Podcast #12: The Shoulders of Giants

If you want to forge a deep and meanfuling connection with someone, you have to meet them where they are. It's a basic rule of human relationships. So why, then, do gamers love to come together and bash on “classic” games and those who would play them almost as much as they like playing games with modern game mechanics that they have deemed “good?” Well, because people like to feel like they are in the know with others—and that their group holds some kind of secret knowledge. It’s a basic rule of human groups.

If there’s one thing gamers like to do more than playing board games they love, it’s to collectively bash on classic, typically family-based games that they think are not worth their time, as well as bash on the people who play them. Corax and Coffeecast hosts Pete Steele and Rick Hendricks push back against the utility of this particular aspect of gamer culture.

Consider that one of the goals of gamers is to bring new people to the table. While this is certainly not a universal goal, we believe that a particularly bad way to achieve it is to say, “You know all those classic games that you know? They’re terrible, and you have bad decision-making skills if you play them. But hey, trust us, we have secret knowledge. Play the games that we play.” Whether it’s board games or anything else under the sun, that’s a bad strategy for recruiting followers. Pete and Rick discuss classic games such as Battleship, Candyland, Risk, Monopoly, and a host of others that have been traditionally written off by the tabletop gaming community.