Not sure what my job, age or how much I make has to do with anything, but I can say it has nothing to do with how or why I play games.

That said, what has shaped me the most when it comes to games was a book called "Playing to Win" written years ago by a then professional Street Fighter player named David Sirlin.

Link if anyone's curious: http://www.sirlin.net/ptw

Suffice to say, in a game like this what interests me the most is what can be done with it, how far can I push it, and what results can I get. Finding the best and most efficient strategies and tactics that yield the most reproducible and dependable outcomes.

Moral questions such as playing within the "spirit" of the game, or not "exploiting" the game mean nothing to me. It's a video game and I'm experimenting with it. I don't place any constraints on that, especially constraints the game knows nothing about.

What I mean when I say what "the game knows nothing about" I'm referring to arbitrary rules a player self imposes on himself that is not actually represented in the game, either because the player feels the game should represent such a rule or because without it, the game simply doesn't function, or is broken to the point of not being worth playing.

So for example, in this game, a player might place a restriction on himself that he won't long rest until after at least three separate encounters. Why would a player do such a thing? Who can say, it's different for each person. Why do a knife only run in Resident Evil? Why do a no death run in DarkSouls? Why do a speed run in any game? The answers you would get would be akin to trying to count the stars in the sky. A challenge, a world record, because I can, to keep the game interesting etc etc and so on and so on.

But in all these instances the game proceeds on all the same. Resident Evil does not care if you only use a knife, and DarkSouls will not try harder to kill you because you're trying extra hard not to die. And if you do die, it will still let you respawn. In your mind your no death run might be over, but the game doesn't know or care.

People come up with all sorts of rules and conditions to tailor a video game to suit their fancy, and I'm fine with all of it, after all these are all single player story driven games. What matters is that the person playing them is having fun.

I don't generally play with such restrictions because I'm much more interested in pushing the game to it's limits rather than myself. A knife only resident evil run might do alot to get you sweating, but the game doesn't much care, and in fact probably has an easier time of it since you're just trying to slick your way through the game as quickly and easily as possible.

But I want to make the game sweat. I wanna try things that haven't been tried before, do things that haven't been done before, flip it upside down and shake it to try and make all the hidden goodies fall out of it, break it, and finally crash it.(I've crashed this game more times than I can count lol)

Those are the things that are exciting to me about a game.

This idea of "balance" though, is a confusing one to me. What is it? How do you define it? Is it the same for everyone? Is one persons idea of balance the same as another's? Or another's?

I've read countless threads on this forum about this so called "balance" and from what I can see, it doesn't really exist. It seems to be just a word people use to justify their vision of what the game should be. And then there will be just as many people with some other vision of what this magical balance should be, and then just as many who say balance doesn't matter at all.

I'm left to divine from this that it doesn't really exist and is just a buzzword used to give weight to any number of different visions and preferences for how the game should be.

I must admit, I don't normally spend alot of time thinking on such things. To me this is the domain of the developers. They ultimately decide what the game should be.

But I....I get to decide how I'm gonna play it.

And in this eternal battle, players have always had the advantage. Developers can make the games, but the players will break them.