Stakes
Posted by Rob Herman at October 31st, 2006
An interesting article, one that you should read, came out this morning on Gone Gaming. It talks about the difference between a winner-take-all game (which most Euro-style games are) and games that include a margin of victory—either with score thresholds for an exceptional win (like Cribbage or Backgammon), or with a payout proportional to the magnitude of the victory, like in limit Poker.
Thinking about this got me wondering about why what you call a victory makes a difference at all—especially when no money is involved! The answer, I think, is that with or without money, every game is played for some kind of stakes, implicit or explicit.
Implicit stakes might include “honor,” “bragging rights,” or the acknowledgement from opponents that one is a skilled player. They can be different from player to player within the same game. Some players just want to come out on top—others want to win big, or to reach a specific score, or crush a specific other player whether or not they win themselves. You don’t even necessarily need to win the game to win an implicit stake; to use a metaphor from sports betting, you just need to “beat the spread.” For instance, if I sit down to a new board game and manage to do pretty well against experienced players—well enough that they regarded me as a serious contender in the game—I consider that a success, a validation of my general understanding of games, even though I lost. Likewise, if I sit down in a chess game against a serious club player (400 points better or whatever) and put up a good fight, I’ll probably feel good about the game even if I lose.
Explicit stakes most often involve money, but might also be explicit honorific awards—the championship title in a tournament, say. Explicit stakes have some very different properties from implicit stakes. First, an explicit stake is much more likely to be worth a similar amount to different players. I might really want to win the Settlers of Catan game while you don’t care, but assuming we are from reasonably similar walks of life, $20 means the same thing to both of us. I think that this is why Poker plays so poorly when there is no money on the table: without the explicit cash to normalize the stakes, players often feel like they have nothing to lose, and important aspects of the game like bluffing and risk management become meaningless. Second, explicit stakes make the game much more like to end up as a zero-sum game. Two players can both feel good about a well-played Chess or Go game, but only one person can win a title or trophy, and for every dollar I lose at Poker, someone else wins one.
The extra complicating factor in all of this, of course, is that hope that you get enough enjoyment from the play of the game or the social atmosphere that even if you lose whatever stakes you were playing for, you feel the time was well spent.
What I find particularly interesting is when people’s implicit stakes conflict beyond just winning the game. (Obviously, if all players are just looking for the bragging rights associated with winning, their goals conflict.) I play a lot of Magic: The Gathering and I have a specific example that illustrates this really well.
I was playing in a 2 vs. 2 team game. My partner was generally regarded as the weakest player at the table and I was generally regarded as the strongest. The two middle players, therefore, had the implicit goal of beating me. My partner wasn’t able to see the larger patterns of the game so his goal was to do a bunch of cool stuff. My goal was not just to win but to keep my weaker partner alive while I did it.
Ultimately, I was successful in my implicit goal but none of the other players, including my partner, achieved theirs. I think this is a fascinating situation because in order to win and to keep my partner alive, at one point I had to “clear the board.” The enemy team had a plot brewing that would have won the game given one more turn, so I basically destroyed everything. As a result, all of the cool things that my partner had brewing were also destroyed. (I feel sorry for the kid because either way, he wasn’t going to accomplish his goals.)
I think it is fascinating how many different implicit goals people have when playing Magic. After the game has very clear cut winning and losing conditions and while you could say there some gradiant to wining or losing based how much life your opponent has at the end of the game, this really isn’t a good measure. Many decks follow the credo “The only point of life that matters is the last one” and will gladly sacrifice 15 or more life (when they start at 20) to get an opening or buy time. Also several decks (particularly combo decks) spend most of the time not dealing damage then drop 25 or more damage on a single turn. The point being that how much life your opponent has is not neccessarily an indication of how close you were to wining. Thus the game often reduces to either reduces to “win or lose” with out much room for “really close to wining”. So in such a clear cut game why do people have so many implicit goals? It can be pretty frustrating building a deck designed to be tournament quality and then play it against someone who has a deck built to put a single card on the table and see how much havok it can cause (like “dovescape” or “confusion in the ranks”). The winning player (with the tournament deck)thinks “Well of course I won his deck sucks” and the losing player thinks “Well of course I lost he played a tournament deck that didn’t let me do anything”. The trouble here is that even though they were both playing Magic they were not playing the same game.
Thank you both for your responses, which illustrate my point better than I did. John’s, in particular, inspired Thursday’s article…