A weird tangent: Julie and I have started watching the OA on Netflix. We’re late, I know, to the party. Evs.
We were discussing it during breakfast today (we’re on episode 3– not far in). I mentioned that I like it, but the narrative has a few too many holes for me right now. Then I did what people who write stories do; I sort of outlined the plot and the number of things that we had to find acceptable to keep following it. It’s one thing off, in my opinion. Julie says “so?”
I point to her. “Poet.” I point to me “fiction writer.”
There are two things that my mind click-stop-locks on: narratives that are well plotted and game mechanics that work well.
This brings me to one of the those moments from my life. There’s a Patton Oswalt joke about him watching a documentary about Paul McCartney where there’s a scene showing a young Paul (an actor’s portrayal, I’m assuming) looking in the window of a music store at a guitar, and the moment is framed as “and that’s when he realized he was going to be a musician. We all have those moments, but maybe we don’t see it at the time.
One of those moments for me happened in a meeting with my PhD dissertation committee. Writing for an audience that specific is exasperating. And I’ll be honest, my particular experience was fraught with a bit of peril. In one meeting, I finally said (after being told for at least the tenth time that a particular chapter wasn’t “right”), “you need to tell me what you want me to do.” This, of course, is the line that we writing teachers (you writing teachers? Where am I on that spectrum now?) hate to hear, but I have always known it’s the honest question from the careful student. It’s the reality. Yes, we need audience awareness, but only a fool thinks that a dissertation is being written for anyone other than the people who have to give you the pass or fail. The response I got was classic: “It’s about what you want to do. Is this a game to you? Are you playing a game with us?”
I knew not to answer yes, because there was anger in the room and my superiors then didn’t understand games the way I understand games.
But writing a dissertation for a group of four readers was absolutely a game, and the rule set wasn’t fleshed out enough for me to make the best use of my time and strategies. But I see now, looking back, that this was when my world and the academic world finally showed it’s disjuncture, and the real thing I have to offer academia became crystal clear.
Everything in life is either a game or a story, and most things are both.
Not many people understand that. Let me illustrate to you how this can help even those who have very little if anything to do with games, or with quality storytelling, by pulling a Law and Order and ripping some things from the headlines.
Example 1: Gun Safety Dad shoots his own kid
Teaching other people important lessons is a place where understanding how games and play work can be extremely useful. It’s a little harder when trying to teach a negative (in this case “don’t play with guns), but understanding game theory would have helped in a few important ways with this scenario:
- If you understand the nature of a mechanical item, you understand that even if it doesn’t operate correctly, there is a chance it will do what it is meant to do. You don’t, for example, stand in the open on a game screen and jump as bullets pass when you could leap onto a platform and stand out of the way. Sure, if you time the jumps right you might not be at risk, but you might fail.
- Gamers know not to take unnecessary risks. For example, if there’s a place where spikes pop out of the floor, you don’t linger there just because you think you know the timing of the spikes. You pass that area and move on. Maybe you can time it right, but there’s no reason to take that risk. It’s not of any benefit to any game to take an unnecessary risk. That’s why they’re called “unnecessary.”
- If you understand that some actions usually have a certain result in game, you know not to initiate those actions when you don’t want that result. It’s easy to be a Stormtrooper in a game and miss what you shoot at, but if you don’t want to hit it, you shouldn’t point a gun at it and fire. You might hit.
- Ramping up the importance here, gamers learn to keep track of steps and to be precise with their actions. Most gamers wouldn’t forget loading a gun, because the putting a bullet into the gun part of using a gun is the critical step. That’s something that, in a game, you’d make sure you had a system for remembering.
- And perhaps most important, gamers learn to practice and probe the environment to find the best way to make a move, the most efficient choice (what most games call META). Of the many ways to illustrate that a gun is dangerous, pointing it at a child and pulling the trigger– even if you are POSITIVE it isn’t loaded– doesn’t present as best practices based on any rule system surrounding firearms. The expected result– had the gun not been loaded– would have been for the children to see what they were NOT supposed to do in action (using a “don’t do this” method is bad for learning when the punishing result isn’t seen, and only someone truly psychotic would shoot his daughter to show his sons what can happen if you shoot someone).
I’m sure if the father played games, that will be used as a reason to explain why he’d shoot one of his children, but in reality, the better he understood games, the less likely he’d have been to shoot.
