Cognitive psychology, which is the scientific study of thinking, knowing and understanding – has brought to us gamers the concept of cognitive bias. They are patterns of thinking and assumptions that affect how we perceive and experience play. What’s noteworthy about them, is that we’re often not aware of these biases. That’s why we are so susceptible to them. Two types of biases in particular, I think, are relevant to gamers and game critics alike.

Emotional bias or „Victory or defeat affects our perspective“

This point seems so banal and obvious, that most players tend to make fun of it. Well, of course a game is awesome, if you win and they’re utter tosh if we lose. If phrased this simplistically, it’s not even worth mentioning.

But look closer and consider how play is also always an emotional experience, and some nuance comes to light. It’s a normal part of our experience of playing a game, that we try to put it into words afterwards. We try to grasp and evaluate what we’ve experienced. To do that, we generally refer to our own memory.

If that memory is defined by positive feedback, it’s reasonable to assume that we see more room for player agency in the game. It will lead us to believe that there is player freedom here. We might see the game’s rules, presentation and even concept as hinting at more positive aspects of the game. Additionally, many gamers recognize a good game by how much potential it has. Something we tend to estimate as being much bigger, if our plays have been defined by positive or constructive feedback. If I suffer a setback during the game, but understand how it came about and how my decisions can help me avoid it in the future, seeing the game’s potential becomes much easier.

On the opposite end, if I repeatedly receive incomprehensible feedback from the game, my experience will be negative. If my decisions do not pay off, and I can’t quite tell what kind of behaviour would lead to a positive outcome, it’s infinitely harder to identify the game’s potential. Its core remains hidden, and by extension I don’t have a good foundation on which to fairly evaluate the game.

It’s an important reason why criticism such as “I didn’t have fun” feels so trivial. It tells us nothing about the game, but only about the personal bias of the person talking. Even trying to explain this lack of fun is only indirectly useful. It’s not that emotional bias makes it impossible to recognize the game’s core, but it can negatively affect our ability to do so.

But the same is true for the opposite stance. “I had fun” can easily make us take too charitable a look at a game. We’re might overlook structural or individual imbalances when we evaluate the game, because we were not affected ourselves.

And it’s these individual differences that can make us susceptible to a different type of bias.

Curse of Expertise or „Everyone knows what I know“

This phrase describes a phenomenon most experienced gamers have surely went through themselves. If we are familiar with specialized knowledge, it can be difficult to see things from the perspective of somebody without that specialized knowledge. In gaming this starts with basic terminology like deckbuilding or worker placement. This is gamer jargon, that is difficult to make sense of if you’re not already familiar with a lot of modern board games. The same is true for phrases like “following suit” or “winning a trick”. Experienced gamers often consider phrases like these intuitive and easy to understand, because they no longer notice how they draw on specialized knowledge to do so.

This pattern goes beyond mere word choice, too. Outside of gamer jargon there is also player behaviour, tactical decision patterns and strategic consideration, that are second nature to experienced gamers. They no longer register as some kind of acquired expertise to them. Trick-taking games like “The Crew” are just one example of that. Most experienced gamers don’t notice how much prior knowledge they possess, that allows them to quickly and easily dive into the deeper layers of playing the game. In comparison, less experienced gamers have to acquire the basic understanding of trick-taking gamers over the course of many plays.

But this is not about the hurdles of so-called expert games, in which you need to be at least generally familiar with the various cards and card effects to play effectively. This is about knowing enough to recognize that processes and pressures of modern game designs, which require players to follow certain decision-making patterns in order to get going. The basic tactics of a worker placement or deckbuilding game, are not actually as self-evident as experienced players often assume. It’s just that we’ve learned this so often and so long again, that it barely registers to us as something other than obvious.

This personal expertise doesn’t just affect the mechanisms of a game. Particularly when it comes to theme, the line between individual expertise and common knowledge (or knowledge that emerges from the game itself) is often and repeatedly blurred. In fact, this may be the biggest blind spot in board gaming.

Because it’s our knowledge of the places, historical events, scientific processes, etc., that allows us to experience a game’s thematic depth and thematic complexity. Without knowing at least a little about these things, we wouldn’t be able to draw connections between rules, illustration and our actions. We wouldn’t be able to place a token on a board and expand it in our imagination to a representation of violence, political power or basic economic exploitation. To fuel our minds with the narratives and motifs we need, some publishers have opted to include supplemental material or even a small bibliography. A game’s theme can not fully blossom unless it hits sufficiently fertile soil.

This specialized knowledge strongly colours our perspective on the game, its potential and in particular its theme. That is why we should always be aware of our own expertise when we try to evaluate and grasp what the game is.