"No, they had discovered a superior strategy." I had a similar experience when I published an iOS game in 2011. I was still in high school, so publishing a gam

"No, they had discovered a superior strategy." I had a similar experience when I published an iOS game in 2011. I was still in high school, so publishing a game available on the App Store was quite a big deal to the other people at school. I became known by a bunch of people for making this game. One day, someone I'd never spoken to comes up to me and shows me 'a bug'. It turns out this guy had developed an optimal strategy that would win the game every single time, with an almost perfect score. I totally failed to anticipate this way of playing the game. In retrospect, it was quite naive to assume that players would play how I would. When I played my own game, I had the technical knowledge of how the game functioned - and it seems as if this context clouded my vision of more creative ways to play this game. Players didn't think about collision detection, trajectories, the scene graph, parallax scrolling and z-indexed sprites. Instead, they saw the game as world to interact with, and having zero knowledge of what was going on behind the scenes afforded them a lot of room for creative exploration (and exploitation)