Category Archives: Discussion and Philosophy

Here is where I can rant about issues, or just calmly discuss them.

Games as practice for life–losing

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Two games we have been playing recently, and a tray for rolling dice.

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.

Hope–in poetry, fiction, and life

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Let me start by sending you to a poem, “Hope” by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer.

Now that you’ve read what it says, so nicely and concisely, I’m going to talk about hope at more length.

Hope leads us from where we are, a place where we can’t see how things are going to work out, to that unknown future where, quite possibly, things really do work out. We can’t know in advance what that future will look like and there are no guarantees–except perhaps that if we don‘t keep moving, we will never get there.

There are two things I want to say about hope. The first is that sometimes we despair because we think we know more than we do. We think we know what is required to save the day, and also that we are unequal to the task. So we lose hope.

In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo is faced with a nearly impossible task. Go to Mordor? “One does not simply walk into Mordor”, as the popular quotation from the movie goes. Much less does one walk in while carrying the One Ring and hope to escape detection long enough to drop it in Mount Doom.

But Frodo accepts the task anyway, “though I do not know the way.”

You know how the story goes. There are others who can show him the way, even the way into Mordor. Help comes from unexpected sources, and in very unexpected ways. Frodo can anticipate none of this. And as he plods forward through the hostile wasteland that is Mordor, he has no way to know that in the White City, Aragorn has learned Frodo is alive and is planning desperate measures to keep Sauron from looking his way.

The day always needs saving, from one threat or another, but you aren’t responsible for saving it. Only for doing your bit.

The second thing I want to say about hope is that it is amazing what we can accomplish together when we have a clear, urgent goal.

Here I’ll move into real examples. Remember the Tham Luang cave rescue? (If not, there are documentaries you can watch.) Twelve kids and their soccer coach were stranded in a cave in Thailand. The Royal Thai Navy Seals and expert divers and rescue workers from all over the world put their skills to work to get them out. The route was long and incredibly difficult, and one diver died in the process. But they did get the kids out.

And then there are the Covid vaccines. People all over the world poured knowledge, skills, and funding into the effort, and the vaccines were developed faster than we had any reason to expect. Death rates dropped, and family gatherings recommenced.

Working together is harder when the goal isn’t as clear as “get the kids out of the cave” or as urgent as “because huge numbers of people are dying daily right now and all our lives have been turned upside down.” But hard isn’t impossible. And again, it isn’t all on your shoulders. Other people are also at work.

To be clear, these examples could have gone very differently. The kids could have died in the cave or on the way out. We could still be waiting for a vaccine for Covid. The point is not that we always succeed when we devote ourselves to a task–we don’t–but that we sometimes do manage incredible feats. Therein lies hope.

I’m going to end with a couple of lines from a song. I like these lines because they seem counterintuitive at first. So, from “Trip Around the Sun”, (I prefer Jimmy Buffet, but here’s Stephen Bruton as well)

“I’m just hanging on while this old world keeps spinning.

And it’s good to know it’s out of my control…”

Can you imagine being responsible for keeping the earth spinning?

Till next post.

P.S. I want to thank the neighbor around the block who periodically inscribes poems on the sidewalk in chalk. I think this started during the pandemic, and I have enjoyed both the poems I recognized and the opportunity to discover some new favorites. “Hope” is a new favorite.

Are You Trying to Produce Change or Just Venting? The “You Idiot” Test

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How can you tell if that catchy Facebook meme or bumpersticker slogan is a means to produce change in the world, or just a way to vent your frustration? Here’s one easy test: if adding the words “you idiot” to the end of it sounds natural, it’s venting.

Here’s an example. There’s a busy road I sometimes travel which runs through a residential neighborhood and past two schools. A kid got hit a while back, so there’s reason for concern. Residents have put up yard signs to get drivers to slow down. But are these signs really a good way to slow traffic, or are they a way for residents to voice their frustration with speedy drivers?

Compare the two most popular signs. One says, “Drive like your children live here.” Now, if you say it in exactly the right tone of voice, you can make “Drive like your children live here, you idiot,” sound natural, but you do have to work at it.

On the other hand, “Slow down. This is a residential neighborhood, not a race track, you idiot,” sounds natural with no effort at all.

Why should this matter to the people choosing a sign? Well, how do you react to the unsolicited advice of a stranger who clearly thinks you are an idiot? Right. Unless you are superhumanly patient, you get annoyed and decide that it is the stranger who is the real idiot. And why should you listen to anything that idiot has to say?

Given this fact about human nature, why are there so many Facebook posts and signs that seem intended to change behavior (e.g. drive slowly, wear a mask) but which are phrased in ways almost guaranteed to make them unproductive? The answer, I guess, is that these posts are also very clever and entertaining to the people posting them and their friends. And it just feels satisfying to tell people what you really think of them.

But if you actually want to accomplish something–get drivers to slow down, say–then telling people you think they are idiots is at best useless and at worst counterproductive. How many drivers, I wonder, saw the racetrack sign and speeded up, just to annoy the person who’d put it there?

So before you put up that sign or post that meme, try adding “you idiot” to the end and see if it sounds natural. Then decide whether your goal is to produce change, or to vent your frustrations in a clever turn of phrase.

Till next post.

P.S. When I looked the sign up online, I found it labeled “Funny caution sign.” So maybe that’s how the people who put it up viewed it–a gently humorous way to say “Slow down.” But I can attest to the fact that it did not come across that way when I saw it, a sad illustration of the gap that can exist between our intentions with words and the way they are actually received.