Some Thoughts on Games, Winning and Competition

views expressed dated: 2025-01

Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all.

-- Judge Holden, McCarthy's Blood Meridian

Games and Norms in Life

1

Games, broadly defined, are ubiquitous in intelligent life. Consider the wide variety of human games, from the simple (tic tac toe) to the complex (Go, Chess, most video games, etc). As an intimate non-human example, consider the dog's game of fetch. Even this simple interaction between dog and thrower is, in some important sense, a game. Games have rules, goals, players, boundaries, choices, outcomes, and so on. To the philosophically inclined, the magnetic pull of finding necessary and sufficient conditions for when something is or is not a "game" is initiated. In this note, I will resist going down that path. My goal will not be to offer an analytical definition of games. I take the somewhat less flashy philosophical view, in the Wittgenstienian tradition, that such a pursuit will not be fruitful. My goal here is rather to explore some of the conceptual space of our thinking and action around games.

In this note, I will assume a loose definition of "games". I will go on to articulate and defend a notion of competition that is necessarily contractual. Around this notion of contractual competition, I will outline how we ought to think about fairness, winning, and meritorious performances in games.

2

Just because we don't have necessary and sufficient conditions for what is and isn’t a game doesn’t mean we cannot learn something enlightening from the inferential relationships around the constellation of concepts of which "game" is a part.

I will start with a few working definitions of games, mostly for the purpose of clarity in terms.

• $(1)$ Game Theoretical Definition: According to game theory, a game is any set of circumstances that has a result dependent on the actions of two or more decision-makers (players).

• $(2)$ Suitstian Definition According to Benard Suits (though Suits defends at length a much more specific thesis) a game is:

  "the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles".

• Or more specifically,

"To play a game is to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs [prelusory goal], using only means permitted by rules [lusory means], where the rules prohibit use of more efficient in favour of less efficient means [constitutive rules], and where the rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity [lusory attitude]."

Suits intends for his definition to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for an activity's being a game. I will decline to address whether it succeeds here.

4

It is uncontroversial that games are a normative domain. I will not try to address the nature of that normative status here, though I will mention that I don't think the notions of "pro-attitudes" or desires alone are enough to cover it. Whatever account of normativity we have, the following of the game's rules is constitutive of playing the game. It is a necessary condition for playing the game. In the game of chess, I cannot be mated, insist that I did not lose, and still claim to be playing chess.

5

If we follow Suits' definition $(2)$, then we must say that games are not necessary in the sense of practical necessity. There is, however, a close relationship between the constitutive normativity of games and many of the necessary practices in human life. Epistemic norms are an example. I think these are well modeled on the notion of a game, despite not fitting into the Suitsian picture.

6

What kind of a statement is "You should believe modus ponens"?

Is it optional to hold that

$P \rightarrow Q$

$P$

$\therefore$ $Q$ ?

In what sense? One might say that they nevertheless believe $\neg Q$, and it might even be played out in some formalism they can show on paper. But what would it be like to live a life in which one actually, in all one's behaviors, practically denied modus ponens? That is what it really is to deny it. There is a tight coupling between the constitutive rules of an "unnecessary" game (in the Suitsian sense) and "rules" which are really codified reflections of how something practically necessary is done. In the case of the most basic epistemic "rules", this is a codification of what it is to reason at all. Here the "lusory attitude", is not any kind of "attitude", properly described. There isn't such a way one can act, maintaining one's sanity, that would underlie denying modus ponens.

7

The rules of the Suitsian game are practically optional. Opting out means declining to play the game. The rules codified in the practical necessity of something like epistemic norms are only optional if we can remove the practical necessity somehow. One can decline to reason totally, perhaps by sleeping.

