Yes and No.
In single player games it’s a hard line to distinguish, there’s probably something i can’t think of at the moment as for playing it wrong but i think, Pacifist runs, Nuzlock, Speedrunning (both 100% no glitch or exploit runs) are all valid ways to play a game. heck I even took advantage of a item dupe bug in Bloodborne to over buff myself for a boss i just couldn’t get past. i think that’s still valid ,
Multiplayer anything that takes enjoyment of the game from others is “wrong”
I don’t think enjoyment has any bearing on whether you’re playing a game ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. IE if you’re playing the original Super Mario but refuse to use the jump button then you are playing the game wrong, regardless of if you’re having a good time or not.
To take an extreme case let’s look at Dota: It has a ‘meta’ which is how players ‘game’ the game to be as efficient as possible (which is often needed to be successful). You don’t have to abide by the meta, but chances are you won’t do very well unless you respect and adhere to that way of playing. You can absolutely play Dota whatever way you want and have fun (taken as a hypothetical).
Obviously not every game operates this way and the more the game is an experience as opposed to a traditional game the less this applies.
Yeah that’s why I stipulated my post to say for single player games it’s not wrong as long as you’re both having fun and playing in a way that allows you to beat the game if you so desire.
MP games are a different beast as how you play affects teammates and opponents enjoyment, so those can definitely be played wrong (griefing, not playing objectives, not playing the meta if your teammates want to play that way and you’re the odd person out etc.).
“Playing it wrong” could almost be like a majority rules thing. In a singleplayer game, you’re 1 vote out of 1. You win! In a multiplayer game, though, not so much.
I’m constantly playing things wrong. Playing easy, avoiding enemies, putting the controller on my head, kissing the mouse, randomly going into T pose. Constantly wrong all the time.
I think it’s very possible to play games in the wrong way.
When someone designs a game, they clearly have a certain interaction in mind. They design the mechanics, the levels, the story, everything essentially, with that interaction being put first in priority. Once its in the hands of a player, the player can do whatever they like, but it doesn’t change the fact that you are working against the designers intention.
To compare it to non-video games, there are countless things I can do with a chessboard, but only one of those things is chess. If I make up different rules, or just play pretend war with my son, we’re still playing, but we definitely aren’t playing chess.
A video game that comes to mind personally is This War of Mine. It’s obviously designed for me to play contemplatively and question the morals of my actions, but I didn’t. I found a girl with a back stab bonus, and she became a wraith that drifted through settlements leaving nothing but corpses and raided pantries in her wake. Her mental state didn’t matter because two days of sitting next to the radio made her right as rain and off she went stabbing again. My survivors got out well fed and rested. I didn’t hack the game or use some exploit, but that certainly wasn’t the point of the game.
Yes, it’s called inverted controls. drops mic back handsprings his way out of the room
But seriously, yes and no. You can fail to grasp how to proceed in a game but that then goes to the question of is that the games fault for not properly communicating how to you.
I would say yes, you can play a game wrong. The example of playing a game wrong that I have is a friend of mine who insists, who is compelled to 100% every game he picks up, every collectible, every side mission, every everything… and he complains about it the entire time. His play style is a determent to his enjoyment of the game.
The other one it someone who is literally broke because they spent all their money on hats and loot boxes (on games they barely even play), but that’s less playing wrong and more gambling addiction.
I think the short answer is “No.” I think the longer answer focuses around whether or not someone takes away enjoyment from the game, and if not, the strength of that criticism. We rarely hear about someone “playing a game wrong” because they’re enjoying it; it’s usually because they aren’t having fun.
Here’s the thing: games are systems of rules. This is strictly a mechanical dilemma. If everything I’m doing follows the rules, I’m playing the game right. The question instead turns into whether or not I’m playing the game as the creators intended. Which I suppose more enters the realm of game design than game consumption.
A lot of the talk in here is about how exactly we’re defining ‘wrong’ and I wonder if that’s perhaps beside the point.
I tend to judge words based on how they’re used rather than how they’re defined, and whenever I see someone make a point on the internet about the ‘right’ way to play it almost always leaves me feeling bad. You see it around stuff like XCOM where people will say that if you’re not playing iron man you’re doing it wrong, or any game with difficulty, where some people will argue that you have to be playing at a certain difficulty for it to be legit (and sometimes even the game itself will imply this) and in lots of other examples.
When people say it, at very best they are saying ‘I believe there’s a best way to play the game and I think it’s more legit than other ways of playing.’ And that leaves a very bad taste in my mouth. So judging by the way ‘playing it wrong/right’ tends to be used at the moment, I would definitely say there’s no such thing. There’s just things that different people find rewarding.
For example while most people might say that the way to play Super Mario Odyssey is to collect a whole bunch of moons, I don’t really think that’s an inherently better way to play than my method, which is to take as many pictures of possible of Mario trying and failing to impress this dog:
OK but he will impress the dog eventually tight? The dog will not stay unimpressed? Please answer quickly this is IMPORTANT
I think you can absolutely play a game wrong. There are times when someone is missing what the game is trying to tell them or they skipped over it or are just plain fighting against it and because of this end up being angry and critical of the game. Sometimes a game isn’t bad, you really were just playing it wrong.
Arguably a lot of the time even this isn’t the players’ fault.
Case in point I can remember is this: I ended up finding the strategy sections of Brutal Legend a lot easier and more fun than a lot of people were saying, because I decided to experiment with the Rally Flag ability you can get a couple of battles in. It made the whole flow of battles make much more sense, automated a lot of what I was running around trying to micromanage and took the pressure right out.
But I would hesitate before telling people they’re playing it wrong. Because the game does a very poor job of explaining this mechanic and how important it becomes in the later battles, and it would be very easy just to bang your head against this without ever realising there was a ‘better way’. And so while for me it meant the game was much, much more manageable, I think this failure to explain a key mechanic properly counts against it.
Sure, sometimes people miss something that is very, very clearly signposted and it’s probably their fault, but I don’t think those situations are what most people are referring to when they talk about ‘playing it wrong’
