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[Alec S.]

There is no point in playing games you don't like since 1) you won't learn anything and 2) you will lose faith in good games (this, however, isn't to say you shouldn't explore genres you haven't explored before.)

I actually would disagree with that.  There's plenty to learn from games that you don't enjoy.  This article makes an argument about learning from bad movies that can also apply to games (As a note, the author of the article says this was said to him by Quentin Tarantino):  

"And I mean if you want to do this for a fucking living and you're absolutely serious, then never hate a movie. You can learn so much about the craft from bad movies. I man you can't like fucking look at Kurosawa and be all "Oooh just do what Kurosawa did. You know, it's easy!" Fuck no! Bad movies teach you what not to do and what to correct in your process and that's way more helpful. You know how many feet of film I burned on this thing [MEANING KILL BILL] when I was trying to be like something else that was great? Like fucking Pole Fighter, like what you said? No, all the best stuff came out of me just trying to avoid mistakes."



Also, if you want to play all the way through games, my advice would be to pick a game (or a few, depending on how much time you can dedicate) and play it at least a little while each day.  If you are playing multiple games in parallel, try to play all of them each day.  This works pretty well for me (as well as for reading books).

[sebaslive]

This would explain all the continuing sales with Colonial Marines... But yep, a pretty interesting design exercise is to get two games similar to each other (preferably one you consider good and bad) and note what this game did right compared to the other. Or vice versa knowing what the other game did wrong.

[Charlie Sheеn]

There is a lot to be learned from mistakes but if you can make mistakes yourself -- and you will be making them! -- why should you  bother with other people's mistakes? The only reason to bother with other people's mistakes is to see how they dealt with them and even these should only be those which are relevant to you. Further, it's impossible not to play a bad game while it's quite possible to never play a good one. In other words, good games are rare and bad games are plenty, so I don't see why I should actively seek out bad games, especially if they are in no way related to what I am making (e.g. different genre).

[Alec S.]

It's easier to see other people's mistakes for what they are than it is to see your own.  It's easy to ignore bad gamefeel or a stilted difficulty curve in your own game because you can become immune to it over repeated testing.  However, in someone elses game it'll be readily apparent, and will teach you things to avoid in your own games.

There's also the class of "This could have been cool" games, where it tried some really interesting things in some aspects, but made major mistakes in other regards which dragged down the whole experience.  Mentally trying to fix a game like this is a good design exercise, and you can learn from the bits of the game that they did right.