Competition and Comparison

8

Games need not be competitive on either $(1)$ or $(2)$, but when is a game competitive? When is a competitive game fairly won? When is a fair game won in a praiseworthy or "good" way? I will first examine competitiveness, turn to fairness, examine the boundaries of competitive games, and finally offer an idea of when a game is won in an honorable or praiseworthy sense. I will call this a meritorious win (or performance).

9

We might call a game competitive when the outcome, prelusory goal, is zero-sum or when one player "coming out ahead" means another "coming out behind".

In Suit's more exact definition, to compete is to:

attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs [prelusory goal], using only means permitted by rules [lusory means], where the rules prohibit use of more efficient in favour of less efficient means [constitutive rules], and where the rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity [lusory attitude]."

Again, I do not have the analytic aspirations that Suits has for a definition of "games", but I am happy with a permissive version of the above for my purposes here. There is an interesting normative element embedded in Suit's definition, which I think is a key insight to how the concept of competition works. The rules must be accepted, and they must be accepted because they are constitutive of the game. Notice, therefore, that competition is not the same as mere comparison. In fact, I will argue that the two are often conflated.

Suppose that $S$, my neighbor whom I have never met, happens to walk the same route as me (a loop around the nearby lake), both of us every day at precisely 5:00 pm. Suppose that I finish my walk, having gone full circle around the lake, at 5:23 pm and I wait for $S$ to make it all the way around. As he approaches the end of the loop, I goadingly look at my watch and declare "I have won! I have walked around the lake 1 minute and 34 seconds faster than you have!".

Supposing we call the walk around the lake a "game", in my far-broader-than-Suitsian sense, what have I really "won" here? While the "walk around the lake" might be called some yet-to-be-instantiated type-game, no-token game of "speed walk around the lake" has been played here. I want to argue, along with Suits, that the token-game has not been played until both parties have implicitly or explicitly consented to what Suits would call the prelusory goal and the lusory means. Those are, in this case, respectively: "Who can get around the lake the fastest" and "Only walking is permitted, starting at 5:00 pm sharp". When I preclude myself from ever making friends with $S$ by declaring that I have "won", this is mere comparison not the outcome of a competition. The only competition occurring here is imaginary. With no agreement, there is no competition-apt game, no possibility of fairness, and therefore no competition. So, there is no "winning" here.

Meaningful competition only takes place when the prelusory goal and the lusory means are explicitly or implicitly agreed upon by would-be competing parties. In the case of "speed walk around the lake," we might consent to competition by a tip of the hat, a sly look, a pantomimed look at the watch, etc.

I believe none of these rules are going to be necessary and sufficient conditions for "competition", "game" etc. But I am certain that they are rules, not exceptions.

10

Note that it is not possible to compete against oneself without holding oneself responsible to some set of rules either. Arranging playing cards in same-suit piles of Ace-through-King is not an instance of winning the game of Solitaire.

11

So far we have rough definitions of "games" and "competition". As general rules: not all games need be competitive, competitive games entail the possibility of winning and losing for some involved competitors, and competition only occurs when a game is tokened ('played' at all) with the implicit or explicit contractual consent of all involved parties to the rules (lusory means) and to the goal (prelusory goal), if any. So, in light of these insights, we can say that "speed walk around the lake" here might hesitantly be called a game, but considering that it was tokened without $S$'s consent, it is not a tokening of a game that is viable for consideration as competitive.

I will turn now to the concept of fairness as it relates to competitive games.

Fairness and Winning

12

We might call a competitive game fair when it is not biased towards any player. It is a game where any given player has the same probability of winning when playing the perfect strategy. Another way of saying this is that the expected value ought to approach zero if all players play perfectly, game after game. This is the game-theoretical definition of a fair game. Russian Roulette with two players is such a fair game. Each of us has the same odds of landing the barrel on the chamber with a round in it, $1/6$. Obviously, "fair" is oberver-knowledge-relative and must mean "fair give or take some unknown margin of error" or no game could ever be declared fair (no spin of the revolver is exactly fair, but it is equally unpredictable to all parties and that's what matters). I will only be concerned with "fair" in the sense of "reasonably fair" in this note. In that sense, fairness should be thought of as a continuous variable, not a discrete one.

