What Games Can Teach Us

 What Games Can Teach Us: How to Lose

There are a lot of things that games can teach us, depending on what we play. Black Orchestra teaches us about some of the historic figures involved in the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler. Constellations: An Xtronaut Game teaches us about the stars and constellations in the night sky. Boss Monster teaches us how to lure heroes to their doom in the dungeons we build...

Boss Monster: great game; check it out.

Okay, that last one is maybe a little out there. For some of us. But anyway, depending on the games we play, we can learn about the world around us. I enjoy board games based in science and knowledge. But that's not actually what I'm writing about today. I'm thinking more along the lines of a life lesson I've thought about a lot lately. Board games can teach us (if we let them) how to fail.

What do I mean? Well, I think a lot about teaching failure now that I've got a son. I think about how, when, and where to teach it because I think it's a vital tool. We learn more from losing than we do from winning. One need look no further than this past NFL season, wherein the Saints swept the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the regular season (34-23, and then 38-3), then lost to them in the playoffs. The Bucs learned more from those losses than the Saints learned from those wins. When it comes to competitive games that I love (I'm thinking specifically of the Conquest 40k Living Card Game and Star Wars Armada), I start terrible at them. I mean, absolutely awful. Not even any beginner's luck on which I can count. I spend most of my time not just losing, but getting stomped. Because I think the game *should* work one way, when it actually works another way. One of my closest friends, Biff, is a player from whom I have learned the most, I think. The way he has described these games in the past is that he starts at a much, much higher level than me. And my learning curve is fairly shallow - that is to say that I need a LOT of games under my belt before I get above my baseline. But once I start climbing, I'm usually able to land in a place that overtakes him by at least a little bit, and then I land in a place where I'm usually slightly better at the game than he is. I'd argue that last bit doesn't hold for every competitive game we play, but I hear where he's coming from. However, I can't make that steep improvement if he doesn't stomp me regularly, and then debrief me. We talk A LOT in the wake of games, working through strategy, choices both good and bad, etc. That's how I learn best. But when I'm winning, I am rarely as thorough. I am not frustrated by a win and therefore trying to identify what I could have done better. I believe that's true for most people.

So what does this have to do with my son and kids in general? Well, I want my son to learn these lessons earlier than I did. I used to fear failure. If I'm being honest, I still do. Because that's what I learned in school, for the most part. I had some really good and great teachers. I also had some terrible ones. But I was schooled in a system wherein we were told to "think outside the box," but were punished with bad grades when whatever we came up with didn't work. In my time as a teaching artist, I've learned that we punish teachers and educators with that as well. Administrations encourage teachers to "try something new," but if it doesn't work the first time or have an immediately positive impact on grades, I've seen programs get immediately cancelled. Again, this is not universal, but it is out there, and it's a problem. It seems to have gotten better since I was in school a couple of decades ago, but we're still not in a place where we encourage failure in more healthy ways. We need to learn how to fail quickly and in safe spaces so when the stakes are higher, we don't fail. We become better at analyzing risk and implementing the lessons we've learned. My friend Roger often talks about "fairways and greens" while we're playing games. I'm not a golfer, but I've since learned that when he says that, he's talking about taking the easy money. Yes, we can take a big swing at killing some monster in Descent. And if it works, we'll almost certainly win. But we can also kill off the two little minion monsters that are already damaged ("fairways and greens") to ENSURE we get a couple of kills and get some plastic enemies off the table. We can only learn when to choose a "big swing" over "fairways and greens" after we've failed.

Anyway, all of this is to say that board games are a safe place to learn how to fail. We can implement any stupid strategy we want. We can choose to do anything as long as it's within the rules, even if it goes against conventional wisdom. Even if it *shouldn't* work, we can try it out. What's the worst that happens? We lose a game. But sometimes, those risks pay off in a big way, don't they? When Biff and I were playing Conquest 40k, we got attached to a couple of Warlords that everyone (and I mean EVERYONE) else hated. Nobody used these guys. My Warlord of choice was Ba'ar Zul the Hate Bound. And while nobody thought he was worthwhile, Biff took it a step further. He chose Urien Rakarth: the single Warlord that everyone agreed was the worst in the game, no holds barred. Both of our favorite Warlords were written off as complete design disasters. Part of the reason we got attached to them was to prove other people wrong. But the other component of that is we really believed they were underestimated and simply needed someone to "unlock them." That is, each of them needed someone to try literally EVERYTHING until SOMETHING worked. We played with these guys for months and months, trying all different styles of play, deck building, etc.

                                    

If you're not familiar with competitive card games like this or like Magic: The Gathering, a lot of this likely doesn't make sense to you. The long and short of it is this: with card games such as these, we buy packs of cards, then build a deck of said cards (usually with some sort of minimum and maximum, such as anywhere from 60-70 cards), and use our decks to play the game against any other opponent using their own deck. It means that we don't all start on the same footing. Building a solidly competitive deck is just as important as understanding the mechanics of the game well enough to make smart decisions in-game. So we spent hours and hours building decks, testing them, then rebuilding them. Sometimes, the entire concept didn't work and we had to start over, and others, we felt like we were close and the changes we made were in the name of deck optimization. I'm not exaggerating when I say we sometimes agonized over the inclusion of a single card to get our deck size from 64 down to 63 cards. That's the kind of detail at which we were looking. Nerdy and a bit obsessive, but for us, a ton of fun. Now, admittedly, that kind of detail isn't attractive for everyone looking to relax. But you can find different levels of this in just about any board game you play!

When we play board games, we have a completely safe environment in which to try weird and wacky ideas to see what works and what doesn't. We have permission to fail in a place where the consequences are not real beyond losing a game. The health and livelihood of ourselves and others are not dependent on our choices. We learn that failing in the right circumstances is okay! It's okay to lose! It's okay to make mistakes! We learn that we learn more from failing or losing than from succeeding or winning. Again, if we're open to the lesson. We also learn how to lose gracefully. Because when we don't, we quickly run out of people with whom to play games. There are a number of people with whom I do not game because they get angry at others for decisions made during a game. They get snippy. In some cases, they literally throw game components across the table. Why on earth would I want to play with these people again? We learn how to lose, and hopefully, we also learn how to win, with grace. I'm not saying it's easy. I'm not saying it's guaranteed. I'm just saying that board games give us the opportunity for all of this, and I think it's just one more benefit they have to offer.

By the by, for anyone wondering, Fantasy Flight Games cancelled the Conquest 40k LCG before Biff and I had the opportunity to bring our decks to a ton of tournaments and prove our Warlords were worthy of inclusion in higher tiers of competition. But Biff did manage to play against some of the higher tier players online before the game was fully cancelled. He went in with his Urien deck (which we stopped using against one another, because there was simply no contest: Biff had broken the character and made him unbeatable), and handily beat every single opponent he saw. Some of the better players of the game actually "rage quit" because they were so frustrated. That means they were so angry about losing that they left the game before it was over. Pretty graceless, but also understandable, because Biff had created a deck that could only win a major tournament once before the makers of the game "nerfed" it, or took some action to make it less effective, because Biff didn't just break the character - he broke the game. Hours and hours and hours of practice and optimization led him to a place where his deck stopped other people from literally playing the game. Was it fun to play against such a deck? Absolutely not. But I gotta tell you: the amount of failure required for him to get to that point was absolutely incredible, and he never would've broken the game without failing countless times, first.

I only hope my son learns from an early age...