Unpredictable Patterns #43: Games, part 1
Playing work, infinite games, becoming a player, keeping score and thinking in games
Dear reader,
This is written on a train; an undervalued form of travel. October is grey and rainy outside, the mists heavy and filled with mysteries. Halloween is closing up, and I have started to sprinkle my coffees with cinnamon. It is a great time to cosy up and learn to really play games - and in doing so come a little closer to the the world.
This note is the first in a series about games, that will continue irregularly.
The Great Game
One way to read Dostoyevsky's observation on God's death - that if God is death all is allowed - is to say that Dostoyvesky observed something important about what the demise of religion does to a society. The death of God is the end of a Game.
Games are built on rules and participants. The rules, the objectives and the moves all describe the game and without rules there are no games - all is allowed. As a consequence of this lenience nothing means anything in the game anymore, and the game ceases to be a game.
The death of God is, in a very real sense, game over.
But the interesting thing is that the game precedes God, and it can be reconstituted and reinvented in any number of forms and versions - and so the question when the game is over is what we choose to play now.
How we choose to play now.
We live in an age that puts a premium on purpose and meaning, new generations are looking actively for something that makes a difference, and want to work with something that brings a net benefit to the world. The phrase "make the world a better place" has lost a lot of its appeal, but the underlying sentiment - the search for meaning - is more important to us than ever before.
Exploring play and games seriously is the surest, oldest and perhaps most fundamental way in which we can create meaning, and it may well be the only way. Indeed, if we were to construct extraterrestial civilizations we could note that even if we can imagine civilizations without religion, it is really hard to imagine civilisations without games. It does not take a lot to see religion as a game, either - an old game about meaning, values and choices.
There exists - notes Johan Huizinga in his seminal book on play, Homo Ludens - a weird distinction between seriousness and play. The idea seems to be that if we play at something we are not serious, and serious engagement excludes the possibility that we are playing. This seems not only wrong, but interestingly wrong: seriousness is not a concept opposed to the game, but a concept that is only possible within a game.
Look at a child playing a game - the intent, the absorbed mind, the joy or wrath associated with losing: how can you argue that we, as a species, do not take games seriously? Serious engagement exists only within the rules and frameworks set up by the larger game.
Meaning only exists within the game.
This latter point could be extracted - with tongs, admittedly - from Wittgenstein's notion of language games. Often seen as small thought experiments, these games constitute meaning in use through rules. They are games in the very real sense, and the connection here between meaning and the fundamental game it exists in goes beyond the thought experiment and seems to be a fundamental quality in Wittgenstein's investigations. Our life form is a form of play.
Infinite and finite games
The mistake we make in underestimating games also shows in our inability to really take thinking about games seriously. The philosophy of games is a curiously slowly developing field. In it, we find some distinctions that are profound - such as the distinction James P Carse makes between infinite and finite games. Carse, a historian and religious academic, noted that these two ways of categorizing games help us see not just different social phenomena in a new light but also understand different players from a new vantage point.
The finite game is won and concluded, but the infinite game is played for the sake of itself and the objective of the game is to continue playing. Winning and losing plays no part in an infinite game, but your position can improve and develop - and the game changing can be a win for everyone, in different ways.
There are a lot of things around us that would benefit from being understood as infinite games: business is one example, where competitiveness should be bounded by a respect for the larger game of social change that we are engage in (Simon Sinek, building on Carse, has written a fine book about this).
Politics should also be an infinite game. This kind of politics - Aristotelian politics - builds society up and constructs new games within the larger game, but there is also the opposite kind: Machiavellian politics where everything is reduced to a zero-sum finite game. The infinite player in democratic politics welcomes time in opposition because they know that ruling is just one of the modes of the game, not the end or purpose of the game.
Our own individual lives are infinite games - and we play them not as to live for ever, but to ensure that the games we are part of can go on. Carse realized that in an infinite game altruism and egoism are indistinguishable; we want the game to go on and so play as to make it go on for everyone.
Game as metaphor
Games are incredibly useful generative metaphors. The idea of generative metaphors was coined by Donald Schön who suggested that such metaphors create an understanding of the world around us not just in the moment, but also allows us to modify and explore the world in new ways.
A generative metaphor allows you to ask how A is like B, or how X is to Y as A is to B, and then play around with the answers in a way that helps you understand the world better.
Games are the ultimate generative metaphor - and there are numerous books that describe life as a game: chess, poker, roulette...and there is wisdom in all of them. Building your own library of games, understanding the world through them, is an undervalued way of deepening your ability to change it. Garry Kasparov - himself an author of one such book - emphasizes this exact point: good decision making, he says, cannot be taught - but it can be self-taught.
Games offer extremely powerful tools for learning - and improvement in the game allows you to build towards improvement in other domains as well. That does not mean that the chess master would be a great CEO or that the poker player should try politics, but it does mean that playing chess and understanding it to some degree helps you approach your own domain in a new, valuable way.
Even just the choice of game can explain something. Henry Kissinger, among others, have suggested that one of the challenges in the relationship between China and the West is that they think differently about strategy: the West thinks in a chess paradigm, with individual pieces dominating an enemy and eliminating all opposition until no moves remain to the opponent. China thinks in a Go paradigm, with breathing, connective structures where the individual stones only have meaning in relationship to other stones, and winning is about encircling territory and the end of the game often is agreed rather than enforced.