I want to distinguish between two different types of fairness:

• Game-internal fairness: The rules of the game themselves are fair to each player. (Russian Roulette)
• Game-external fairness: Things additional to the rules of the game ensure that it is not unfair.
  • Game-externally fair Russian Roulette: No one tampers with the pistol before I pick it up again.
  • Game-externally unfair Russian Roulette: The cylinder is swapped for a weighted one between trigger pulls, just before my turn.

Typically game-internal fairness will apply to type-games (is chess fair?) and game-external-fairness will apply to token games (did you sound an airhorn in my ear while we played this game of chess). Game-external fairness is important because in real life, not all of the rules that constitute a tokening (playing) of a game can be explicitly stated and sometimes how the rules ought to apply to the playing of the game is unclear. Merely following the type-game's rules is not sufficient for token-game fairness. For example, it is assumed that in "walk around the lake" I am not allowed to jump in my car when I am out of sight of $S$, drive around the lake, and then declare victory.

Did I win "walk around the lake" if I took amphetamines and trained at speed walking for 5 years before tipping my hat to $S$ to let him know the race is on? I will say more on whether this token-game would be fair later. It should be clear for now though, that the token-game can be unfair even though the type-game is fair, game-externally fair of course. Supposing we play Checkers (which is actually a game-internally fair game) and you pour water on me during each of my moves, the token-game is not fair, though the type-game of checkers remains fair.

13

It might be suggested that fair type-games can only have game-externally-unfair token instances if some explicit or implicit rules are violated. I do not think this is the case. It is not a rule of basketball that the mean height of each team must be equal, however, if your team's mean height is 7' and mine is 5', the game is certainly unfair and it is not so because of the rules of basketball. Not many sane audiences will be impressed by the mean 7' team's victory. The concept of "fairness" has strong inferential ties with the concept of "merit", especially when "competition" is in the mix.

14

Let me conclude this part of the discussion on fairness by highlighting some aspects of fairness that underscore the distinction between competition and comparison. Consider a conceptually revealing insight into reciprocal fairness: Its significance emerges only within competition-capable domains. In the interaction between a dog and its owner during fetch, no meaningful notion of reciprocal fairness is to be found. Supposing I were to throw the stick 20 miles (by some superhuman feat of strength), this would not disproportionately effect one party in such a way as to aptly be called unfair. The dog is disappointed, but in the same way that I would be if he bit my leg instead of running after the stick. The fun is over, but neither party is "ahead/winning" or "behind/losing" on account of it. What would it take to make the game of fetch competitive? Why can't I or my dog "win" fetch?

The game lacks a reciprocal agreement to terms that could constitute its fairness or unfairness and therefore its competitive nature. Fairness and competition are related because they are both products of being held accountable to agreement on reciprocal rules. Fairness is the mutual commitment to reciprocal rules, while competition and its results are the structured actions that adhere to and emerge from those rules.

I propose that competition is inherently social and can only manifest where the possibility of fair agreement and responsibility for reciprocal rules exists. Where this possibility is absent, what appears to be competition is only mere comparison, a non-mutual assessment of differences without the normative intersubjective dimension.

15

We should keep in mind this distinction between competition and comparison because it has real consequences. Very often, competition and comparison are conflated in service of the ego or in pursuit of status. It makes us feel better to have "beaten" someone at something we "came out ahead" in, but was it agreed to? Were the terms, goals, and rules all known ahead of time to consenting parties? I think that often if these terms, rules, etc were known, such victories of the imagination would not be nearly as impressive as they are in the internal world of the victors. As competitive social beings, this impacts how we see ourselves and others in the world of persons.

