What the hell is going on when playing feels like suffering?

Being bad at a game often feels bad to me. That’s most true when I think I *should* be competent, or when I’m playing with my close peers, people I feel competitive with. Being bad at a game feels terrible when I’m emotionally attached to a specific outcome, especially if I think I’m failing my team.

But this suffering is worse in some games.

That suffering feels most acute when I have a lot of emotional and intellectual investment in the game—when I’m attached, taking it seriously. And crucially, games can exacerbate or defuse that suffering with their design.

Having more control before going into the game—having more fiddly bits to optimize, and having that optimization matter—intensifies my suffering, my feelings of failure and inadequacy when something goes wrong. It’s awful when I’ve made many impactful choices before even playing, and then have to suffer through watching the prolonged consequences. Having more meaningful decisions available within the game, with invariable and foreseeable outcomes, is another potential intensifier. The more consequential any decision is, the more bound up and obsessed I am as I struggle to play perfectly.

Randomness can be good or bad. The more random a game is, the less control I feel over the outcome. In a game without much optimization, randomness often feels freeing. But it’s painful to see my good, careful planning and optimization be completely upended by capricious dice.

I’m talking in detached terms. I’ll give examples.

Chess is a game with little pre-game optimization. You don’t bring a different loadout of pieces to a game, you don’t have any special abilities to remember or prioritize. But most—if not all—choices made in a game of chess are meaningful. There isn’t any randomness or variance, and if you think hard enough in advance you can imagine board states and likely countermoves many turns ahead. So I don’t enter a game feeling like I’ve already made the wrong choices, but many choices I make throughout a game could be the wrong ones.

D&D can be optimized, depending on the players and the expected game. But the game itself has a broad mix of randomness and variably important decisions. Some choices you make are consequential, others aren’t, and even your strongest choices might fall back on a die roll. Furthermore, the game is open to discussion amongst the players, with an often-shared understanding that the rules are there as guidelines to be used as best suits the gaming group, not as infallible canon.

But it’s the more codified games I’ve played that painfully revealed my patterns of attachment and suffering. In chronological order, they were Armada, Blood Bowl 2, and Hobgoblin (which I just wrote about)

I played Star Wars: Armada before the pandemic, with friends, in person. It’s a game that involves many pre-game choices, requiring some depth of thought. Your goal is to create a fleet that counters whatever you anticipate from your opponent’s fleet, often with some intent to specialize in a particular way. It’s a Fantasy Flight-designed game, so there are details upon details and plenty of fiddly bits—and some choices are simply superior, and work together far better, than other choices.

That game stressed me the fuck out. Honestly, I’m not surprised: the whole design feels honed to intensify my feelings of attachment. Lots of impactful choices beforehand with a big investment of effort or focus required, plenty of impactful choices mid-game, and enough randomness to feel punitive—especially when I clearly should have specialized during the design process to mitigate that randomness.

Winning a game of Armada felt good, yes, but the rollercoaster ride of anxiety on my way there (when I managed to win) felt like shit. I often felt like I was losing pretty early in a match, regardless of the final outcome. And when I did lose, I felt like I’d wasted my last several hours, plus some. It’s an intellectually interesting game, and I appreciate some of what it does, but it wasn’t a fun experience for me.

I wonder whether I’d feel differently about it now, because of my experience with Blood Bowl.

I started Blood Bowl 2 during the pandemic. I was already stressed about a lot of things, unsurprisingly. I felt helpless, anxious, and desperately wanted some form of escape. Playing Blood Bowl 2 might have been an absurd choice, given all that, but I was playing it with friends, most of whom weren’t too serious about the game or were more invested in the stories we could come up with than in a given match’s outcome.

Their outlook helped me a lot.

Playing Blood Bowl 2 forced me to confront my own powerlessness in many ways. It’s far more complex than chess, and has far more variability in any given action. It’s a game of risk management; you can plan carefully, you can optimize to your best ability—and if you do those things you’re more likely to win on average. But so much of the game is about engaging in measured risk-taking, calibrating how much risk and randomness you can accept. Crucially, you can’t avoid the randomness completely. Sometimes, your players die or suffer career ending injuries. That’s not something you can control, and you must accept that risk to even play a match.

I wrote a whole post about this, and about coming to some kind of peace with it. Read that. The important point for this post is that Blood Bowl 2 was a learning experience for me, and helped me to understand my own attachment to the game and how I could shape that attachment consciously.

This may sound silly or obvious, but I tried to approach the game more playfully. I focused on what I could learn from my failures. And I did my best to accept impermanence—that nothing about my teams would last. Playing heel teams helped too, with villainous players whose deaths I can at least shrug about if not celebrate.

Blood Bowl 2 isn’t well designed to defuse the attachment I describe. In many ways it encourages that attachment, that emotional and intellectual investment, and then slaps you across the back of the head and laughs at you for caring so much or trying so hard. But Blood Bowl was a good tool for me to recognize that attachment, and to practice letting go. With Blood Bowl showing me when and how that attachment led to suffering, I could find ways to manage that for myself.

Hobgoblin, so far, feels designed to defuse that attachment.

That sounds bad somehow, which isn’t what I mean at all. The game retains the fun of tinkering, and of trying to outfox your opponent with your army composition, your deployment, and your maneuvering.

Hobgoblin offers enough impactful choices before and during a game to feel meaningful; I expect to have lots of fun experimenting with different army compositions, trying different setups, and attempting new tactics. I also foresee gaining skill in maneuvering my army to my best advantage, and that feels rewarding. I hope to gain a better sense for how to respond to my opponent’s army composition and positioning as well.

But unlike building a fleet in Armada, building a functional Hobgoblin army takes little effort and (to my current knowledge) doesn’t have a clear meta. Therefore, even if something goes poorly, it’s not a big deal—I can dust myself off and try again without feeling like I’ve wasted hours of effortful planning. If I enter a matchup feeling like I’ve already lost, the resolution will be fairly painless and relatively fast. And there’s enough skill and randomness involved that I might be able to pull off something tricky.

That’s because, like Blood Bowl, Hobgoblin embraces variance. Unlike Blood Bowl, Hobgoblin’s variance hasn’t felt like it’s laughing in my face. And while the quick start rules don’t yet incorporate these, there are mechanics to prevent tactical success from snowballing too much; when one of your units is broken and routed from the field, you gain resources which might let you turn the increasingly-desperate tides of battle.

So much of Hobgoblin feels like it was designed with this overall dynamic in mind. Like Mike Hutchinson had been there, felt shockingly angsty about a game, and understood how to make something that could feel fun even when you’re on the back foot.

So yes, skill matters. Yes, planning matters. But the skill and planning that go into any given fight (so far, as a novice) don’t feel insurmountable or too effortful. Luck also plays a role, and it seems likely that I’ll eventually play a game with such bad luck that I can do nothing about it. But the game won’t rob me of agency while I’m losing. I’ll always have a chance to throw a punch of my own, and once I’m playing with the magic and fortune card rules I’ll be consoled with additional wildcard powers after the loss of each unit.

In short, Hobgoblin is built from the ground up not just to smooth away the snags of Warhammer Fantasy tabletop, but to offer fewer places and times for my emotional investment in the game to sour and turn toxic.

I expect a lot of my perspective here comes from having faced my own attachment and suffering in other games. I’ve found more equanimity elsewhere, and I bring that to this game. If you, as I sometimes still do, regularly get wound up and too invested in your other games—tilting and getting salty and lashing out, or wallowing in the misery of your apparently-inevitable defeat—Hobgoblin won’t magically solve that for you. But I really appreciate seeing a game designed to counter those tendencies, whether intentionally or not.