Winning and Losing

Winning, Losing, and IngressThere is a certain joy in winning that most people will recognize whether or not they put forth any effort. Winning a lottery or a game of pure chance has a certain exhilaration and joy that is hard to beat. When you add effort to the equation, that is, when people win because they did something right or well, the personal reward may be experienced not only as ‘winning’ but as an endorsement of skill or strategy that implies a general sense of worth that humans seek.

Games, on the whole, have winners and losers. Winners finish first (races), or reach some score first (rummy), or have more of something at a certain ending time (most team athletics).

Losers, on the other hand, suffer from any combination of luck or skill or situation that turns out to be worse than someone else's. By definition then, losers are not as good as winners at something. It doesn’t take much for us to extrapolate this little loss to it’s impact on our spirit. We don’t just lose games, we become ‘losers.’

The impact of competition on the human spirit, in terms of both hubris and depression, led to new understandings of how we can play in ways that encourage effort and achievement but without pride and pain. The New Games movement of the 60s and advances in game theory tried to develop win/win games and new strategies (see Prisoner’s Dilemma) in which it was possible for both sides to achieve a sense of ‘winning’ without an offsetting sense of losing from an opponent.

About the time some philosophy of gaming was changing, role playing and video games were becoming more prevalent and addictive. People spent years of their lives playing Dungeons and Dragons, then Worlds of Warcraft or Guild Wars, or whatever. While these games often encouraged and sometimes required team play, there were still usually clear winners and losers and the object of the game was always clear. While contemporary games tried to make the experience of the game broader than winning and losing, it sometimes came down to intimidation, skill, and power winning.

Those of us who have become involved in Ingress move between the worlds of rewarding individual achievement and the emotional mix of winning and losing quite regularly. In order to advance in the game, it is expedient, although not strictly necessary to blow up ‘work’ done by your opponents that they cannot feel good about. We all felt pangs of pain when our first portal, or field, or farm was demolished by heartless fiends who are clearly psychopaths who do not care about the pain they are inflicting. We get over this. Mostly. But even though we know that somehow blowing up our stuff allows for new points and cycles and whatever, someone is still destroying something we have worked on.

We may even come to define winning differently in Ingress. Winning is making perfect fields, or being in first in our region, or helping others level up. Early on, personal achievement centered on just making the next level. And then we reached 8. And there was a brief period of disorientation as we had to come up with some new way to get the personal feeling of achievement / winning. So now it’s huge fields, or amassing insane amounts of equipment, or something we care about. But since the way of keeping track of who is ‘winning’ on the global level is so esoteric, we now have regional competition which may need some fine tuning. Since figuring out how to ‘win’ is now so diffuse, we are inevitably going to differ with our playmates either on our team or not. Other people will more easily seem mindless or heartless.

Badges and septicycles help, but we also need to sit down with our friends and our enemies and figure out what it would take for all of us to win. If we can’t so this, folks who attend to their feelings will move in and out of the game as their heart and nerves can tolerate, but eventually we will tire of it.