The distinction between competition and comparison has consequences precisely because it bears on what we take ourselves to be committed to. If I think I have beaten $S$ in some meaningful challenge (in no realm of agreement or fairness), then I see myself differently than if I only would have thought that "one dimension I could compare myself to $S$ in is $\phi$" and that has a much more deflated psychological thrust. This impotent feeling of comparison feels as it does precisely because it is arbitrary. For any two people, there are countless ways to compare them where one or the other "comes out ahead". Victories in valid competitions are normatively commanding in a way that arbitrary comparisons could never be (you agreed to them by competing).

Gerrymandering Games and Game-Boundaries

16

Noting the arbitrariness of ego-stroking comparisons, we should be wary of the proposed boundaries of competitive games as they are often strategically defined to shape the outcome in favor of one player. This is a possibility around game-external-unfairness that I will call game gerrymandering which requires us to add one more clarifying point around the reciprocal agreement aspect of competitions. Suppose that:

• I speak with $S$ and we agree (oddly) to a game of "speed walk around the lake" next year at 5:00 pm sharp on January 1st.
• Suppose that $S$ trains rigorously in speedwalking and spends countless hours meticulously improving his time around the lake.
• When we show up the next year on January 1st, $S$ wins handily.

In this case, $S$'s win is fair, surely. He prepared, I did not, and therefore he emerged the better speed walker. But now suppose that:

• I speak with $S$ and we agree to a game of "speed walk around the lake" next year at 5:00 pm sharp on January 1st,
• but now further suppose that $S$ has secretly been a professional speed walker his entire life and only recently took a break from winning speed running competitions.
• I prepare rigorously for the next year,
• but on January 1st my preparation pales in comparison to $S$'s long speed walking career.
• When we show up the next year on January 1st, $S$ wins handily.

Is this token instance of "speed walk around the lake" fair? I think not. The token-game here is extremely game-externally unfair. We implicitly agreed to one year of preparation, but no amount of preparation in that year would have allowed me to win the race.

We could defend $S$'s win, saying that his lifetime of preparation made him deserving of that win. I agree he deserved to perform as he did and perhaps in some sense that he won, but not that it is deserving of much praise. The winning of this game is a negligible achievement. My focus here is to show how the binary notion of winning a competition should take a backseat to merit and achievement, not the other way around. Surely $S$'s preparation is commendable. No one should dispute that, but I did not wittingly consent to a competition with a lifelong professional speed walker and even if I had, his win would not be game-externally fair. That is, unless the boundaries of the game were changed.

$S$, wanting to claim a fair and square win worthy of praise, has two options:

1. Admit that he was deceptive and that, given full knowledge of his expertise, I would not have agreed to the race. (or perhaps would have agreed jokingly, tipping my hand that I knew defeat was virtually inevitable)
2. Claim that the game encompassed more than merely one walk on the evening of January 1st.

17

I consented to a game of "speed walk around the lake next year at 5:00pm" with $S$, which it turned out was game-externally unfair because of $S$'s silent background as a professional speed walker. But suppose $S$ says "We've been playing the game all our lives. I just played it better than you by deciding to pursue professional speed walking at age 3. You should have done the same if you really wanted to win." This response highlights a strong tendency that players have to gerrymander the boundaries of the game into ones where they win almost by definition. Obviously $S$'s suggestion that I should have lived my life as a toddler differently to win the game of "speed walk around the lake next year at 5:00pm" in 2025 is absurd. We can make the gerrymandering move, but unless the new boundaries are agreed upon, we have thereby dissolved competition into comparison.

Again, $S$ may be comparing himself to me and imagining a gerrymandered competition where he is the winner, but no such competition could have meaningfully taken place. I implicitly agreed to a competition where it was assumed that we were both average-joe speed walkers, likely with some difference in talent, but nothing that a year's worth of hard work couldn't even out. The threshold of unfairness was low to imperceptible in the competition I agreed to.

