Why Traditional Games Are Good

25/08/2009 by Steve Tierney.

Why Traditional Games Are Good

A number of teenagers regularly use my shop to play a strategy card game called Magic The Gathering.  Back when it was released about fifteen years ago it was a fairly complex card game with about sixty pages of detailed rules.  Even though it was tricky to learn in the first instance, something about the game made it immensely popular and in very short order it grew into a giant success which spawned hundreds of other similar games. 
  
Since then the manufacturers have been releasing “expansion sets” at a rate of three or four a year each with addition rules.  They have also revised the “main” rules a full ten times.  The end result is a hugely complex, detailed, strategic, competitive monster of a game overflowing with complication, rules conflicts and complexity which make the games most of you have probably played look like noughts and crosses (tic-tac-toe if you are American).
 
One particular boy who plays in the shop has been coming in for years and I’ve gotten to know him.  He has explained to me that he had problems at school, has needed lots of help with learning difficulties whose root is apparently a combination of ADHD, behavioural problems with other children and Dyslexia.  He’s a nice lad, but he’s had something of a tough time of it by all accounts.
   
To learn to play Magic The Gathering you are forced to read a huge rulebook and learn the intricacies of tens of thousands of different cards that could be played (most cards have rule variations written on them!).  Then, when the game begins if you are playing multiplayer (you can play with two, or many, people) then the game might last several hours during which a great deal of concentration is required.  Throughout the game the players must wheel-and-deal, scheme, cooperate and manage complex interpersonal negotiations and interactions. 

The (dyslexic) boy learnt the rules in a day by reading and watching other people play.  The same (ADHD) boy can sit for hours involved in the imaginative and detailed mechanics of a game that he himself is not even playing at that time.  And when he does take part, the same (behavioural problems) boy can make deals, break deals, connive, bluster, get stabbed in the back (metaphorically) and win or lose with perfectly good humour.  
  
That’s why traditional games are good.

Ps.  I stopped selling games some time ago and do not sell Magic the Gathering.  Nor do I
recommend that others go and and buy the game.  It’s not for everyone.  This article was
purely to demonstrate why traditional games are certainly not a “waste of time” as
some less enlightened folk have suggested in the past.
  
  

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