Scoundrel on Nostr: The best kinds of gaming is the kind where you get better primarily through practice. ...

The best kinds of gaming is the kind where you get better primarily through practice. But this isn't always the case. Sometimes the best way to get better at a game is not to practice it, but to study it. This can be really fulfilling in itself, since games often have really interesting dynamics, and it is incredibly satisfying to attempt to apply something you've been studying in the actual game and to just feel it click.

But not all studying is so engaging and, well, meaningful. Sometimes the skill ceiling will prevent people from getting better altogether long before this point, but otherwise at a high enough level, every game turns into route memorization of data with no translatable meaning outside its niche.

In some competitive games, this pattern gets so bad that it actively works AGAINST practice. In high level chess for example, chess players memorize many chess positions and engine evaluations NOT because those positions are especially natural or personally interesting, but so that the players can attempt to force others into those positions and beat them with experience. The consequence of this is that the dynamics of the game itself encourages high level chess players to AVOID playing eachother, just so that they don't use up all of the one-time-use tricks that they painstakingly memorized.

Unfortunately, sometimes the best strategy is not to play.