Why Don’t Gamers Win At Life?
Last weekend I attended Bryan Caplan’s annual board game weekend CaplaCon, as I have since ‘07. I enjoyed it, though my interest in board games has waned over the years, maybe due to an increasing obsession with s career of figuring key stuff out.
This prompted me to pose a key question:
Some people are really good at board games. Not just one or a few but they can do well at most any. Why don’t they then do better at life? How do board games differ so systematically?
Yes, board game success does correlate with life success. But most of the 353 responses seem to agree that this correlation is weak enough to leave a puzzle to explain. And this seems a challenge to game theory; the key thesis that life is well described by game theory seems in doubt if those who do well at explicit games do inexplicably less well at life.
I did six polls comparing eight possible “biggest reason very good gamers (G) don’t do better at life (L)”. Here are (tentative) strengths (normed to 100) from 2375 responses:
I just don’t buy answer #1, complexity, as top gamers do just as well, if not better, in the most complex games tried. I can’t buy #6, must choose goals in life, as the usual success markers seem quite well know. Nor can I buy #7, life isn’t fair, as the best gamers would do as well on average in unfair versions of the usual games.
Answers #2, life isn’t as fun, #4, gamers too busy gaming, and #8, life lasts longer, do seem to contribute. But those effects don’t seem to me strong enough to be the main effect here. That only leaves: #3, life social relations differ, and #5, life rules implicit.
The way I’d say it is this: we humans inherit many unconscious habits and strategies, from both DNA and culture, habits that apply especially well in areas of life with less clear motivations, more implicit rules, and more opaque complex social relations. We have many (often “sacred”) norms saying to execute these habits “authentically”, without much conscious or strategic reflection, especially selfish. (“Feel the force, Luke.”) These norms are easier to follow with implicit rules and opaque relations.
Good gamers then have two options: defy these norms to consciously calculate life as a game, or follow the usual norm to not play life as a game. At least one, and maybe both, of these options tends to go badly. (A poll prefers defy.) At least in most walks of life; there may be exceptions, such as software or finance, where these approaches go better.
A decision about who to marry, which school to study at, which job to accept, whether to have kids, often have effects that last years or decades. In a game, these decisions could be iterated many times. Players of the game of Go need to play about 50 games to get a good feel for how it works. Not so with life. (Also, seems like your poll was kinda pointless if you were just going to ignore the results.)
I think hypothesis #6, life has implicit rules [WAS #1, life has complex and /unclear/ rules], may be the best of these answers.
Historically, at least in the West, most thinkers have adopted 1 of 2 great worldviews: the rationalist worldview, which tries to simplify reality to a set of fundamental, eternal, /a priori/ rules; and the empiricist worldview, which tries to understand the world by observing it. In the domains of philosophy, economics, and science, we can see that empiricists like Epicurus, Adam Smith, Hume, and Edison crush rationalists like Plato, Marx, Hegel, or Chomsky at correctly understanding, predicting, and manipulating reality. (Though the very best, like Aristotle, Newton, and Einstein, use both approaches.)
I expect the same thing happens in the domain of life: empiricists are more-likely to use strategies such as "do what successful people do", or "pay attention to what people do more than what they say", and are probably better at adopting successful strategies and avoiding the traps laid by professed-but-not-honored moral codes.
Gaming selects HARD for rationalism. People who like board games are probably people who want life to have a set of specified and unchanging rules which they can then analyze and optimize for. You don't find many popular board games where the rules are generated randomly at the start, and change slightly on every turn. (Just FLUXX.) It might even be that board games are a compensating mechanism for people who wish their rational, rule-based behavior would /win/ sometimes.