Quintin Smith from Shut Up and Sit Down recently gave a short talk about why he left writing about video games to write about board games. I see this talk more about why board games are more interesting from a psychological perspective. He titles the talk “A Feast of Friends” and it’s a very engaging 20 min that you shouldn’t miss!
If you look at my recommendations, one of the websites is Shut Up & Sit Down. This is a great board gaming website, and they have a monthly podcast. The podcast that just went up today has three of the SUSD’ers at the Game Developer Conference. That’s mostly for video games, I believe, but they have some talks about board games. Two of the people had just been to such a talk where the topic was about how players feel loss much more than gains when playing a game. They talked about framing effects, which is a classic cognitive phenomenon, and touch on other psychological concepts as well. Take a listen to the first 30 min of this podcast (#54) to get a sense of what I want to do when I get brave enough to start my podcast.
Actually, it was the podcast from two months ago (#52) that really gave me the impetus to do this. They were talking about, if you are a critic, how important it is to have interests outside of your area of expertise, because that often gives you interesting insight into what you are critiquing. This moved to if you wanted to start a blog about board games, that’s all well and good, but you really need to have additional interests that you can bring to the work. Quinns, and this is the thing that obviously hit me like a bolt of lightning because I was already thinking it as he was saying it, specifically used the example that if you were a psychologist, it would be great to write about how psychology influences game design. He said he would read that in a heart beat, and Paul agreed (that conversation starts around the 49 min mark)