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        Arimaa >> General Discussion >> Snatching joy from the jaws of defeat
        
(Message started by: megajester on Nov 16^th, 2011, 4:51am)

Title: Snatching joy from the jaws of defeat
Post by megajester on Nov 16^th, 2011, 4:51am

As much as I love Arimaa as a game, and it gives me great pleasure to organize events for others, for some reason I have an aversion to actually playing it myself (apart from very rarely having 30-45 minutes all at once to dedicate to a game). Yesterday I rediscovered why.

Being out of practice and all, I suffered a particularly crushing defeat at the hands of a ladder bot (http://arimaa.com/arimaa/games/jsShowGame.cgi?gid=202193&s=b).

What's hard for me is basically feeling like a complete idiot. There's that combination of shame and rage that comes over you when you know the game's lost, and it's because you were rubbish.

I am getting better at dealing with it. In particular with this game, going back over it and looking at what I ~~did~~could have done better gave me a feeling of, "Oh well, at least I know I'll do better next time." So that's how I hope to snatch joy from the jaws of defeat...

Title: Re: Snatching joy from the jaws of defeat
Post by Fritzlein on Nov 16^th, 2011, 7:13am

on 11/16/11 at 04:51:18, megajester wrote:

What's hard for me is basically feeling like a complete idiot. There's that combination of shame and rage that comes over you when you know the game's lost, and it's because you were rubbish.

I hear you, brother. That feeling can keep me away from the greatest joys of my life.

Quote:

I am getting better at dealing with it. In particular with this game, going back over it and looking at what I did better gave me a feeling of, "Oh well, at least I know I'll do better next time." So that's how I hope to snatch joy from the jaws of defeat...

That's a great insight. If you have any more like it, keep on sharing. I need to know how to get over the shame and rage, not just for Arimaa, but in life.

Title: Re: Snatching joy from the jaws of defeat
Post by megajester on Nov 16^th, 2011, 7:50am

Oh! I wasn't quite expecting that. I was in two minds as to whether to write about it or not... Glad you liked it. Please do share whatever mantra you repeat to yourself to stop you doing permanent damage to your laptop screen or whatever...8)

I found this page (http://www.competitivedge.com/resources_quote_week.htm) with a whole bunch of sports coaches' quotes. Admittedly there's a fine line between nuggets of wisdom and airy-fairy guff. But some of it is quite good, like this:

"I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. Twenty six times I have been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over again in my life-and that is why I succeed."
-Michael Jordan

Edit: Although I'll bet that's a book quote.

Title: Re: Snatching joy from the jaws of defeat
Post by Fritzlein on Nov 16^th, 2011, 10:58pm

I like the Michael Jordan quote, although I wonder if it is more inspirational than illuminating. I expect that success comes less from failure than from being willing to take risks and accept challenges. Failure and success are not cause and effect so much as two effects of the same cause. They both arise from the same root, so you can't have the success without also having the failure.

I am just home from a pickup game of Ultimate where I played pathetically. I hadn't played in over a month, and was out of practice and out of shape. (Not that I am very good even at my best) It is such a trivial thing, but it is hard for me to get over the shame of playing poorly. I may have trouble sleeping tonight because of it. I wish I had a magic psychological solution, but barring that I just try to tell myself that playing is good for me, and that my teammates are very forgiving.

In Arimaa terms I have a history of avoiding experimentation and situations in which I might lose. It was an important turning point for me to start setting up with four forward rabbits, not because it is objectively a better setup, but because it forced me to play outside of my comfort zone and learn, even if I lost some games in the short run that I wouldn't have lost with more familiar setups. The lesson I should take from that is to initiate more goal races, even if I will initially lose more games that way, because in the long run it will make me a stronger player.

Title: Re: Snatching joy from the jaws of defeat
Post by chessandgo on Nov 17^th, 2011, 6:55am

Isn't that quote from a nike advert? Starting by "My name is Micheal Jordan."?

Edit: No, apparently he doesn't his name. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45mMioJ5szc

I almost answered yesterday, saying that losing was good because it taught us more things and gave us an incentive to review the game, learn and improve. But then I had lost several games against sharp mostly without applying my own advice.

So I suppose I'm just gonna say that, even though that's probablyt no comfort, we all feel the same.

Title: Re: Snatching joy from the jaws of defeat
Post by Boo on Nov 17^th, 2011, 7:57am

Quote:

What's hard for me is basically feeling like a complete idiot. There's that combination of shame and rage that comes over you when you know the game's lost, and it's because you were rubbish.

For some reason this reminds me the book "A Theory Of fun" (by Raph Koster) I have read recently. Here is the part of it that I liked the most (discussion of what makes game fun or boring):

Quote:

Fun is all about our brains feeling good—the release of endorphins into our system. The
various thingy tails of chemicals released in different ways are basically all the same. Science
has shown that the pleasurable chills that we get down the spine after exceptionally powerful music or a really great book are caused by the same sorts of chemicals we get when we
have cocaine, an orgasm, or chocolate. Basically, our brains are on drugs pretty much all
the time.
One of the subtlest release of chemicals is at the moment of trumph when we learn something
or master a task. This almost always causes us to break out into a smile. After all,
it IS important to the survival of the species that we learn—therefore our bodies reward us
for it with moments of pleasure. There are many ways we find fun in games, and l will talk
about the others. But this is the most important.
Fun from games arises out of mastery. It arises out of comprehension. It is the act of solving puzzles that makes games fun.
In other words, with games, learning is the drug.