Example 2: Your Lying Heart (and Chief):
Let me quote the 45th President of the United States, from Twitter:
“I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don’t watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came… to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year’s Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!”
Okay, let me start by saying I don’t like this guy, but because I know he’s the President and that means something, I’ll extend him the respect of the benefit of the doubt. He might believe, in some way, that he’s being honest. But… he’s probably not. So I’m going to treat this like it’s an attack to turn people against Joe and Mika. Weird choice given the power dynamic, but believe it or not, there are a number of secret identity games (many that aren’t video game based) that can help someone handle this better.
Perhaps the most popular secret identity game is Werewolf (or Mafia), a game where players are given a role (human or werewolf, to make it pretty simple, though the game gets complex fast. You can see how complex it can get by looking at Town of Salem). These games work on a basic psychological premise that is present in games like Poker as well: you can read people the more you watch them in action, eventually figuring out their motives.
A good gamer knows that to avoid this, you have to understand the rules of engagement in the scenario and follow a simple three point process:
- Don’t draw attention to yourself
- Watch everyone until you see an inconsistency OR a chance to create an inconsistency
- Only offer comments that are phrased in ways that could be taken as true and that seem reliable or provable.
Looking at this situation, we have to do some assuming of our own, but the narrative seems to be that President Trump is upset with the Morning Joe program for being critical of his presidency. Why he chose that particular news outlet for this specific round of the game I don’t know, but that’s not my concern. This means that we can simplify a game of werewolf in significant ways. Either Trump or Joe/Mika are the werewolf, and so one or the other of them is lying and deflecting.
A good gamer would assume from seeing this tweet that President Trump is the werewolf. The reason is super simple: he initiated an attack on someone’s character that wasn’t necessary. He started a fight.
And in doing so, he failed to do all three things I mentioned before. Eyes are always on the President, but no one was really paying attention to his interactions with a morning cable show on the network that is supposed to be anti-Trump anyway. He took a swing, though, and in doing so betrays that he could be lying from his first words. Saying “I heard” then denying that you checked, indicates that at the very least you’re willing to take the word of someone without verifying, which makes you less-than-reliable. But usually it means you did see it happen and don’t want to be known to have been watching, which creates a sense of “hey, wait… what?” He then calls the hosts names and insults the female’s intelligence, a move that indicates aggression and desperation. Look at the difference in how these two sentences read if you are having trouble seeing what I mean (I know that thinking through game-as-dialogue can be a little weird):
Random Person: Phill is a terrible teacher.
Phill: Everyone gets their opinion. If that’s just something you think, though, I’m not sure it’s that big of a deal. If you can’t even offer an example of when I did something that was terrible, it seems more like you just want people to quit suspecting that you, Random Person, are a terrible teacher/werewolf/Mafia member.
vs.
Random Person: Phill is a terrible teacher
Phill: I hear that people like you say that, never heard it until this moment, but people tell me it’s being said. Why would you, a low IQ crazy person say that when just the other day you were at Chipotle and wanted to sit with me. You had your calves bandaged to keep anyone from noticing the scars from your new calf implants. That’s why I said “don’t sit with me, Calf-bleeding Crazy Rando!” So sad. So, so sad.
In the first example, I’m dismissing an attack that is baseless, pointing out the lack of ethos the person has. In the second one, I might as well say “I’m rubber, you’re glue, bounces off me and hits your mom. Twice.” Why would I need to insult the person making the attack if the attack is baseless? That’s a dumb strategy. The only time that makes sense in game logic is if I think I can make the other person blow up and look horrible. Or, you know, if they’re telling the truth and handling it the way I did in example one would result in the other person listing a number of valid examples of me doing a terrible job.
And the third point above shows the game error of talking about people trying to visit you in a place but bleeding from wounds in their face. Your deceptions have to be possible. No plastic surgeon would send a patient out with open, seeping wounds that weren’t covered. And no one who has any intelligence at all (and certainly not a person who makes her living being on television daily) would risk going out to a social gathering while such a wound could seep. But if she did, paparazzi would have put pictures all over the internet. So… that seems like it’s pretty unlikely.
There’s also a major internal logic flaw: the President asserts that Joe and Mika are his enemies, but then he implies that they were dying to be his friend and came to his place to see him only for him to turn them away. That could be true. But that’s an extremely complicated social situation. It’s a tough sell.
