This is a tangent off of the incuriosity about game design chost by Bobby Schroeder, and I'm making a separate chost because I don't want to imply that the solution to that problem is "everybody should just engage with games the way I do" but sometimes I genuinely am more curious about games I don't like than ones that I do. Not all games, obviously, not even all games that other people like more than me.
But often when I play a game, especially a tabletop RPG, which has to exist in such a specific context, I'll have a bad time and walk away from it thinking, "why did I have a bad time?" and end up thinking about it more, discussing it with other people, and funniest of all, wanting to play it again. Like. Why didn't I like it? Was I playing it wrong? Were the people I was playing with playing it wrong? Is the game completely untenable, or are there maybe some changes that could alleviate the problems?
The funny thing is, I think this instinctive curiosity makes it harder for me to understand other peoples' reactions and figure out how to address complaints (well, that and the autism, probably). Sometimes I feel confident I can identify why a game didn't work for me, but the more complex it is, the more likely I am to ask myself, "did I fail the game?"
For a long example of what I mean, and why I absolutely don't think "this is how everyone should approach every game", there's my on-off relationship with (once?) indie darling Fate.
Several years ago, I had barely played TRPGs in a decade but through a series of events found myself with free tickets to a local convention. I heard there was a free seat at a table for Fate, a game I'd never heard of. The product they were actually showing off was It's Not My Fault! (A Fate Accelerated Character & Situation Generator), which is to say a deck of cards to make quick characters and situations to put them in, and they had fake dubloons for fate points and stress boxes. Unfortunately, I had no idea what those were, and I got a very brief explanation of the cards and coins that I didn't understand, but was told "it will make more sense if we start playing" (in defense of the people at the table, I had joined after the game started so they wanted to get back to what they were doing).
It was miserable! I had no idea what was going on and felt stupid for not knowing after asking again and not understanding any of the explanation. I didn't even know which part of the rules I was interacting with was "Fate" and which part was "this card deck", and terms like "invoke" and "soak" were tossed at me like they explained things without explaining those terms.
So, naturally, after the convention I became low-key obsessed with figuring out what they were talking about. I read about Fate, ended up joining the r/faterpg community to read discourse and figure out what was The Deal. I ended up reading all about what people said did or didn't work in the game, common problems people had and how to work around them, and eventually became knowledgeable enough to be the one stepping in to say, "ah, well, that's one way to play the game but there's an interesting suggestion in the Book of Hans that might help..." Still, though, the one time I'd played it, I didn't like it! Was it because Fate wasn't very good, because it was fine but didn't click with me, because the explanation was bad? Was it because it was Fate Accelerated, because of the group play, or because of the way we were using cards without making our own characters?
Long after that, I had joined a regular gaming group after the con, got more experience with the indie "scene" through online communities and podcasts, and when I ended up running a game for the first time it was Breakfast Cult, which I picked because I loved the idea of a mystery game with each player potentially having their own secret agenda, and the "anime bullshit" theming was right up my alley so I felt comfortable improvising if I had to. And also, notably, it was built on Fate Accelerated Edition. It turned out... well, frankly, I had a great time and I think so did my players (they wanted to play more, after all), but I didn't feel like the system really... did its job quite right? Everyone just kind of succeeded in what they tried to do (which, admittedly, was kind of what FAE is supposed to let them do) and I didn't find any opportunities to use their aspects against them. Arguably a system that "gets out of the way" so you enjoy the setting and characters and story is good, but I wasn't sure if we had a good time because of or in spite of the system.
Eventually I did play a game of regular-non-accelerated Fate at a convention, and had a good time, and ran Breakfast Cult a couple more times, though my players still chafed against some aspects and I didn't feel like I was running it "right" since I don't think I ever invoked one of their aspects against them (a supposedly crucial part of the flow of the game).
Do I like Fate? Do I think the systems it offers "work" if you've read pages and pages of discourse on how to run it right, or does it just feel generic and wishy-washy no matter what?
I dunno! It's fine! I also realized after all this that I don't really like generic systems as much as specific systems that have mechanics tailored to the story they want to tell. So I ended up spending all that time and effort trying understand Fate and make sure I got it, only to come out without an especially strong opinion on it.
And then I see other people in my group open a game like The One Ring and before even playing it say, "well this is dumb, I don't think armour should work this way, let's house rule this" before even playing, while making characters, and then later complaining about the game being unbalanced and tedious, and I didn't understand why they had been so against the idea of just playing the game as intended and seeing if it works as written before deciding it won't work and changing it.