Plus, one can still have fun with friends while playing something that is a competition regardless of whether one wins or loses: e.g., sports, board game, card game, etc.
Right.
The game involves such-and-such competition between such-and-such participants seems pretty compatible
with the game is fun. I enjoy playing backgammon and various whist variants. They are all competitive games. The people who play with me often have fun too. They are competing against me.
I'm thinking of trying to get into a Torchbearer game. That's a competitive game, in a way that my favourite RPG - Burning Wheel - is not. I would still expect it to be fun, even though I would also expect not to be especially good at the competition (I've never been an especially good technical wargamer or dungeon crawler).
Assuming that every activity that the game allows for is inherently fun, which isn't the case in reality.
Another favourite RPG of mine is Classic Traveller. But it certainly allows for activity that - in my view - is not inherently fun. I'm thinking of two things in particular - some of the trading it has rules for, which can degenerate into mere bookkeeping; and onworld exploration, for which it has no robust system.
Those things don't stop me playing Traveller. But when I GM, I deliberately steer things away from those activities, or put workarounds into place.
There's a contrast in this respect with other systems I GM and enjoy, like Burning Wheel and Prince Valiant, which don't require me to be so active in managing where the action goes and occasionally deploying workarounds, because they don't have comparable deficiencies (ie of having some fairly core activities having a tendency to be non-fun because of design weaknesses).
Overwhelmingly, yes. The players of my games typically don't find the fun. They are mostly miserable.
Its clear to me now that I've spent far too much time trying to GM a huge variety of games, GM for a huge number of players, deconstruct play paradigms with thoughtful GMs, and think hard about and work even harder on my craft.
All this time the problem was that I_just_wasnt_looking for the fun.
I get where you're coming from!
If a team wants to get better at netball, I think telling them to
score more goals isn't very helpful. I imagine most netball teams can work out that the aim of play is to score goals (and prevent the other team scoring). But to get better, they need to improve the particular skills and tactics that will enable them to score more goals.
Those skills and tactics will be different (at least in part) from the skills and tactics a football team needs to work on if it is to improve.
Presumably most people play RPGs to have fun, but identifying that goal doesn't take us very far in identifying what the various participants ought to be doing to try and ensure that the experience is fun. The particular game being played, its systems, the "ethos" it brings with it, etc, are all considerations. Eg D&D benefits from maps in a way that is largely irrelevant to Prince Valiant. D&D as typically approached benefits from - even, arguably, depends upon - cooperative party play in a way that Burning Wheel doesn't have to and even Classic Traveller can depart from. If I wanted to play a game of intense emotional and tactical rivalry between protagonists - if that was the sort of fun I was looking for - I wouldn't choose D&D. It's lack of social conflict resolution mechanics would be just one of the reasons for that; the fact that it is designed around a sort-of "combined arms" paradigm of problem-solving is another. Whereas Burning Wheel or (I would think) Apocalypse World would handle the game of intense emotional and tactical rivalry pretty handily.
www.enworld.org