So you might ask what a good gamer way is to handle this? The best way is to not call out Morning Joe at all. That’s a risk, like pointing a gun at your kid, that doesn’t need to be taken. But’s say this were a game of Werewolf, and Trump is the Werewolf, and they said as much on Morning Joe.
To defend himself, he might have said:
After months of not seeing it, I caught highlights of Morning Joe today. Heard some things said about me that simply aren’t true. Sad to see an old friend attack me out of jealousy, but I wish Joe and Mika well in their new relationship. They, after all, have never had anything to hide.
This allows for the shifting of blame to them (by using the slight at the end to point to their affair, which would attack their ethos), it also doesn’t presume to start from just hearing about the insult. In the middle there’s a recognition that there was once goodwill between the parties with one pointed accusation of jealousy, a common human trait that no one can prove but that an audience could easily understand.
Example 3: Bidding poorly
This last one isn’t political, and isn’t life or death like the first two, but it’s still a great example of two parties playing the game in different ways.
Paul George, the newest member of the Oklahoma City Thunder, said a few weeks ago that he didn’t plan to stay in Indiana after the last year of his contract, and in the same breath he said he would like to go sign with/play for the Lakers.
This is a rude, but bold move. He put his team behind the 8-ball.
Normally, free agency and roster trades are one of the most complex things that happen in sports, a mix of money balancing, speculation on the future, questions about player chemistry, etc. The player rarely has any power.
George knew that, looked at the system, and he realized something. He knew that Indiana wasn’t going to take him to court hoping to prove that what he did constituted interference or breech of contract, so by making himself less valuable (by illustrating that he might walk away), he wagered the possibility of an uncomfortable, less than productive year in Indiana on the chance that he would surely get away from the team before the season even started, even if that meant only spending a year somewhere.
The Pacers organization tried to call the bluff and act like George would be fine staying. Then they tried to get too much from people asking for trades. They didn’t understand what anyone who has ever traded in game gear, who has ever used a game marketplace or auction, knows from being in that environment: values rarely go up for a seller without some sort of intervention. Unlike in the normal world, where the values of certain things go up and down in predictable ways, in a game economy (which is what players are in a sport, though the other sports assets work more like the regular economy) the value of things will always go down unless you can: 1) create scarcity (or benefit from someone else creating scarcity), 2) Illustrate new/deeper use, 3) tap into nostalgia in a marketplace where funds can be spent without a cap, 4) fake scarcity by proving someone else wants it
A player is weird in this sense, because there’s a baked-in scarcity that is always at direct odds with an over-saturated market. There can only ever be the one Paul George. At the same time, there are more people talented at playing his position on an NBA team than there are positions in the NBA. So the scarcity is based on George himself, and it becomes a metric of his production, his age, his health, and his marketability. Two is tough to do with a player. That sort of value inflation for a player comes from the player proving to be better than expected (right, Draymond Green?). Nostalgia is a non-issue for most cases in pro sports because of salary caps; no one is going to go bid up on a player just because of emotions because there’s a low ceiling. That said, sometimes teams do go after hometown guys, and in super-rare cases like with LeBron James it would make sense to handcuff the team to have the once-in-a-generation guy back on his home squad. Paul George is good, but he’s not once-in-a-generation. And he telegraphed wanting to go to LA, so that’s not going to make them open their pockets.
Indiana tried to play the normal economics principle of supply/demand by gathering bidders to drive the value up. But because of what George did, they couldn’t inflate his value. And by holding out, they lost more resources and more resources until they actually took a bad deal, tying themselves to a resource that will sit on their books for several years (losing that valuable salary space) just to make sure they didn’t walk away with nothing.
Paul George proved to be a better player– at the game of getting where he wanted to play– than anyone thought. His only risk was that now he looks like a jerk, and that washed off players like Durant and James quickly.
Indiana proved there’s a reason the Pacers don’t have an NBA title.
My three examples here have another common thread: they’re things that broke my heart (in different ways) this week. It saddens me to no end that people have guns around and can accidentally kill their children. It makes me sad that my President is a slander artist but is bad at it. And it saddens me that I grew so attached to Paul George and trying to be a Pacers fan only to see him walk away in such an unceremonious way.
But life’s a game. I can play through a few sad chapters.