I once visited some friends in a different city and we all decided to play monopoly.

I suggested we play on a computer app because it’ll be efficient. It will allow us to focus on the actual game, rather than counting notes, calculating rents, or fight about the rules.

On the computer, we were able to finish multiple games in one sitting.

After that day, when we were discussing what to do, I suggested we play monopoly again.

They said yes, but only if we play it offline, because “counting the notes is the fun part, otherwise there is no point of the game”!

They did not care about the actual gameplay. In their minds, playing monopoly was about doing the money math and counting notes!

That was the first time I realized that even when I am playing a game with well defined rules with someone, they are experiencing a completely different thing in their head.

I was optimizing for the wrong thing!