Your own strategic style may be more like chess or poker, and you can examine others in your environment to find out what game they might be playing. Is their style offensive or defensive? If they are chess players - are they great at improvising, masterful tacticians like Mikhail Tal or deeply positional like the great Tigran Petrosian?
Spending time with games, exploring them and understanding the key elements in them is a way to understand the world. If there is a metaphysics worth engaging in it is the metaphysics of games. Learning to design games is a way to do research into the world that is also exciting to explore further. Ian Bogost - among other things a game designer - has written a beautiful book called Play Anything and he suggests that we make a fundamental mistake when we think that play means that we decide what to do completely on a whim. On the contrary, the game is in the things around us: the limitations and rules they impose on us is what forces us to react the play.
A game is an adaptation to restrictions on our free will, and so playing a game, in this sense, is a deeply evolutionary practice.
Becoming a player - the community of games
I started playing World of Warcraft in 2005, and my undead rogue, Gorthaq, is now 16 years old. Through-out this time I have played other characters and games, but I still return occasionally to Gorthaq. He is an identity the game has allowed me to construct and play around with, but in doing so I also acquired a second identity as a player. Whenever I meet someone else and we realize that the other is a player, something interesting happens: I recognize in this other person a fellow player and participant in the game.
This is true for all games. A serious chess player who meets another player immediately gets access to a whole shared language, and poker players immediately know that the probabilistic approach to problems another poker player may apply.
Games make us players.
This is true for other social contexts too, to some degree, but for games it is essential - and for those that understand the underlying nature of what they do as a game, it offers an ethics that will color their interactions. We find it in the interplay between politicians and journalists, lobbyists and decision makers as well as between business men. Scores are kept, and evened when necessary - but transgressions are frowned upon and often even chastised by the community.
Players are bound by rules.
This is an important insight if you want to work in government affairs or public policy: your company, once it reaches a threshold, will start to affect others around it in such a way that it becomes a player. Size and success will force you across this threshold faster, and once you are a player you need to understand the rules and play by them. Players engage with other players, and realize that the individual problems they may be engaged with are now secondary to the game itself.
Any sufficiently successful business is a player bound by the rules of politics.
The failure to realize this can be fatal. If a player does not look as if it is interested in or even knows the rules, the community will impose harsher rules with more enforcement. The player is chastised and attacked until it recognizes the authority and legitimacy of the game. Dismissing politics as silly or stupid at this stage is likely to inflict even greater harm on a company - even if that will often be the instinct of a fast growing, competent organization with focus and purpose.
Realizing when you become a player is key.
So What?
Deploying games in your everyday work is easy, but tends to feel a little cheesy to start with. The idea that you should look at your work and the work of your team as a game will sound almost irresponsible, especially if you make the mistake of thinking that play is the opposite of seriousness. But used in the right way, the idea of games and play is a key tool you can deploy to learn faster and understand your world better.
There are many concrete methods that can be interesting to try.
Game design. Invite your team to build a game that represents what you do in small groups - ask them to build in a way to keep score, and a condition for winning or ceasing play. Look at the different games that emerge and compare them you will find a lot of different forms of games emerge this way and the shared understanding you gain can be valuable.
Game storming. A way to explore new ideas by turning your problem into a game. This allows you to find solutions that are built on a formalization of the problem, but it also allows you to understand the problem itself much better.
Red teaming. Explore how you should play against yourself. How would you attack your own organization? How should someone attack it? Gaming this out and understanding it is a good way to shift perspectives and explore vectors of attack that may be invisible when you sit solidly within an inside-out perspective.
Write up individual games. We often talk about retros or post mortems. They become much more interesting if you write them up as games, moves in a specific context where the players are well-identified - and that forces a narrative as well! The reason for doing this is that in many cases you will find you are playing an instance of that same game. Chess players do this religiously, writing down their games and analyzing them for insight and to avoid making the same kind of mistakes in the future.
Play games, and note the game design. Are there useful elements that can help you think about your own work? A simple example from computer games is the idea in Civilization and other simulation & strategy games that your civilization is underpinned by a technology tree. This model of a tree of interconnected and developing capabilities gives you a great way to model your own team's function and contribution to the company. Board games, computer games, mobile games - does not matter: play!
Think in moves. Whenever solving problems or finding next steps - ask what game you are playing and what moves are available. If you solve problems as games, you will automatically think about not just the problem at hand, but also about the next move and the unfolding of the game as a whole.
Play, really play. The biggest hurdle for you to overcome is going to be the sense that you are not serious if you play games. Nothing could be more wrong. The resistance to play you encounter in an organization is a measure of its lack of collective imagination.
We have only scratched the surface here - and there is so much more to say about games and play, that I am sure that we will come back to it. As I have been thinking about how to write about this I have decided that the best way to do this is to just give a broad overview first, and then perhaps come back and dig in more on specific examples and cases. Among the topics I want to get back to: game theory, culture and games, acting and games, serious gaming, future gaming, Conway and his games…there is so much!
Taking games seriously is life changing!
Thank you, as always, for reading,
Nicklas