clayton@philosophy

~ / MetaphysicsAndMethods / Thoughts-On-Games

# 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.

"the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles".

"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)(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→QP \rightarrow Q

PP

∴\therefore QQ ?

In what sense? One might say that they nevertheless believe ¬Q\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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

(this is a trimmed excerpt for the terminal-edition exploration — see the full essay on the main site)