> Should playing the fun way, and playing the optimal way be the same thing? This is something that game designers, especially in roguelikes where there is a

> Should playing the fun way, and playing the optimal way be the same thing? This is something that game designers, especially in roguelikes where there is a lot of procedural generation and combinatorial gameplay experiences, think about a lot. There are all sorts of related questions: * What should the space of optimal strategies look like? A single point that players should try to discover and optimize for? A region where there are a variety of equally valid ways? * What are the discincentives for non-optimal play? Should it just be boring, or should the game actively punish the player for not following an expected strategy? * What to do about strategies that are extremely effective but not fun? In roguelikes, that's things like "farming" where you find an easy to kill monster that breeds and just mow through hundreds of them to grind XP. Should the game try to avoid those scenarios so that players don't have to make an uncomfortable choice between maximizing versus fun, or should that be up to players?