Games are good at moments of reflection – a very specific kind of reflection anyway. You might call it the “Well, That Didn’t Work” Moment. In games we get do-overs, so when an approach isn’t working, you get to rethink it. Rather than in real life, say, where I just try the same failed approach again but grumpier.
Card games are particularly good at this, and Marvel Snap is a particularly good example of a card game that is particularly good at this. Whenever I lose a game – and I lose all the time – I get to spend a pleasant few moments working out what went wrong, picking over my deck, and swapping cards in and out. There’s a reward for being bad at the game. How kind.
The funny thing is, I’ve always found deck building really overwhelming. In Hearthstone, for example, I never made a deck from scratch. I just slowly transformed old decks that didn’t work into new decks that didn’t work, a single card at a time, until the sheer amount of poor micro-decisions had riddled the whole thing, the way termites will undermine a house one tiny bite at a time.
