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Saturday, April 26, 2008

Teach People to Play, Do Not Feed Your Ego

This is Steven Petrick Posting.

Teaching people to play games is something of an art. In my experience, you need to keep your own personality and needs out of it. One of the gamers I knew had a habit of teaching people to play games on the basis of his owning the copy of the game, and you not. He would set up a game, and defeat you soundly. Then set it up to play again changing sides. Only now he would reveal rules that you did not know, and you would again be beaten soundly as everything you learned about the capabilities of the two sides was no longer valid.

Example, Izyum Salient. First time you play it, you are the Germans, and the Soviet defenses are very powerful and you are just barely able to force a gap before the Soviets counter attack. Next time you play it, he is the Germans, and here are the special first turn German Surprise Attack Rules. Next time you play it, you are the Germans, you know you get to use the German Surprise Attack Rules . . . but here are the rules for the Soviet Special First Turn Defense in Depth.

By the time you have learned all the rules and are on an equal footing . . . well he does not want to play that game any more, here is this new game he wants to play.

He won a lot, but after a while people did not want to play him.

It had other effects.

I actually got into SFB late because of this. He introduced me to the game back in 1979 (at Fort Benning), and his method of teaching it left such a sour taste that in 1985 when the game was announced as the game to be played that weekend by the local group (at Fort Campbell) I at first said no and wanted to play something else, anything else.