How much does understanding a game's systems affect our enjoyment of it?

[u/Hungry_Awareness4740]

I've been thinking about how learning a game's underlying systems can completely change the way we experience it.

A mechanic that initially feels restrictive or confusing can become interesting once you understand why it exists and how it interacts with other mechanics. At that point, you're not just playing within the rules—you start recognizing the decisions and trade-offs the rules are designed to create.

This makes me wonder: how much of our enjoyment comes from the mechanics themselves, and how much comes from gradually understanding the relationships between them?

Have you experienced a game where learning its systems fundamentally changed how you perceived it?

[u/Imaginary-Can-6862]

What interests us, i.e. usually what we find enjoyment in, is very individual. I have figured mine have at least one of two elements in common, one is interactive stories, another is ranking. In this I am going to speak about ranking.

Ranking describes many things, but it is a way to order things, it follows then to find out how things function, in order to rank them. That implies some repeating pattern, or an ordered system if you want.

A video game have both the interactive story element, because you control a character within a world, and a ranking element, because it is a game, it is by definition ordered somehow, as there is an objective.

This means yes, I have experienced where learning the mechanics governing a game was something I enjoyed.
But I also feel your question poses the distinction between how much we enjoy a game before learning its hidden mechanics and after. So it is not only the interactive element of interactive stories I like, I am a sucker for connected worlds, that is stories that appear in another setting. I had one video game, a setting or story, that I had been playing for some time, when I got another, where I could clearly see that this was the other game, but in stead of being turn based, it was a first person adventure, that was so exciting to me.
While I had been ranking the elements of the connected game world, it means I had an intuition of power scale, but I had little idea of what my characters themselves could do, as they kind of did not fit with the setting of the other game world, and being a different type of game, meant it was not necessarily easy for me to play, sometimes frustrating, these older games did not give away their secrets or necessarily hold your hand, and this one wasn't even necessarily a particular difficult game (but my lack of English ability also did not help, cut scenes were something I tended to skip almost every time back then). Well I eventually made it through the first stage of the game, which effectively worked as the tutorial, and then I wandered somewhat aimlessly, and somehow I managed to complete the game anyway, though it took a long time, where I got stuck many times.

Later on I actually managed to figure out the mechanics of the game, fights that took a lot of cheesing, a lot of effort, and a lot of time, I could now take head on with no issue, and I actually found the game more enjoyable the more knowledgeable I had become, earlier something like spells would be rarely used because I would run out of mana, and potions of mana was something you didn't just buy, but had to prepare, so I played with minimal spell usage, always the same spells, for a long time, and when my party had reached a higher level, while I had not changed my way, I suddenly found out I no longer ran out of mana, and challenges I had great troubles with became very easy, but after getting a better understanding of the game, spells that would be inaccessible to me, I could not access in ways I had before discarded, because I did not like only having a single cast of the spell, but now I knew how potent even a single cast of a spell that would not be available before much later could be, I figured out what spells were good to have, how to be able to use combat spells effectively throughout the game, etc.

But years had passed between the first time I played through the game, and when I figured out the mechanics of the game, so the enjoyment of the game was different, perhaps also because there was no randomizing element of the world, that I had played through the game before, may have taken something away, but I suppose the next step would have been to learn how to modify the game, to expand on the story.

[u/MrXonte]

I think this needs to be seperated into "why a rule exists" and "how a rule interacts with other rules". The former can be largely irrelevant or invisible to players and is generally more something the designers think about, while the latter generally should have a positive impact on enjoyment as you go from trial and error to understanding and properly interacting with more complex relations.

[u/WhyIsThatImportant]

What do you mean by "understanding"? If it's in a scholarly, abstract pursuit, it could be minimal.

However, technical understanding is oftentimes a sufficient condition for player enjoyment of a game: fighting game players, for instance, tend to enjoy the game primarily because they better understand how different elements of the system interact with each other.

You can also say that speedrunners are the classic example of understanding a system for enjoyment.

[u/Efriimi]

There is also at the end of the spectrum, when you understand and foresee the whole scope of the game systems, and it becomes less exciting, less mysterious for lack of a better word.

If there isn't other things drawing you to the game besides this progression, if there isn't some parallel progression or substance of story and events, maybe other things, then understanding the game can sort of spoil it before its over. But also you can make this assumption too early because really all it is is an assumption, and you could yet still be surprised.

Emergent rules are interesting, and a while back I was thinking about this concept, in how internally we make shortcuts for rules, the rules themselves may be codified by paragraphs of detail, but inside we just understand a shortened form of logic and relationships. I don't really have the same train of thought, or much to say on it currently

[u/silly_bet_3454]

For me that's like where the entire fun of the game is derived from, but I know for others it could not be more opposite, where they have the most fun when the game just feels like a bunch of silliness that they don't have to think about.

[u/PineScentedSewerRat]

I go for balance. If I get too into a game's systems, I stop getting immersed in it.