it, does not reflect on the vast majority of human beings. Most humans want to enjoy both the process and the result. Or, if you prefer? Most humans aren't Spike, as MTG would put it. They're Timmy or Johnny, or some mixture of two or all three. Spike only cares about winning, and will only have fun if she wins. Timmy doesn't care about winning per se (though he won't say no to it if it happens to come along)--instead, he wants a flashy game, a dramatic game, a game where there are twists and turns and shocking reversals before a satisfying finish; he wants an emotionally satisfying game. Johnny, by comparison, wants an intellectually satisfying game: clever ploys, artful connection of disparate things, strategic thinking that leads to an ineluctable conclusion. Both Timmy and Johnny can lose ten out of ten games and still have fun--tons of fun--so long as the path was worth walking. Only Spike would reject this. And there are plenty of Spikes in the world! But they're nowhere near the majority. Not even a plurality.</blockquote>

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