I don't know the people involved, but I just want to point out that it sounds to me more like they've usually played soccer, and one of the players always played to win, no matter that it was in general a fun pick-up game. Someone willing to push a little hard, take chances with his kick, jump aggresively to get to a head ball, all with the aim of scoring goals.
Then when they tried curling, where there is little room for individual heroics, the team that plays together tends to win, and often the best thing you can do is throw a guard that will never score points--he dislikes it and tried to get others to share his feelings that this was not a fun game--sadly by mocking it and so on.
Is that a particularly pleasant thing to do, well no. Does it make him a horrible person that you never want to associate with? Well, not necessarily. He may generally be someone enjoyable to have around, he may in fact provide a vital part of the group dynamic in a lot of cases. The Storm Tribe includes such lovely characters as Urox, Humakt, and Eurmal ;-)
Or to put it another way: is role playing so critical to us that we'd abandon a friend just because we didn't particularly like the way they played?
I think that this is something that HQ faces a fair bit. If you'll stick with me, a quick story.
I recall an article in one of my engineering magazines, back in the early nineties, where they were looking at 'intuiting' versus 'sensing' learning and teaching styles (for those not familiar, intuiting and sensing are the two ends of one of the scales on the Myers-Briggs personality inventory. I'm sure you can google more information if you care, but it doesn't really matter for this purpose).
They measured the students, divided them randomly, and taugh one group a unit using sensing style (typical for engineering), and one group the same unit but using an intuiting style (odd for engineering). They found that the sensing students preferred the sensing style, and did fairly well under it. The intuiting students didn't much like the sensing style, but did even better than the sensing students--they'd learned from experience how to deal with sensing teaching styles, but also brought their own natural intuiting styles which gave them two approaches to the material. The sensing students were almost totally baffled by the unfamiliar intuiting teaching style, and did very poorly, while the intuiting students liked it well enough, but did no better than the intuiting students getting the sensing style.
The moral of all that is that even when people are working in a style that they are not crazy about, they can learn to do well with it, and even excel as they bring some different insight and experience to it. Meanwhile those who naturally like that style and have always worked that way will find a change to a different style both unwelcome and difficult--it is not what they like, it is not what they are used to, and until they do it long enough to develop some skills in that regard they will struggle with it.
I have no idea what the best way to attempt to divide up role-players is, or to describe games (GSN has the advantage of having been described, not sure if it is the best system). But clearly HQ as written is a very different game in tone, goals, and mechanics than most RPG on the market. People who were never totally happy with those may well find HQ a breath of fresh air (*I'm raising my hand here*) On the other hand, people who were really at home in those systems are not apt to greet HQ (or like games) with enthusiasm. And even the former group, the ones who may find they really like HQ, may be thrown off at first just because it is not familiar and they have not built up their skills in that area.
So I think any 'how to sell HQ' has to take into account that some of the things that HQ promotes most are things that many players will never have pursued or thought much about. It is a maybe a bit like teaching tennis, but everyone has to use their left hand.
Anyway, enough MOnday morning incoherent rambling. Sorry for the length.
--Bryan
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