Game Over / Game On

I've had some thoughts about this little internet escapade for a while now, and I think its finally time to make some closing arguements.

What Might Have Been
I've noted in the past that part of my problem is that I talk a lot during games. I talk a lot in general. I think half the reason i play a game is as a social exercise, and half of that fun (a quarter of the overall reason, for those keeping track) is the debriefing after the game.

But I've realized another part of the problem, which is also part of my larger personality. I can become obsessed with what might have been. In certain situations, no matter how things have gone, I can help but think about what I might have done differently, and how things could have gone differently. I use a variety of mechanisms to avoid this regret.

One offshoot of this is what I'll call "the relief of restriction". Sometimes in life, I will find myself relieved when, via some set of circumstances, a choice is effectively made for me, when some set of options is pruned down. I'll think, well, that option that is closed to me now might have been a good one, but at lease now I don't have to choose. For example, if I'm trying to decide which of two gifts to get someone, and one ends up being sold out, this is, generally, a positive in my book. At least now I can't have done the wrong thing, is the subconscious reasoning.

So basically, I fear having made the wrong choice, so I sometimes (irrationally) (subconsciously) find myself being relieved at a lack of choice. Its about avoiding regret.

In games, when I make a choice and then realize that if I had made another move, I could have been much better off, it eats me up. I will find myself saying, to no one in particular "oh man... if I had just done [this] and [this]...". I will mutter about this several times, even. Its just something I do, but I think it must be annoying to listen to.

I chastized myself in previous posts for thinking its all about me, and to some extent, that's a problem. But I also think that a lot of my attitude revolves around wanting to see how things might have played out, and I am necessarily at the center of that tree of possibilities.

(This regret effect, incidentally is why I like Rage so much, you can't really be blamed for anything bad that happens to you with all that chaos and hidden information - you just do your best with what you've got. I think this is actually somewhat telling. Some people get mad (enraged, even) at that game, saying "Arg! I wanted to win that hand and it got away from me!" I only get mad when I feel like I screwed up, something I feel blissfully free of, for the most part, in that game.)

Hope against Hope
The other factor is that once I see a way that things might turn out and decide that I want that to happen, I really get into it, and have a hard time letting go. This happens in games, but also in televised sports, elections, warranty disputes - any sort of one-or-the-other conflict that might ever arise. It might not be important, but once I've aligned myself with hoping for an outcome, I have a hard time being rational about how important that really is. Once I get involved in wanting to win a game (the single biggest mistake I can make) its very hard to be rational about it.

So if I make a mistake in a game I want to win, I've put myself in a bad spot.

Also, this outcome fixation might even take the form of someone else's move. If I see a move I want someone else to make in a game, for one reason or another. I will become very disappointed, even angry on some level, if they don't make it. Which is nuts.

Now, the key is that obsession with the desired outcome. I've become a much healthier sports fan, and have gotten a better grip of what's important in life and such (having your team lose in the finals, twice, in one year, will do that, I suppose). I suppose I could do the same with games. But also, I have to set better outcome goals - to truly embrace the goal of "everyone having a good time" the way John Hseih, my goddamn hero in this regard, does, (though that dude, he fails to mention a key rule when teaching a game like no one else I know. Like, every time.).

And more broadly, I just need to mellow out. And generally be a better person, I suppose. If I can bring this blog of exposure and vague self-flaggelation to a crescendo, I could stand to be a less self-absorbed person in general. I don't mean in terms of bizarre, self-absorbed blogs like this one, but just in terms of being more concerned with others' happiness.

The One
Finally, an issue that I've mentioned in the past that makes this all extra problematic, I do have my self-image tied up in my performance of these games. Two anecdotes apply here.

I remember playing half-life with my dormmates freshman year. I was better than everyone else, and this, in some subtle way, did make me cooler in the other players eyes.

I remember playing quake with some friends on a LAN when I was in high school. I got outscored by Ryan, who we all (I'm fairly certain) considered to be a less skilled player than me. I had a really bad attitude about it, making all manner of snide comments. I actually, on some level, was really enraged about it.

These are stories from years ago, but they are crystalizations of my deep-seated attitudes about competition. Once I feel that I am perceived as good at something, any failure to live up to that perception is very difficult for me to deal with. Whether its true or not, I considered myself to be perceived as good at board games. Therefore, losing seemed like losing some social foothold - that it would actually result in people liking me less. I know its not rational or honorable, and I didn't see things like this consciously, but I know now that it was there.

This made it hard for me to truly embrace any goal other than winning, which once embraced I would get obsessed with (see above), and would lament deeply any decision which thwarted it (see even further above).

That, right there is the rundown of the personality problems that lead to 90% of my game problems.

