"Playing to Win"

CronoDAS

John F. Rizzo is an expert on losing. However, if you want to win, you would do better to seek advice from an expert on winning.

David Sirlin is such an expert, a renowned Street Fighter player and game designer. He wrote a series of articles with the title "Playing to Win", about playing competitive games at a high level, which were so popular that he expanded them into a book. You can either read it for free online (donations are appreciated) or purchase a dead tree edition.

Any further summary would simply be redundant when you could simply read Sirlin's own words, so here is the link:

http://www.sirlin.net/ptw

John F. Rizzo is an expert on losing. However, if you want to win, you would do better to seek advice from an expert on winning.

Any further summary would simply be redundant when you could simply read Sirlin's own words, so here is the link:

http://www.sirlin.net/ptw

Really? I tend to see competitive ability as a necessary foundation for productive cooperation. This is getting pretty vague, though.

What do you mean by competitive ability? The things he is talking about in the book is bluffing and psychological warfare. Are these useful skills when trying get something done cooperatively or do they harm the process if used?

The situations that we are least good at are cooperative situations

This seems difficult to conclude. Can you explain why you think this is true?

Possibly we mean different things by cooperative situations. I'm talking about situations where people have to work together to win, you can't just wipe out or ignore everyone else. This means balancing your goals with others, Competitive situations, especially the types of games talked about here, you know what needs to be done, This makes them simpler and easier to deal with.

I would assert there are many competitive elements to this issue.

You can treat solving global warming as having competitive elements, but then you will be less efficient at actually solving the problem by having to spend resources on competing, which could have been used for solving the problem.

What do you mean by competitive ability? The things he is talking about in the book is bluffing and psychological warfare. Are these useful skills when trying get something done cooperatively or do they harm the process if used?

You need to be extremely good at the game to be able to not play it. ie. Have the ability to detect and punish defection if necessary while conveying both a credible threat and the preference to leave the threats idle.

Once you've learned to groin kick and eye gouge you are perfectly equipped to master hugs and back claps.

0loqi17y

That may be, but you said: [...] Which, to me, is about more than just bluffing and psychological warfare. [...] I don't know. I could easily imagine the answer being both, depending on circumstance, thus making as simple a characterization of them as you seem to implying pretty difficult. [...] This makes the point that cooperative scenarios are harder than purely competitive scenarios, not that we're particularly bad at them. "Balancing your goals with others" is in the end just another way of saying that your goals positively correlate with theirs. Most big problems (and yes, even Magic) contain agents with goals both positively and negatively correlated with yours, so "cooperative or competitive" is not, in general, a binary proposition. Do you think we're particularly bad at planning in the presence of others with positively correlated goals? [...] If it has competitive elements, then I certainly want to treat it as though it has competitive elements, regardless of my final strategy. But you also seem to be suggesting that approaching an objective competitively is inherently less efficient than approaching it cooperatively. Surely you don't mean that.

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