“Trigger Warning”: A social experiment that paid off.

Over the last month, I tried something new: no baggies, no sorting, just dumping the bits wholesale into the boxes and shaking them until it closed/ish.

Why? What blasphemy is this?

I was doing a social experiment with my unknowing accomplices.

Hypotheses:
- Longer setup time isn’t a bad thing.
- Getting players involved in cleanup doesn’t do anything but getting them involved in setup makes them play smarter.

The reason I did this was to find out if people would be more engaged if they were more involved in the @cleanup@ prior to the game.

Wha’ had happened was ...

I noticed that when people come to a table that’s been set up, they tend to play faster and not be as engaged. This was true with multiple games, and ones they liked.

So, I stopped cleaning up. I just swooshed my hand over the table to make a usable pile and dumped the components into the box. When it came back out, I handed everyone a rough pile of shit to sort into groups.

The result...
Over a month, I took notes on playtime:
- Hit Z Road
- Desolate. (Wife and I)
- Escape from BC
- Super Pac$
- SEAL Team Flix
- Survive
- Las Vegas (Ravenhurger)
- Kingdom Builder

The result:
When measured from the first move of a game to the last, playtimes were about 20 minutes longer on average.

Anecdotal notes:
- Players, on average, were more deliberative in their moves, as if they felt more invested.
- The players that finished thier piles earlier and were more prone to grabbing some of a slower players’ pile to help were...
— more prone to ask to play co-ops
— more prone to ally with others or negotiate deals
— Less prone to attack others directly

I don’t know how scientific this is (it’s not) but I can tell you that there was a noticeable divergence from normal traits. People who usually make brisk moves and continually forget whose turn it is were markedly more interested and took longer to decide on turns. The usual helpful, less confrontational people were even less confrontational. The people who were constantly on their phones were still constantly on their phones, but took longer times to assess the game state.

Really interesting.

I too do this. But more out of laziness than out of increasing the quality of playtime due to the engagement of the community and the equality of labor in the gaming proletariat.

Could it be that you are a communist monster in disguise?

I think it’s like ice cream.

If you keep it in the house and it’s easy to access, you’ll eat it but it’s not anything special.

If you have to drive somewhere and interact with others to get a scoop from a ice cream shop, you have to WANT that ice cream bad enough to be inconvenienced and when you eat it, it’s a “treat”.

When people clean up a game together AFTER the game, it’s a chore. If they sort before a game, they become familiar with the bits (if it’s a new game) on a superficial level at least, but more importantly, it’s like building the LEGO spaceship before you play with it. It’s anticipatory

All that bullshit aside, isn’t sweeping all that crape into the box and giving it a good shake to settle the pieces the most satisfying feeling?

The most satisfying feeling was getting my Behringer Q802USB mixer to act as the audio input on an iPhone.

“Fuck it” to a game and sweeping it into the box is a close second, though.

SaMoKo wrote: All that bullshit aside, isn’t sweeping all that crape into the box and giving it a good shake to settle the pieces the most satisfying feeling?

It is when it’s someone else’s game

Now I'm wondering if we're all part of some fiendish experiment.

What do you think Superlfy Circus was? An experiment to determine how games are sold, why people buy them, and how easy it would be to become a “respected member of the journalistic game media” by doing something novel: Entertain gamers and don’t lie to get access to free shit.

Back then I made a lot of money. In retrospect, I wish I’d have gotten into music back then...Instead of 3 grand in paints and brushes and models I’d have a ‘65 ES-345.

Sounds good to me. Except for ARKHAM. I leverage my degree in Math to work out the forbidden geometries needed to collapse 8 cu ft of games into 1 cu ft of game boxes.