At first, when I tried to change my attitude about games, I tried to stop complaining, but all this personality bullshit was still happening underneath. Then I tried to to not worry about winning, but I couldn't really embrace it. Now I know that this crazy perception of the importance of winning underneath it all. I knew that tendency about myself, but I never understood how it fit into the whole chain of how I acted and felt during games. I think I finally understand it, and I think it honestly does give me what I need to be a better game player, if not, I dare say in all sincerity, a better person.

Reflections on Reflections
And that takes up to one more aspect of my personality, not one that fits into this chain, but that overarches this entire system and explains this blog. I, generally speaking, need to understand things.

In order to learn facts, for example, I need to have some system for understanding how they fit into what I already know. I can't remember numbers or names or state capitols for shit. But I can spend 5 minutes looking at 20 Magic: the Gathering cards and tell you what all of them do 15 minutes later, because I can internalize their effects relative to other cards and how they might interact with them in a game or metagame.

When I'm designing something with a large number of possibilities, I need to work out some model of what I'm working with, some notion of the factors and scales at play (see my game design blog). Once I've done so, I can design the shit out of whatever the issue is (something I should remember when I feel like I'm spinning my wheels with regards to game design, but I digress).

And this need for understanding includes things about myself. I had strange night terrors as a child, a weird sense of floating away or disolving as I fell asleep. I talked it over with my parents, and we decided that it had something to do with lying in a bunch of blankets without any hard input to my sense of touch, without any physical point of reference. After understanding that, the sensation mostly ceased, and ceased to bother me when it arose, immediately. I've used similar reflection to improve my relationship with my parents, my poker game, whatever.

It's my hope that now that I understand, nay grok even, this problem. I can always tell when I have really plumbed the depths of something and internalized it. To say that it feels like something "clicking into place" is an understatement. It really feels like a *click*, a release, like your ears popping, a return to normalcy. I am able to really reason about it, instead of reasoning about trying to understand it. My mind accepts it as an object to be used, rather than a series of entities bungling around in space - like a string made of threads. This has happened right as I was finishing this section, which seems like a positive sign.

What Might Have Been Pt. 2
The big question, that I want to end on, though is:

Should I have ever started this blog, and the exploration that went along with it?

The thing is, I used to play games a lot. Now, I don't. Like, ever. I don't know if I even like them anymore. I can't help but link it to this blog. Every time I played a game became such an exercise in failure. Though I think that on some level I was becoming subconsciously aware of getting stressed out by games, if there was an existing decline, thinking about it as much as i did via this blog certainly accelerated it.

What if I had proceeded as normal, never given these issues much thought?

On one hand, I probably would have continued to be a talkative, obsessive, vaguely grouchy, occaisionally mean game player. This is, from most reasonable perspectives, no way to be.

On the other hand, I don't know if I often bothered anyone so much with this. I wonder if (hope that?) I've been harder on myself about these things than anyone else was.

I think in the short term, this blog was a disaster. I overthought one of my favorite hobbies so much that I ruined it for myself.

But I think in the long term, it was an important step. I think, with some of these last thoughts that I wrote above, that I really understand the tendencies in my personality that make me behave the way that I do.

I think the problems that I described in my early posts here were not the sort that you just say "hey, I'm going to change this about myself" and it happens overnight. They were issues that were pretty engrained in the more obsessive, intrinsic parts of my personality. And now I think that I understand where the tendencies come from, and feel equipped to actually have a different attitude about things.

For what its worth, I have been itching to play games lately, if only a bit. Unfortunately, I've lost much of my player base, but we'll see what we can do. I have some other friends who are not into the hobby who might be pulled in - and teaching new people about games really is my favorite part.

Conclusion
I know (hope?) that there are only a few people who have ever read this blog, and fewer still who will ever read this post, coming so long after the previous ones as it is. But I hope that it has at least been an interesting psychological profile, a tale of a man finding and fighting demons in his own hobby, (though that's probably a stretch).

Taken as a whole, this blog is about as personal a thing as I've ever produced. I at least tried to be completely honest and unflinching about my assessment of myself. The role of this blog has changed over time, but always was meant to help me understand myself, and thereby improve myself. I think it's served that purpose for the most part.

I'm convinced that the cost of making my thoughts on the matter (semi-) public, and thereby potentially subjecting myself to harsh judgement, was one that was necessary for the exercise to be effective. I hope that anyone who read any of this and knows me doesn't think I'm an overly self-absorbed, crazy or otherwise bad person. In either case, feel free to email me if you have any comments. In closing:

Thanks to all my players over the years, final appologies to those I have been unkind to, and best wishes to my future players. I hope you're abundant, and that you have fun playing.

Generations

My grandfather died a couple weeks ago, and we got talking about him. It seems he was a fierce competitor, with a bit of a temper about it. My dad is pretty competitive, with a mean streak in him at times when he's losing. It makes me feel a little better somehow, both in that it gives more credibility to where I've gotten, and in that it's something that ties me to my family in some roundabout way, which is rare.

