Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was just talking with a friend about this. The reason older people tend to play repetitive card games isn’t because they are captivating, it is just a thin excuse to spend a few relaxing hours together. After a few months of hesitation I’ve gotten some of my friends into playing simple games like euchre and hearts and the quality of our time together has gone up significantly.
IDK that hasn't been my experience. When I've gotten together with people to play euchre it's always people who are super competitive about it, get annoyed if you misplay a hand, and don't talk about anything except how good or bad their last hand was.
They call it socializing but it is always a type of problematic socialisation because it always ends up hypercompetitive and solely focused on the game. We know humans can't truly multi-task and this is true for games too, so what happens is that as the game progresses everyone is increasingly focused on its strategy and no real conversation about anything else happens. I think it is actually a crutch for people that are not that interesting to begin with and prefer to retort to this sort of activity (passive-agressive competitiveness built-in) instead of cultivating something interesting to talk about with other peoples.
I'm all for socialisation by talking or doing shared activities with a common goal, but games and to an extent sports are really more trouble than they are worth most of the time...