These past few weeks, we’ve been playing a new game, Fantastic Factories, as well as the old favorite, Ark Nova.* I always find learning new rules difficult at first, and maybe that’s why my mind went back to games as practice for life. In this case, as practice for losing (though I’ve been doing pretty well with Fantastic Factories so far.)

Let’s face it–losing is disappointing. It’s more fun to win. And yet, unless you are playing a cooperative game, someone is bound to lose and it may be you. So you have to be able to lose well. You need to be able to lose without either acting out (like a petulant child) or giving up on the game altogether.

Acting out is particularly bad. No one likes a sore loser. This is one of the more obvious lessons kids learn from playing games, along with taking turns, following rules, and being a gracious winner. If you are known for upsetting the board when things don’t go your way, other kids won’t want to play with you. (Talking to you, Ali B.!) This is clearly true in life as well. (And now I’m looking at some politicians…)

Only a bit less obviously, you need to be able to lose and not give up on the game. If every loss is so upsetting that you refuse to play again, you miss out on the fun you can have in playing. You also miss out on the opportunity to get better at playing and so start winning some games.

Similarly, in life every skill you learn starts off with you doing very poorly. For example, if you’re trying to get published, well… how many agent-rejections am I up to now? Sixty? Eighty? More than one hundred? (It’s still early days.)

So what helps a person lose well? Here I’m going to digress a bit. In games where you are focused on building things or completing projects, and where winning is mostly about being more successful in your projects than your opponent, it is perhaps easier to deal with losing because you can still feel you were very successful. It’s just that the other guy was even more successful. In games where the competition is more direct–you can’t both take the same trick in a card game, for instance–your current status if you are losing feels more sharply obvious.

One thing that helps is perspective. It’s just a game. There will be other games.Obviously this is not true of life, but in life, particular episodes of loss are just that–episodes. There is more to your life than this one loss.

Hope also matters. It’s hard to have fun when things are clearly going badly for you, when all your plans and stratagems are being frustrated. So long as you feel, “But I can still win!”, you have hope. At some point, depending on the game, it may become obvious that you are going to lose. But if you can reasonably think, “Well, next time I will do this differently…” then you still have hope, even if it is no longer focused on the game at hand.

So losing in games is practice for losing in life. I’m not suggesting that this is why people should play games. That would be like suggesting people should eat broccoli because it is nutritious, instead of because it is (when properly prepared) delicious. No, you should play games because they are fun. And like anything else in life, some games will appeal to you more than others. So my point, I suppose, is that you should seek out games that appeal to you and those you play with, and play them.

And practice losing well.

Till next post.

*Because sometimes you don’t have time for a three hour game.