I played Race for the Galaxy recently, didn't do great sportsmanshipwise, but that game is murder, and I hadn't played anything in a while, and excuses, etc. The next day was Princes of Florence, which I hate, I think. At first I didn't think I was doing great, because I did some rationalizing and excusemaking in my head, but I realized I actually was pretty damn good about keeping it to myself, even when things went badly.

I don't know if this represents a revitalization of this blog, likely not, but I'll still keep it around for when the mood strikes. The subject remains an open issue in my life.

work / fear of fear of losing

Been playing a couple games lately, have generally done well. Whined breifly about a game of Mall Madness, of all things, but took control of it from there.

I keep wanting to design these dexterity based games, or asymetrical games. I keep wanting to play dexterity games and asymetrical games. I think its that I want to play, but I want to be able to say to myself that I'm not failing if I lose, that it doesn't matter, or that it wasn't really supposed to be necessarily fair anyway. Its not the fear of losing, its the fear of fearing losing. Awful.

I just can't seem to tackle a mental challenge (unless its extremely creative), without it turning into work, without taking it as a failure if I don't do well. I don't know how to get around that.

I think a lot of it is the fact I'm basically doing it for a living. Doing research, writing papers, its this cutthroat, intense exercise in wrangling ideas and pinning them down. Its often not fun, the stakes are high, and confidence that you're doing well is a large part of keeping with it. That attitude finds its way into game playing sometimes.

Its a bad thing.

I feel like I'm getting to the point of being a whole lot less crabby in games, but I still need to fundamentally change the way I think about them. I need to get really jarred out of my thinking somehow. Its insane to me how difficult this has proven to be, when it seems like it would be really easy.

Poof!

I took this blog off my profile's list of displayed blogs. I'm still not sure what the purpose of this blog has ever really been, but I had some coworker stumble upon it and it seemed, in retrospect, too personal for the world at large.

It is still, you know, on the internet, but this seems like a happy compromise. Theoretically only those who have already found it will know about it. The mere threat that one or more such people might read it should be enough to keep me motivated to post, and post genuinely.

- - - -

In any case, I braved a game of Puerto Rico with the Roomies. I undertook a drastically different strategy in an effort to throw myself out of old habits, but still found myself hoping and angling for victory within one turn.

No complaining that I can remember, which was good! I still had some excusemaking, mentioning a bit that I was trying something new, but I think I managed to make it sound at least a little conversational. Baby steps.

I worked in several positive comments, which might have seemed forced, though I did mean them. The fact is, I'm a TALKER. The more my brain is on, the more my mouth wants to talk, and a good strategy game is meant to engage the brain. So its just going to have to happen, I've decided not to fight it. I just need to avoid overthinking, and make sure that whatever I say remains mostly positive.

I ended up winning on the Doubloon tiebreaker, but was perfectly ready to accept loss.

One issue was at the very end, where I pulled an elaborate move to end the game next round, while denying Robin the option to buy and man a 2nd big building in time. It ended up not being the difference. I wondered whether it was too cutthroat a move; mostly it was just a clever-feeling play that I wanted to attempt, and it seemed despotic to deny myself it. I'm still undecided.


Oh, also, last weekend we drafted Magic. I moaned about the deck I ended up building, which really did look bad, but ended up going undefeated over about 7 matches. But, I don't know - it really was my assessment that the deck sucked, and as a talker, it might just be unstoppable to say so. I was downright appologetic to opponents who I inexplicably was able to crush.

As a bigger issue, it occured to me to wonder whether this blog was helping or hurting, at this point. Is it just making me neurotic? I think its still helping, I just have certain habits that are really dying hard, and realizing how many times I end up writing the same halfhearted victories will hopefully serve to keep my on my toes.

Fintere Fleure

Finally played a game, albeit a totally light one. Didn't come close to winning, made no stink about it. Totally fine overall. I still talk to much, but that's just me.

We'll see if it sticks if I get back into actual gameplaying proper again.

...I kid

But it occured to me that is how I sometimes see things, though it was actually thinking about how Geoff seems approach games that lead me to the ideas. Importantly, though, he is much better adjusted about it. Getting there!

Need to play more games. I still don't much want to, but I want to want to. That's good!

How to Win

First, focus on what matters. Find out what the key of the game is, and go for its thoat. Find your strategy, and go for it utterly. Don't dick around with any side stuff that might be useful or interesting. Focus. This is key to many video games - find the dominant tactic and do it as hard as you can. In board games, go for the stuff that improves your position early, and the stuff that determines the winner later. Do not deviate on this matter.

Then, don't settle. This is more of a board game thing. Make sure you've seen all the options, offer any possible deals, explore any allegiances that might help you, maybe make an offhanded remark that might discourage someone from making a move that might hurt you. Coasting kills.

In short, find every possible advantage you can, and apply that entire advantage exactly where its needed. Then you will probably win, but at least you'll be mildly miserable either way.