Intro III - Unnecessary Obstacles are the Best Part of My Day
What are games, actually, and why are they important?
This is Part III of the intro series. This is where you can find Part I and Part II.
What are we actually talking about when we say game? Games are probably as old as civilisation, yet most of us will struggle if asked to define them.
Try it for a second before moving on.
In fact, only in the early 20th century did an academic first put a scholastic effort towards that. After mulling it over for a long while, philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein came up with a jumble of words like play and competition and how people apply them to different activities that are loosely tied to each other. Roger Caillois later tried to define games via six characteristics, such as governed by rules and uncertain. However, one of these characteristics is non-productive, which stands against everything I’m proposing here, so that’s not going to work for us.
Many further suggestions were made, with none locking it down to a widely accepted one, much to the chagrin of the mathematician part of my brain. The one that really hits closest to the head of the nail, and is most useful for us, was termed by Bernard Suits, who described playing a game as:
"The voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.''.
I like to look at it as a self imposed challenge without stakes.
Playing a game essentially means taking the role of an agent of order in a chaotic space. You operate within a predefined set of rules, applying force on a shared space in the form of skill, power, decision making, perception or even guile in an attempt to divert a seemingly stochastic scene to your team’s benefit.
Now reread the previous paragraph, replacing “Playing a game” with “Being a manager”. Still works?
So why are we talking about games?
For the same reason lion cubs wrestle with each other, dogs fetch balls ceaselessly, and soldiers frequent the shooting range - We need to establish order without stakes in order to hone our skills. No stakes means we can try new tactics, go outside our comfort zone, and most importantly, fail, without risking our existential, social and psychological well being. In a knowledge based economy, where innovation and efficiency are paramount to success, this is more relevant than ever.
The sad fact is, most workplaces can’t afford for us to play to grow. A competitive market and a limited budget mean your time in the office needs to be dedicated to producing deliverables. We grow by either making mistakes, praying that the price tag on them is not high enough to cost us our jobs, or by drawing on the experience of others, be they our superiors, peers, or voices on a podcast. This form of learning is stressful for us as well as our peers and managers, and often comes at their expense.
This is an even truer fact for managers, because the product of our work impacts others more than ourselves. Most professions have a training track - vocational training, and academic degree, etc. Most managers step into their role because they are good at some profession, and have the will to take on a wider breadth of responsibilities. A manager starts a new professional career with limited experience, usually no training, high expectations from their surroundings because they were a high performer in another role, and pretty much no margin to fail safely.
We are all, at least some of the time, lion cubs, finding our feet in a titanic struggle for success we have yet to fully fathom. There is always a new challenge for us to overcome or find our way around. We don’t have to stumble through these, though. The workplace might not be able to afford for us to wrestle until we figure it out, so we try to prepare. Each in their own way.
Mine, if it’s still not obvious, is playing games.
Games forgo details for the sake of purity. One hardly needs to consider the logistics of mobilising a troop of armored horsemen when moving their knight on a chess board. Chess only needs the knight to embody the threat of flanking to effectively generate a strategic threat. How you feed your troops has little bearing on said strategy. In doing so, games allow us to focus on perfecting the exact skills we seek to learn. Our wrestling lion cubs learn how to go for the jugular without having to worry about how to sneak up on their prey. This won’t make them perfect hunters, but it will prepare them for the moment of truth.
Purity and freedom are highly conducive for learning. They are just another name for that precious, elusive resource - simplicity.