I was playing Mage: The Sorcerers Crusade tonight. It was a great deal of fun; the PCs were all chasing a Taftâni thief on a flying carpet through the streets of a city in Reniassance Germany, desperately trying to take a certain magical cross away from him (and all for different reasons). It was quite spectacular.

I came away from it vaguely unsatisfied, though, and later a comment one of the other players had made made me think: when using magic, I was thinking of effects and then trying to work out how to wrestle my mage's Spheres into achieving them, instead of looking at my Sphere abilities and trying to figure out an application for them. This was totally opposite the behavior of the other players.

Apparently I've been doing this for some time now, and according to my friend, I started doing it around the same time I started designing games; somehow that effort drastically changed my methods of thinking about games in general.

My question is, has this (or something like it) happened to anyone else? What can we learn from this kind of thing?

Personally, game design has made me more aware of exactly what I'm doing and why I'm doing it during play. It has sharpened my eyes when it comes to spotting problems and areas of dissatisfaction in play. Basically, every instance of play becomes an idea mine which I can often take to the drawing board and apply various elements of the experience to whatever game I'm working on. Assuming I'm not being a "lazy player" and just playing for fun... :)