{"id":2457,"date":"2004-11-29T15:44:31","date_gmt":"2004-11-29T20:44:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2004\/11\/29\/2457.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:47:27","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:47:27","slug":"mfq-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2004\/11\/29\/mfq-again\/","title":{"rendered":"MFQ again"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The New York Times Magazine appears to have gone sort of nuts for toys this week. In addition to a disturbingly wonderful slide show<\/a> of cutting-edge Japanese playgrounds, and another slideshow<\/a> that’s less wonderful and more disturbing, what with the spray-on polyethylene baby clothes, there’s a fascinating article on MFQ. Well, it’s not about MFQ as such, it’s about Cranium<\/a>, makers of unconventional board games. The article is called The Play’s the Thing<\/a>, and it’s by Clive Thompson<\/a>, and there should be something in it for each of you Gentle Readers to defend and to deny.\n

Myself, I like the idea that making people feel like morons isn’t a fun way to spend an evening. On the other hand, game design isn’t the primary monster here. Scrabble, for instance, is perhaps the game most perfectly designed to make a player feel like a moron. The problem, however, isn’t usually the player’s vocabulary, but the player’s Scrabble-playing skills. The best vocabulary in the world isn’t going to help you put a g on the end of ‘thin’ and then put ‘grew’ on the triple for a boatload of points. In other words, it’s the design of the game that would totally put off the Cranium folk. But once the player is familiar with it, Scrabble is a terrific game with a very high MFQ.\n

Also, there’s no discussion of my own pet peeve in game design. In my experience, the most anti-MFQ thing in the actual design of a game is when, having already dropped quite a ways behind the lead, the losing player or players has to endure a long period of boredom. That is, ideally, each player should feel like she could be in striking distance of first almost until the very end of the game (measured in minutes that feel like hours), or alternately, should have things to do that are interesting even if they don’t lead to victory.\n

In Scrabble, for instance, until the board fills up quite a bit, it’s quite possible either through rack-dumping or through the triple to make up fifty points in a turn. Even if you feel like you can’t make up the difference in the score, each individual play is just as interesting as if you were in the lead, or more so if, like Your Humble Blogger, you find a tight board a challenge. In Settlers of Catan (another brilliant game), though, a bad start can lead to getting cut off of ports and such, and reduce not only your chances of winning, but your play options, until you just try to buy cards and get lucky. That doesn’t happen too terribly often, and the game is short enough anyway to make it not so severe, but it is a problem.\n

Anyway, the mailman has just delivered my copy of Holy Tango of Literature<\/I><\/a>, so I have to go now.\n

Thank you,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The New York Times Magazine appears to have gone sort of nuts for toys this week. In addition to a disturbingly wonderful slide show of cutting-edge Japanese playgrounds, and another slideshow that\u2019s less wonderful and more disturbing, what with the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[203],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nytimes"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2457"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2457\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17216,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2457\/revisions\/17216"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}