Two Games:

• Speed walk around the lake next year at 5:00pm, as average Joes
• Speed walk around the lake next year at 5:00pm, one player as a professional speed walker, the other not

Game gerrymandering inevitably produces predetermined outcomes. Maybe you want to claim that you won the "basketball + team selection game" when your team with a mean height of 7' beat mine with a mean height of 5'? Again, the critical distinction between competition and mere comparison lies in mutual agreement about the game's parameters. Did we consent to teams assembled without constraints? Then a win by the 7' tall team, while unimpressive, stands, though it gets its merit for reasons more related to team-selection than basketball.

18

Where are the bounds of a token-game? At birth? At the starting shot or the first move? The bounds of the game are where the agreement to play it says they are, whether that agreement is implicit or explicit. The fact that we are not always good at making and keeping these agreements says nothing against the arguments here. If we want to compete meaningfully, we must agree on terms. If we want our competitions to be game-externally fair, we ought to agree to their boundaries, rules, and prelusory goals in the fairest way possible for all participants (for either game-internally fair or game-internally unfair token games).

If the competition we want is healthy and stimulating, we should agree to gerrymander games only for the purposes of fairness and agreement not merely the binary outcome of winning.

Meritorious Performances

19

Why does fairness matter in competitive games? That sounds like a strange question, but I invite the reader of this note to be puzzled by it for a second.

20

If a 250lb heavy-weight and a 125lb fly-weight agree to fight and the heavy-weight knocks out the fly-weight in 10 seconds, he has "won" the match, sure, but there is some very important sense in which the fight was not validly won or was a bad win. No one would be inclined to say "Well. A fight's a fight." and the concept of fairness is to blame for this reluctance. Notice that this kind of unfairness is possible even if no rules or contracts were broken. Rules being broken implies unfairness, but unfairness need not only be a result of rules being broken.

Fairly won games are deserving of praise. They are an impressive feat. Unfairly won games on the other hand can be won through stacked odds, cheating, game gerrymandering, or type-unfair games. Therefore, less skill and expertise were demanded to produce the victory. There is a strange sense that since "winning/losing" is a binary distinction, that the caliber of the achievement involved is irreverent if it is a loss. I think this is exactly wrong. The caliber of the achievement should be placed first and the binary outcome second (though often the caliber of achievement is strongly linked to the outcome). Scoring even a single point against a professional tennis player as a complete amateur represents a far more remarkable achievement than a professional defeating a college-tier player in, say, a "best of 3".

21

Assuming the outcome of a given game is binary, when is a win "a good win" (one that is an achievement of merit) and when is it a "bad win"? I argue that a win is a Meritorious Win, just when:

• It is a win.
• All competing parties are consenting (implicitly or explicitly) to the rules, outcome, and boundaries (in the gerrymandering sense) of the game. (This is required for it to be a competition, and thereby a "win" at all.)
• The type-game is fair (or fair-enough, as in the case of the spinning cylinder in Russian Roulette)
  • or the winner wins despite a probabilistic disadvantage in a type-unfair game
• The token-game has been played in a game-internally-fair way
  • or the winner wins despite the opponent cheating, resulting in a probabilistic disadvantage for the winner
• The token-game has been played in a game-externally-fair way
  • or the winner wins despite the opponent accruing some game-external advantage resulting in a probabilistic disadvantage for the winner

Note that a performance can be meritorious whether it is a win, loss, or neither (merely swap out "the winner/wins" in the above for "a player/plays"). Clearly, performances are Meritorious on a sliding scale. Winning despite a slight disadvantage is less impressive than winning despite a huge disadvantage. Let's look at a few examples to clarify.

