Do you consider learning a new game to be unpleasant work?

[Zardnaar]

Mostly not interested. Work I suppose.

Don't get to play the games I own as much as I like so learning a new one is mostly pointless as it's an expensive shelf ornament.

Steams also killing it. New RPG or hundreds or thousands of hours on a grand strategy game like Crusader Kings or Europa Universalis IV over the next 7-8 years that I get to play for free.

 

[Lanefan]

Work, for a few reasons.

First off, opposite to @Garthanos I view pretty much all learning as work: something that, if it must be done at all, is to be gotten out of the way as quickly as possible so I can get on with using whatever I've just learned. I don't have (and never really have had) the patience for learning - just ask my teachers from school! (in fact it was probably school that turned me off from learning as being an enjoyable experience)

Add to that, when it comes to something like a game - particularly a hard-rules game a la most board games - ideally I want to know the rules inside out and backward before I sit down to play, so as to avoid a) making stupid mistakes and or b) causing a rules argument because of my own lack of knowledge. And while I enjoy a bog-simple board game now and then, I'll get tired of it fairly quickly if it doesn't have some complexity and-or variety: every decade or so I remind myself that chess is still a game, and get back to playing it; and every decade-plus-a-year I get tired of it.

With something like an RPG where the rules often aren't so hard-cut, the only real way to learn it is to play it - which means the other players would have to put up with me as I trial-and-errored (and - pun intended - worked) my way into figuring it out. I own and have read the rulebooks for various RPGs for both entertainment and idea-mining, but other than in the broadest of strokes that reading doesn't give me any real idea how those games would actually play.

 

[Garthanos]

There is a color based personality test (which greens consider more than a bit close to nonsense but potentially valuable at teaching tolerance towards people who think differently) where the Stereotypic Green types consider their work a form of fun.

 

[Lord Mhoram]

I voted Fun, but that is with a caveat. My game time is limited, and is also shared with video games and board games for demand of my leisure time. I prefer to use universal/generic systems that have a wide range of applicability. Games I have played for a long time, and know inside out, or (in the case of Cypher) a new game I am really enjoying reading/learning.

But if a game, on first readthrough could not do what the games I want do, or there isn't a really cool hook to the rules themselves (such as Cypher's skill approach) then it is more work than fun, because I will likely never play it.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I voted Fun, but that is with a caveat. My game time is limited, and is also shared with video games and board games for demand of my leisure time. I prefer to use universal/generic systems that have a wide range of applicability. Games I have played for a long time, and know inside out, or (in the case of Cypher) a new game I am really enjoying reading/learning.

But if a game, on first readthrough could not do what the games I want do, or there isn't a really cool hook to the rules themselves (such as Cypher's skill approach) then it is more work than fun, because I will likely never play it.

That's all pretty close to my practical reaction to.