In my many travels around the gaming world, I’ve seen that among many ways you could categorize gamer type folks, you can put them into two camps depending on how they enjoy games. I class this as either the micro-gamers or the macro-gamers.
Micro-gamers are essentially tinkerers who like to see all of the moving parts of a game machine work correctly. They look at everything from a granular viewpoint and consider all specific angles before coming up with an opinion about a game. They’re the people who you may sometimes see with spreadsheets, reference links, and statistics to show how well or how poorly a game has been designed or received. No detail is too insignificant to these folks and they’re usually the first to take apart articles, designs, or mechanics to see what’s inside and how to best utilize it.
By contrast, macro-gamers are concerned with generalities. They have overarching, sometimes very binary needs when it comes to gaming, and they make decisions on very broad-brush impressions. At first blush, you might think that the needs of a macro-gamer to enjoy a game might be simplistic, but the wide range of subjectivity assigned to a macro-gamer’s criteria – such as “is the game fun to play?” – make their needs as much or even more complex to meet at their micro counterparts. Macro-gamers basically like details, but only when it is relevant to a larger, more general question they want to answer about their own personal enjoyment.
Now, don’t get me wrong – I’m not trying to say one way to enjoy games is better than the other. But I’m squarely in the macro-gamer camp, mostly because it fits my personality and my requirements to like a game these days. When I look at a game I’m playing, and ask myself if I’m really enjoying it, I ask very simple questions – “am I frustrated with the game?”, “do I have friends that I enjoy the game with?”. or “do I feel like stabbing my eyes out?”. Answering these questions gives me a very clear picture of whether or not I should continue playing, because for the most part, I’ve realized that at its core, micro or macro, people play games to have fun. If you can’t have fun playing, then I wonder what your motivation is for continuing. I can understand if you’re not having fun because your carefully planned and analyzed build isn’t doing well in combat or a game lacks space monkeys (and therefore, cool factor). But continuing to play despite that, or choosing to suffer through your gaming sessions, means that a step back might need to be taken. I’ve found that finding the simple things about a game that I like or dislike helps me make good decisions about what I want to spend cashola on. Others may disagree – but I hope that regardless of your reasoning, that people never forget why they play games, and how much personal enjoyment can and should factor into putting hours into them.