To be a little harsh (cuz I know you cats can take it): honestly, to me it feels like criticizing the number of PBTA games is just a minor variation on the previously popular side-hobby of “crapping on the number of indie games that I think are kind of mediocre and maybe shouldn’t have ever been written.” Which seems like a pretty sad place in many ways.

There are always ALWAYS a bunch of games that are maybe not as exciting to any given player as they could be and you may even feel missed a couple of big opportunities (true for me as well, of course). And sometimes people get into this mindset or this place in terms of their network-ed-ness or limited reservoir of attention to what’s happening in the vast field of game design that those are the majority of the games they perceive, either because those games dominate in their circles or because (for a whole host of reasons) they don’t have a direct line to a bunch of game designers who are putting out games that would actually excite them.

But it’s almost always true that those designers and games do actually exist, whatever one’s personal preferences are or the place one is currently at with games. (Often those games are given away rather than sold, too, because they are made by niche communities for niche interests, so they may not show up on our shelves to remind us that they exist.)

However, I think often we end up buying and thinking about and working through games that aren’t directly where we hypothetically want to be because those are the games that connect us to other people, whether the folks who made them, the folks who are playing them, the folks who are talking about them, and so on. And that’s totally wonderful and expected. We make compromises to be a part of a community of people engaged in a supposedly identical hobby that’s probably more accurately a bunch of overlapping different hobbies. And some of those compromises teach us unexpected things and we almost certainly enjoy playing those games a bunch even if they’re not exactly what we would ideally want. No big loss.

However, sometimes I think people feel like they’re always being asked to compromise, that they only rarely come across a game that really does the things they really want games to do, without having to hack the crap out of it and basically redesign their own experience. And that can feel depressing, but is it really that different than, say, our relationship with other media (movies, TV shows, video games)? Our relationship with other communities (say, religious institutions, even)? And so on. Having to find your own joy in something that’s not perfectly designed for your interests is the norm, no? And we embrace that a lot of the time.

Consequently, it’s really hard for me to hear people complaining that the creative products of other people’s hours and hours of hard work (for something they’re probably making crap money on, if anything) are part of the problem because they don’t do X thing that people wanted them to do. Cry me a river. The games that you want are out there, almost certainly. And we’re all empowered to make our own games and adapt existing games to do the things we want them to do or (as Brand says) just play them long enough that the cliches stop coming and “things start getting real.” Maybe it’s not always worth the time and energy to make that happen, but it seems weird to blame it on games that never aspired to achieve those things in the first place or maybe aimed to do those things but need some additional help from the players to get there.

But again, I have a lot of baggage on this issue, so forgive me for reading less charitable things into this conversation. I do actually get the general points you were trying to make, but if you project those concerns more broadly, I’m not sure they carry too far.