Playing To Win

The idea of Playing to Win is to not be satisfied with merely surviving or playing "not to lose". Go for it. If you don't like your reality, change your reality.

see ExtremeProgrammingApplied

If, in a peer event, players are sacrificed in order for the team to win...is this considered victory? Individual loss results in winning, yet losing individuals, even in or for victory, diminishes the team. Does the length of play make a difference? If the game involves a one time short term experience is losing team members less significant then if the winning and losing is happening, say in a school or business environment? ---markstone@wisc.edu --- Fortunately or unfortunately, one's reality is comingled with the reality of many other's realities. You can't just leave every time you become annoyed or make a whole network of people turn on a dime. --AnonymousDonor

Yeah, you're right - far better to just muddle along, being annoyed and miserable. Why try to change anything?

With this mind set, if you don't "win" you will (presumably) "lose", and that easily puts you in a (perceived) conflict situation, which probably could have been avoided if you took a more cooperative mind set. If "If you don't like your reality, change your reality" is what you want, I suggest calling it StartTheChangeWithYourselfFirst?, after all if you are unwilling to change for yourself, why should the rest of the world change for you? -- OliverChung

you cannot change the world if you cannot change yourself -- David Pickering

With this mind set, if you don't "win" you will (presumably) "lose"...

Well, if you're unhappy with the present situation, aren't you "losing" already? Therefore, it cannot hurt to try and improve the situation if possible. If you fail, you'll still have the problem, but if you succeed, you won't (and you may very well have improved things for other people at the same time).

If "If you don't like your reality, change your reality" is what you want, I suggest calling it StartTheChangeWithYourselfFirst?, after all if you are unwilling to change for yourself, why should the rest of the world change for you?

This assumes that the individual is the source of the problem. Why is this necessarily true? The problem could be his PointyHairedBoss, or the NotInventedHere nature of his organization, etc., etc.

The individual may not be the source, the perception or the point of view of the individual can certainly make the problem worst. Certainly, "start with yourself" does not mean "end with yourself", but to try to make other people change after you yourself have made substantial changes. Sometimes, just changing your own way of things will make the problem go away. There is a Chinese saying, roughly translates as "Take a step back and the sky become bigger". -- OliverChung

Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed a "sea change" recently here on Wiki, where all of a sudden there is a lot more "anti-individual"/"socialist-collectivist" sentiment? What's with that?

This interests me because I "feel" the same thing and it isn't just on this wiki. I believe, for better or worse, many folks are stuck in a reality they don't want and really cannot afford to change. There are many reasons for this. A few years back when the job market was smokin' things were better, but now it is hard even for highly experienced and accomplished developers to find work. Rates have come back to reality. Companies are more interested in finding CodeMonkey type folks than JustaProgrammer types. And this aspect of XP makes life even more difficult in these situations.

With all of that said, I still think that many issues have to do with the individual not being honest with themselves. I've met many a programmer who don't know how to type, let alone build complex software systems.

It is probably not just you, in a free country with freedom of speech, alternative and opposite views help us to examine and perfect our way of thinking about international approaches and ways of thought. This is a help. It tends to help us recognize the model we have for doing things is superior in many ways. We can readily recognize the weakness and failure of others who suffer under restrictive regimes. The sentiments and attitudes of those who are in competition with the ideas predominant in winning cultures serves mostly to strengthen and encourage free thought and the testing of ideas in a free marketplace. It serves to illustrate the importance of opportunity in a land of freedom. It is true that in the US we play to win.

Yes, OK, sure. But my point was that it seems as though this anti-individualist sentiment of which I speak has noticeably increased recently, as in over the past few weeks or so - and it's this change in particular about which I'm curious.

I have noticed also that such sentiments occur during the same period of the day/night. Does that indicate anything?

Just because you're PlayingToWin, doesn't mean someone has to lose. ThinkWinWin.

How do PlayingToWin suggests in the PrisonersDilemma? I assume PlayingToWin means one should try to trick the other side to lose as much as possible so you can win more. IMO, PlayingToWin does not encourage WinWin solutions if WinLose? solution will win you more.

But that is rarely the case in real life where the majority of situations have WinWin as the most attractive solution.

