Winner winner
A friend of mine successfully drew me into a punishing game of Snatch, where my inability to parse the building blocks of language was made woefully apparent. Don’t bring memorized words to a phoneme fight.
Afterward, after rubbing everyone’s faces in the dirt, he mentioned how this dumb word game gives players a chance to show off, and that got my mind swimming in it’s typical muddy backchannels of loose connection and murky logic.
I love Bernie De Koven’s mostly-forgotten work, The Well Played Game, in which he outlines, in a loose-fitting stream of consciousness, the contours of what we can consider play, as well as a theory of what a well-played game might look like. In De Koven’s estimation, in order for a well-played game to occur, the players must:
(1) Understand the game being played
(2) Agree to the game being played
If one of these two thresholds are not met, according to De Koven, you’re not fully playing with other people, and in some cases, you’re not playing at all. So, what does understanding mean? What does agreement mean?
Understanding likely refers to the rules of the game, meaning that the people who are playing know what the boundaries and contours of the game are. You have to know what you can and can’t do, right? You’re not allowed to carry the ball in basketball, defined by a rule about number of steps before you “travel”.
Agreement means consent, meaning that everyone involved has consented to both the rules of the game and the way in which we’re going to play it. The latter is tricky, if not impossible to define, as one person’s definition of a “rough” game of flag football is probably significantly different than someone elses'. On top of this, failures to agree to this can also be a failure to consent.
And these failures of agreement don’t apply to just little games. They cascade upwards to supposed rules for armed conflict. Empire convieniently forgets the “rules” of war or doesn’t agree to them at all (check out Principle VI of the Nuremberg Principles for the most ignored “rule” of all time).
Let’s complicate things further: Gettier problems.
Gettier problems are a philosophical problem that challenges the justified true belief (JTB) account of knowledge, which is a rigorous way of defining “how you know you know” something. According to the JTB account, if you have a belief (a claim) which is both true (accurate) and justified (having good reasons), this is equivalent to knowledge.
Now, along comes Gettier in the way that philosophers do, confusing everything. Gettier problems illustrate that someone can simultaneously have a justified true belief, but not knowledge. Here is my paraphrase with less rigor of the classic example Gettier gives:
These two guys, call them Smith and Jones, apply for the same job. Smith has evidence that leads him to believe that Jones will get the job. His evidence is that the president of the company told him that Jones will get the job. He has also, for some reason, counted the coins in Jones’s pocket, of which there are ten. He thus has evidence for the following claim: the man who will get the job is Jones, a man who has ten coins in his pocket. His belief is true and justified by any reasonable metric (even if this is a series of weird ones).
PLOT TWIST: Smith will get the job, and unbeknownst to him, he has ten coins in his pocket. In spite of the fact that his belief was both justified and true, he does not have knowledge of or accurately perceive his circumstances.
Gettier problems are often used to support skeptical arguments about dubious beliefs or claims. I view this as a good thing—I have always found certainty troubling. As I have mentioned before, at one point in my life, I had what were arguably justified true beliefs about things that are morally repugnant, like war. Certainty is dangerous especially where assumptions about human righteousness and welfare are concerned.
But back to Bernie and Snatch. My transposition of ideas that do not necessarily cohere notwithstanding, how can we ever say it is possible to agree to and fully comprehend a game being played? Does a well-played game even exist? You can absolutely play a game in bad faith, competing with the other players and potentially winning. You can accept the premises of the game and play to a conclusion, but it is possible that not all players are playing the same game.
Take one of my favorite games, Tigris & Euphrates. Players lay tiles representing different components of society (temples, markets, farms, and settlements), attempting to control “kingdoms” of connected tiles using wooden leader pieces. The conflict in the game emerges when leaders of the same color come into conflict—representing ideological conflict or power struggles. These conflicts often dramatically reshape the landscape of the board.
There are many ways to play Tigris & Euphrates. You can play it to win, attempting to predict how the kingdoms will rise and fall, riding the waves at opportune moments to garner the necessary points to win. In this way, it resembles Go. However, you can also play both the way that I do, which is trying to create interesting shapes and forms on the board. My future planning is, how you say, not-so-hot, so I settle for the enjoyment of building fascinating patterns and watching them move, lifelike in their asymmetry and unpredictability. The designer of the game, Reiner Knizia, has an oft-repeated quote: “When playing a game, the goal is to win, but it is the goal that is important, not the winning."
I disagree with the good doctor, in that I am not sure about that goal. Perhaps I am not reasoning well enough, but it seems to me an impoverished view that the desire to win is a necessary component of good play, or play at all.
My style of play in Tigris & Euphrates sometimes results in a win, but it also creates challenges and obstacles for my fellow players, as if I had become part of the landscape of their conflict, an obstacle to navigate rather than an opponent. I do not play all games this way. Is that right? Wrong?
But more and more, as I become crustier in my old age, I find myself turning against competition, against the desire to discover and prove exceptionalism. For me, what makes a person exceptional is often self-evident, and it is unnecessary for me to see a demonstration of that exceptionalism.
I no longer crave strength and power in my life—rather I would like to see and understand weakness, futility, and compassion. One cannot be outstanding in a field in which they are defined as the sole competitor.
And, I hope, there are intellectually rigorous reasons for doing so. But that sounds like a Gettier problem waiting to happen.