Playing with people, not merely near them

Shared presence is not the same as shared attention, and the difference shows.

You can spend three hours at a table with five other people and interact with none of them. It happens whenever a game routes every action through the board and never through another person. Everyone optimises privately, waits their turn, executes, and passes on. It is companionable, in the way that reading in the same room is companionable, and there is nothing wrong with it. But it is playing alongside rather than playing with, and a group that only ever does the former will notice, eventually, that they have logged a great many hours together without learning much.

The difference lies in whether the game gives players reasons to address each other directly. Negotiation, bluffing, cooperation, teasing, the need to persuade someone to do something they were not going to do: these produce contact. So does any structure that makes one person's decision genuinely dependent on reading another. The test is simple enough to apply on the way home. At the end of the evening, could you describe how somebody else played, their habits, their nerve, the moment they hesitated, or could you only describe how you played? If the honest answer is only yourself, then you were running parallel to those people rather than playing with them.

A balanced group wants both kinds. Alongside games are restful and forgiving of a tired week. With games are where the stories come from, and they are also where the friction lives, since being addressed directly is precisely what makes a game feel personal. A group that only ever plays the restful sort tends to drift apart quite amiably over a couple of years, with nobody able to identify the moment it thinned. A group that only plays the intense sort burns brightly for a season and then somebody stops replying to messages. Alternate, and do it deliberately.