Not so. The WinWin scenario is more attractive than the WinLose? scenario to the loser. And sometimes it's worth the smaller win in order to not make an enemy bent on beating you. WinLose? is nice, but only when you're the winner.

That's a pretty good summary of the PrisonersDilemma, and paradoxically (according to the naive interpretation) WinWin is still the better strategy. See IteratedPrisonersDilemma, TitForTat, and TitForTatVsPavlov for details.

Just because you're PlayingToWin, doesn't mean someone has to lose. ThinkWinWin.

Absolutely. Life is not a zero-sum game, despite opinions to the contrary. If it were, the human race would still consist of a few small tribes, living in cold dark caves, fighting over the same little scraps of food. Wealth (and the attendant comforts and contentments that arise from the use of wealth) is created, all the time, all over the place, by those who are PlayingToWin. It is not a static quantity. -- MikeSmith

I still don't understand how PlayingToWin encourages WinWin solutions. The definition at the beginning said The idea of Playing to Win is to not be satisfied with merely surviving or playing "not to lose".. The IteratedPrisonersDilemma is certainly not a zero-sum game, there can be total net again after each iteration (except when both side defects), just that you will win more if the other side loses. How could not be satisfied with merely surviving or playing "not to lose" mean anything other than trying to make the other side lose? Having a WinWin solution in IteratedPrisonersDilemma is playing "not to lose". Am I missing something?

Yes. What you're missing is that real life is much more complex and varied than a simple little game theory exercise. -- MikeSmith

Perhaps that's because I am a Physicist by training, even though I do software now. In Physics, if your theory cannot give the right answer for simple systems, no one will care if it can give the right answer for complex systems, because even if it does, it will likely be wrong. Of course, you can explain that by saying the simple system does reflect reality, but what does IteratedPrisonersDilemma differs from reality qualitatively? What essential feature of reality did it miss? What facet of reality presented to the two prisoners that is not represented in the IteratedPrisonersDilemma model?

PlayingToWin isn't bad, it just is mute on the other side. People who are shortsighted might believe that if I play to win, then you must lose. In many cases, creating a loser just sets you up for losing bigger later. Many would say that MicroSoft plays to win, but winning too big has certainly spurred on Linux development, entrenched MS in court battles in the US and EU, and generally set them up as the big fat target. You can make a similar case that short-sighted US middle eastern policy (backing the Shah's oppressive regime for cheap oil) has caused some of the problems in the area over the last 20+ years. In both cases, a little ThinkWinWin with your PlayingToWin might have resulted in fewer problems.

[Playing the DevilsAdvocate] So far, the court battles does not seem to be hurting MS substantially at all. In other words, had MS not played to win as it did, they probably won't be in this dominant position at all.

One could say the same think about the UnitedStates on September 10th.

How could "not be satisfied with merely surviving or playing 'not to lose'" mean anything other than trying to make the other side lose? Having a WinWin solution in IteratedPrisonersDilemma is playing "not to lose". Am I missing something?

Consider:

Playing "not to lose" is merely trying to ensure that you don't get screwed, even if it means screwing someone else. Playing to win is seeking to ensure that everybody wins.

Here's something to think about. Who are these prospective losers going to be? Some of them are your friends, neighbors, and relatives. ALL of them are related to somebody, if not you. Winning and losing happens to communities, not individuals. (Consider the Rodney King riots.) And indirectly, everybody is related to you, even the people you don't like. The geek you tease in school today may blow you away with a shotgun tomorrow. (Disillusioned people do really nasty things.) Having 'something to lose' is a very important check against cruel behavior. Take this away from someone at your peril.

The problem with the UsVersusThemMentality? is that losers will accommodate you for only so long. If they cannot successfully appeal to you to allow them to win, then they'll try to hurt you, often violently, to make your 'winning' strategy ineffective. Hurting them back worse often strengthens their resolve and makes them nastier, and may also win you new enemies. Consider the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Who's winning here? The WinLoseParadigmSponsorsTerrorism?, so win/lose is actually lose/lose in disguise, at least in the long run. There's no such thing as somebody else's problem. We're all in this together.

Feel free to edit the WikiNames.

-- JoshuaJuran

CategoryOffTopic