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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 9790515" data-attributes="member: 6690965">Earliest attribution (in the usual slightly different form) seems to be Soren Johnson, a different designer working on Civilization. Sid Meyer's most referenced game design insight is "a game is a series of interesting decisions."This is a sore point for me, both because it's ridiculous to treat players following the incentives laid for them as the source of the problem, but more so because solving this problem is the core task of game design. Expecting players to do the work for you is abdicating your entire role in the process. Bemoaning the behavior of players is just an admission you set up your system incorrectly, and don't like the results it produces; if it's intended to create a different experience, laden with different decisions than it is, then you're missing some constraint. That constraint can't be "the player should only think the thoughts I want them to think."I design cooperative board games and this is an issue that inevitably creeps in during every design process; we discover that the tools we've provided can be used far too efficiently to conqueror the problems laid out. Sometimes we determine it's a rare situation and not worth addressing because it will infect few games, sometimes we scrap stuff we like because it's too easy to abuse, and sometimes we create new rules altogether. More than once, we've resorted to effectively just putting a plea in the rulebook that amounts to "we did our best to counter this line of play, we're sure a clever player could still get around what we did, please don't and consider that outside the scope of the game" and that's already more of a cop-out than I'm really comfortable with.</blockquote>

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