Anyway, because Paul did throw it back on me and because everyone online seems to be twisting their underwear over this, the way I think about this in my head is something like:

In most games there is something that is the primary activity that you are there for. It doesn’t mean secondary, tertiary, etc., activities aren’t also really good. It just means they aren’t the prime one.

We tend to, because of the informality of casual language, call that primary thing (and maybe some of the secondary things) “play.”*

In some games, like Microscope, the “play” part is also the setting up and laying out of a fictional world. Because in Microscope that activity is the primary activity that most folks who are participating in the game are there to do.**

In many Indie Table-Top with Dice and You Make Your Own Characters and All that Shit kinda games, the “play” part for most players*** is making actions/decisions/talking as their character. In other games (King Wen’s Tower springs to mind) it might be the same, but where their character isn’t a person, but is a faction/nation/whatever.

Thus, the question is really about “when setting up a situation is not the primary point of a game, how many times have you ended up spending more time on the things that were not the primary point than the things that were supposedly the primary point?”

The “and why do you think that happened” was implicit, I guess. Like, was it because you lost timing? Because you actually were enjoying the secondary activity more than you suspected you would have the primary activity? Because you didn’t feel like you yet had enough material/support/safety to move to the other activity? Because the game was broken and its designer a failed human being?

So, yea, something like that.

But hey, if you need me to tell you what “play” is and is not in an absolute sense so that you can count seconds on your spreadsheet… well, shit. I’m not going to do that. Define it as you will, and if you can’t, move on.

I also find it funny that I’ve seen multiple answers (not in this thread, specifically) in which people are like “this has never happened to me” and I’m like “haha, I played with you at X con and this EXACT THING HAPPENED” or “I remember reading your post about how you spent 6 hours prepping a game, a whole session doing character gen, and then never played again, so….” So, there’s also that.

I wonder if we’d made it so it sounded like doing this was a positive and desirable thing, rather than a slightly mocking one, if that would have skewed questions a different way.

* For a longer discussion of this, see the entire history of western philosophy and stop bothering me.

**Unless of course they didn’t know what the game as about. In which case it may become the thing they’re there to do, as they adjust expectation to reality. Or they may be unhappy about it as it never spends enough time doing the thing they want to do.

* Most, because there’s always going to be THAT GUY. Chances are good if you’re reading this far into the footnotes you are THAT GUY sometimes. And, sure, the fact that I wrote this many footnotes does in fact mean that I am THAT GUY all the time.