Boredom is the opposite. When a game stops teaching us, we feel bored. Boredom is the
brain casting about for new information. It is the feeling you get when there are no new
patterns to absorb. When a book is dull and fails to lead you on to the next chapter, it is
failing to exhibit a captivating pattern. When you feel a piece of music is repetitive or
derivative, it grows boring because it presents no cognitive challenge.
We shouldn't underestimate the brain's desire to learn. If you put a person in a sensory
deprivation chamber, they will get very unhappy very quickly. The brain craves stimuli. At
all times, the brain is casting about trying to learn something, trying to integrate information into its worldview. It is insatiable in that way.
This doesn’t mean it necessarily craves new experiences—-mostly, it just craves new data.
New data is all it needs to flesh out a pattern. A new experience might force a whole new
system on the brain, and often the brain doesn’t like that. It's disruptive. The brain doesn’t
like to do more work than it has to. That’s why it chunks in the first place. That’s why we
have the opposite term, “sensory overload.”
Games grow boring when they fail to unfold new niceties in the puzzles they present. But
they have to navigate between the Scylla and Charybdis of deprivation and overload, of
excessive order and excessive chaos, of silence and noise.
This means that boredom might not wait until the end of the game. After all, brains are
really good at pattern-matching and dismissing noise and silence.

Here are some ways in which boredom might strike, killing the pleasurable learning
experience that games are supposed to provide:
1) The player might grok how the game works from just the first five minutes, and
then the game will be dismissed as trivial, just as an adult dismisses tic-tac-toe.
“Too easy,” might be the remark the player makes.
2) The player might grok that there’s a ton of depth to the possible permutations in
a game but conclude that these permutations are below their level of interest—-
sort of like saying, “Yeah, there’s a ton of depth in baseball, but memorizing the
RBI stats for the past 20 years is not all that useful to me.”
3) The player might fail to see any patterns whatsoever, and nothing is more boring
than noise. “This is too hard.”
4) The pacing of the unveiling of variations in the pattern might be too slow, in
which case the game may be dismissed as trivial too early. “This is too easy
now-it's repetitive.”
5) The game might also unveil the variations too quickly, which then leads to
players losing control of the pattern and giving up because it looks like noise
again. “This got too hard too fast,” they’ll say.
6) The player might master everything in the pattern. They have exhausted the fun,
consumed it all. “I beat it.”

Any of these will result in the player stating that they are bored. In reality, some of these
are boredom+frustration, and some are boredom+triumph, and so on. If your goal is to
keep things fun (read as “keep the player learning”), boredom is always the signal to let
you know you have failed.
The definition of a good game is therefore “one that teaches everything it has to offer
before the player stops playing.”
That's what games are, in the end. Teachers. Fun is just another word for learning.
One wonders, then, why learning is so d**n boring to so many people. It's almost certainly because the method of transmission is wrong. We praise good teachers by saying
that they “make learning fun.” Games are very good teachers... of something. The question is, what do they teach? <...>

I guess you have fallen into the 5th trap. :)

Title: Re: Snatching joy from the jaws of defeat
Post by Fritzlein on Nov 17^th, 2011, 8:26am

The Koster excerpt sounds insightful, but I am a little wary of over-simplification, even if I don't know enough biology or psychology to suggest a different theory. Merely from the fact that we have different words for different kinds of pleasures (fun, ecstasy, comforting, enjoyable, fulfilling, funny, relaxing, delicious, gratifying) suggests that something different is going on in each case. Even if the same chemicals are involved in some mixture in each case, my subjective experience of different pleasures feeling different makes me suspicious that the pleasure-chemicals are mixed in different levels and different proportions depending on what our bodies are approving of.

As to the psychological explanation of the pleasure of games, I worry about a description that can talk for so many paragraphs without mentioning competition. The feeling of overcoming an enemy is sufficiently different than the feeling of solving a puzzle that many games are criticized on BGG for lack of player interaction. Some (less fun) games feel like each player individually completing a quest, with the winner being merely the one to finish first. If gaming were just about learning strategies and solving puzzles, side-by-side games would be just as fun as games with direct conflict.

Does Koster back up his analysis with psychological and biological studies? Somehow it reads more like a blog (albeit a fascinating one) than a book. (Obviously my response is like a blog post too, and a quickly composed one at that. :P )

Title: Re: Snatching joy from the jaws of defeat
Post by Boo on Nov 17^th, 2011, 9:34am

Quote:

Does Koster back up his analysis with psychological and biological studies?

This is not a scientific book, there are no studies. It is a book written by game designer about his experiences in designing games. This is more like philosophical book which is searching for answers like "Why do people play games?"

As for the competition - I find it mentioned under "master a task".

Title: Re: Snatching joy from the jaws of defeat
Post by megajester on Nov 17^th, 2011, 10:36am

I'm sure it's different for everybody, but for me a huge, huge part of it is the self-esteem element. Basically, once I take it into my head to learn to do something and do it well, I find it very hard not to link that to my self-worth as a person. (I'm told that even at 6 months I would get angry with myself because I couldn't walk.)

I also worry about what somebody watching would say. Pathetic, I know, but there it is.

I get over that one by reminding myself that God doesn't care if you're intelligent or not, and ultimately it's only His opinion that matters. So if people want to put me down for playing badly, stuff them, they have no right to.

But that's just me ;)

Title: Re: Snatching joy from the jaws of defeat
Post by UruramTururam on Nov 17^th, 2011, 11:24am

on 11/17/11 at 06:55:29, chessandgo wrote:

So I suppose I'm just gonna say that, even though that's probablyt no comfort, we all feel the same.

Well, maybe, but we feel like that more often.