I play Civilization. Or at least I used to back in the day when I had free time. Pre Betsy. I could open a game of Civ (I or II - I haven't spent enough time with III) and know within the first few moves without cheating if I was going to have a game that would move fast enough and aggressively enough to be fun to play. Games that didn't look fun were ruthlessly abandoned.
Back in the day when I played chess 1000 years ago, and I used to play my best friend Lee daily, we were evenly matched and used to have to decide how many moves into a standard opening we'd skip so we could get to the interesting part. Those opening moves would run like the wind. Once we got past them, though, we'd bicker over right moves, wrong moves. Oh, we played to win, and bluffed and poker faced each other hoping our strategems would go unnoticed. But getting through the opening to the first really important move always meant we'd sit for half an hour each staring at the board. We finally started timing ourselves on moves just to get the thing going.
What all this means is that I like weighing the options carefully, setting things up, evaluating the conditions to see if the spot I'm about to invest time is going to return well. I play to win big. I'm risk averse, but I also dig on adrenaline. And you can't realy have the no-risk and the adrenaline in the same lifetime. They don't go together.
I no longer have much time for Civ and I don't have a regular chess partner. This lack of games leaves only real life for me to ponder on and woe betide the moment of the strategic choice. I will BEAT IT TO DEATH. Oh, you would all be SO BORED if you could see me think through anything really important. Er, ok. Some of you actually have been and are.
So I ask you my friends - what sort of game players are you?
Posted by karen at August 7, 2004 12:23 AM