22

Suppose I agree to play Magnus Carlsen in a game of chess tomorrow. Not surprisingly, he beats me. Suppose neither of us cheats or does anything extraneous that would be game-externally unfair like sounding off airhorns or pouring water on each other. Based on the arguments above, the following are the facts of the case:

1. The type-game of chess is fair enough
2. We did, in fact, compete.
3. This game of chess was game-externally-unfair (It was not possible for us to agree to a fair game here, though we did agree to compete. Magnus has been playing since childhood and I have played less than 50 games.)
4. This game of chess was played in a game-internally fair way (no one cheated).
5. Magnus's win was valid but the performance not very Meritorious

$3$ is likely to get the most objections here. We did agree to to play this game and I knew Magnus was a lifelong professional chess player. This agreement is enough to establish that we did in fact compete. Both parties knew what they were agreeing to, unlike in the case of $S$ being a silent professional speed walker. However, to establish that the win was meritorious, it also needs to be the case that the game was game-externally fair (to some reasonable degree). In this case, it is in neither my control nor Magnus's that he had enough experience to make my winning virtually impossible without Magnus giving me a substantial handicap of some kind.

23

At this point, it will likely be objected that I have defined a professional or expert out of the possibility of a meritorious win/performance against anyone but one of their close peers. This is not the case. First, we should not confuse Magnus's preparation and training being praiseworthy or impressive with his win being praiseworthy or impressive. Second, Meritoriousness of performance is not zero-sum. Magnus's win might be meritorious, but it is just far less meritorious than my mere playing in competition against him as a player of less than 50 games of chess.

24

There is some sense in which the evaluation of performance is tied up in the definition of a rational self. What makes me responsible for the merit and outcome of a performance is, I argue, volition. To illustrate this, let's examine a scenario in which I am comparing my performance to Magnus's to see whose was better, all things considered. Suppose that I do decently against Magnus, despite losing. Suppose further that I want to claim that my performance was more meritorious than Magnus's win altogether. Clearly, there must be some threshold above which it is and below which it is not (though it may be fuzzy as it is intersubjectively defined).

To defend this claim, I might cite the reason that "If I had had equal training, I would have won." But what can I mean by that? Isn't my being myself somewhat tied up in the notion of not having had equal training? Maybe I am making a claim about my innate aptitudes? That is, maybe I am saying something like: "If a person with the same innate aptitudes as myself were to have equal preparation to Magnus in this game, ceteris paribus, then I would have won." That seems highly unlikely given Magnus's early life, but more importantly, it seems like a strange route to go down. What am I really arguing for here? That my aptitudes are better than his? If so, that is not evidence for my performance being more meritorious. Talent is not earned.

This scenario drums up a counterargument to the proposed view here: If the merit of a specific performance is not to be assessed on the basis of counterfactual differences in talent, or in training, then what is it to be assessed on? Another way of asking this question is: what achievements (or parts of achievements) am I responsible for and what achievements (or parts of achievements) are mere accidents of my history? I will claim the answer is that I am responsible for the achievements that are the downstream results of my volitions. This gets us into deeper philosophical waters than I have space for here, but it will suffice to say for now that I have a somewhat Kantian compatibilist story to tell to defend the use of "volitions" here.

25

It may also be objected that since I agreed to compete with Magnus, knowing the skill differential, that my agreement is equivalent to my signing off on the game of chess we are to play as fair. I think this is to confuse two notions of fairness: the fairness of the agreement vs. the fairness of the game. The agreement is fair, in the sense that I was not deceived, but that does not thereby ensure that the token-game is fair. Token-game game-external fairness does not follow from fairness of agreement or from fairness of the type-game. I may agree to play checkers against you blindfolded, in which case you winning is unlikely to be meritorious.

26

I am arguing that we ought to value the meritoriousness of performance over the binary outcomes of winning and losing a token game. So far I take myself to have made an intuitive conceptual case for taking things this way. There are clear intuition pump scenarios where meritoriousness of performance seems strongly to come out ahead of the binary win/lose outcome in terms of value. Doubtless as well, in most fairly played games, meritoriousness of performance is highly correlated with game outcome. Allow me to also briefly make the case for this inversion of valuations from the perspective of bettering ourselves and others, for recreation or necessity, in addition to arguing from conceptual grounds.

When we take the stance of valuing performance over outcome, we grant ourselves license to pay closer attention to the details of a performance. One might exhibit this change in focus by, say, finishing a bad game of poker and thinking "I really should fold more often on bad hands next time. At least I stayed in the game for many hands against better players!" rather than just "Shoot. I lost". Further, we allow ourselves to capitalize on the morale-boost of personally gerrymandered achievements: "I lost, but I played extremely well compared to my last game!" This has the additional benefit of fighting recency bias when losses start to stack up. Valuing "winning/losing" over performance purports to compress the information-dense landscape of choices and actions that comprise that performance into a single bit.

27

Before concluding this note, I'd like to offer some thoughts on why we don't already value meritorious performances over winning. I believe the first and most obvious answer is that it is harder. Social memes proliferate proportional to their ease of reproducibility. It is much easier for "$S$ won" to spread than "$S$ won but $A$ really gave the more commendable performance despite some extreme disadvantage."

The second major reason that we tend to have these values backwards is that the "outcome first" valuation tends to benefit those in positions of power or privilege. The rich kid who wins the pay-to-win style game is hesitant to include the purchase of expensive gear into the story of their victory. This creates a feedback loop where the narrative that "a win's a win" is propagated by the wealthy/powerful/talented etc, which will outcompete the more nuanced story of "a win despite a disadvantage is more commendable because $XYZ$ ..." and so on.

Yet a third reason why we have these values in the reverse order, is that it sells. It sells for the same reason that it spreads. It is a simple story. "$S$ (the professional Olympic discus thrower) threw the discus 100 yards!" is an easier story to sell products with than "$A$ threw the discus 25 yards but he is 45 and started this sport late and his shoulder hurts and he lost sleep because of his crying child... " I am not denying that professionals with near perfect lives, training, privilege, and resources can never give the most meritorious performances. However, I am claiming that we only care about the achievements of the best more than the best achievements because the stories of the former are simpler to tell and therefore our values are inculcated backwards.

The human ego-driven tendency to gerrymander the game into a "win by definition" is bound up in our nature as hierarchical creatures. We want to assert dominance over others and position ourselves higher up the ladder, but we should shift our focus to the quality of our achievements and how that can help us learn and become better persons.

Concluding Thoughts

28

In this note, I have argued that we often call something a "competition" even when the constitutively necessary implicit or explicit contract is not there to ground it as such. I have also argued that achievement or meritoriousness of performance should be valued over the binary outcomes of winning and losing. We often seek to dishonestly gerrymander the boundaries of supposed competitions to ensure the outcomes we desire. I have argued that we should pay closer attention to how we gerrymander game-boundaries and that we should do so only in pursuit of fairness and agreement. I have argued for this inversion of values on conceptual grounds and growth-driven (instrumental) grounds.

I will conclude by considering the words of McCarthy's villain on the topic of games. The Judge is partially in agreement with one of the central points of this note:

... the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard

We cannot meaningfully put anything at stake in a game without making ourselves responsible to some rules. What do we "put at hazard" when we hold ourselves and others accountable to the terms of a competitive game? The answer is: the very fact that we see ourselves and others as accountable for certain practical claims or outcomes. Victory or defeat in social games is not up to just one party. Winning and losing consist of the changes in how others see us as a result of the agreement that we have "won or lost" by agreeing to, in combination with some performance.

What about this character's darker ruminations?

But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all.

The Judge wants to paint the picture of life as a token in a sort of "ultimate wager". Dark and mysterious as that sounds, I don't think there is much conceptual treasure hiding under the notion of a game that is necessarily one player's last. I also do not believe that all games "aspire" to be such a game, though, in some interesting sense, all games (in life as a product of natural selection) are genealogically derived from such "ultimate wager games".