Not playing the game

This is more often a problem with board games, but it relates to RPGs. Also, I'll tend to call out people for not playing the game in the same way that I call people out for cheating. In a lot of cases they are the same thing, but I should work up from the beginning.

In Game Theory, the type used by economists and such, part of a game's definition is the set of payoffs. Payoffs are a measure of the utility (or benefit, or happiness, or awesomeness) to each player. A player wants to have his payoff be as high as possible and will play to achieve that. I say that he will play because that is in his best interest, from the definition of the payoff. For example, if you have a bunch of friends playing poker for money the payoff is not necessarily the winnings for each player. A player could feel bad about winning money from his friends, which reduces his payoff for high winnings. The definition of payoff takes this into consideration and the game is defined in part by the payoffs of all the players.

This is important because in board games at least, the game tells you what your payoffs are. In chess, for example, you could assign the payoffs as 1 for winning, -1 for losing, and 0 for a draw. Many games have some kind of way of tracking how you are doing, like victory points. The game is implicitly saying that your payoff is the number of victory points at the end of the game, possibly altered by who actually wins. The game is telling you through the existence of the victory points, that even if you're not going to win, you are better to try to still get as many victory points as possible. They are not simply a means to an end, at least in my view (more later). This is different than in chess, because there there are only three results: win, lose, and draw. You can kind of track how you are doing by how many pieces you have taken relative to the other player, but checkmate is the only thing that matters. Taking pieces is only a means to an end, which confuses a lot of beginner players.

In a sense, this is all a lie. The game can't tell you what your real payoffs are. Your real payoffs are determined in part by how you do by the game's measure, but also in part by how you feel about it, what you wanted to accomplish. The problem with that is that your real payoffs define a different game (in the Game Theory sense) than the one that came in the box. The real problem is that the game is defined by all the players' payoffs. Since the players probably don't know what each other's payoffs are (or even possibly their own) then they are necessarily playing different games, none of which is the game that they are actually playing. This can lead to frustration as players are often unable to form effective strategies because the game they strategize for is not the game being played.

Let's look at chess again. The victory condition is checkmate, everything should work towards that goal. If one player instead (wrongly) thinks that he should capture as many pieces as possible no matter what, he is playing a different game. This usually gives benefit to the player playing chess as opposed to the variant described (capture pieces), so I think it is of less concern. That is, unless the variant player thinks that he is winning when the chess player takes advantage of this. This will probably devolve to some simple set of moves where the variant player captures several pieces while losing none until he finds himself in checkmate. This will be boring for both players, as they both think they are winning and may continue to play the exact same moves game after game. Maybe this is just as much of a concern. As long as the variant player acknowledges that he lost when he is mated, I suppose he really is playing chess, just with bad strategy.

Let's look at Twilight Imperium. The game involves different races vying for galactic dominance. Throughout the game you colonize planets, build space fleets, wage war, trade, research technology, lots of stuff. To win, you have to reach a certain number of victory points, which are gained by achieving objectives. The objectives are mostly public and all on cards (so you know the possibilities). Victory points are what make you win, so I say they have value in themselves (again, more later). Throughout the game, the objective is to obtain victory points and to deny them to the other players. The situation often arises that at least some players fall far enough behind in the number of victory points, that it becomes seemingly impossible for them to win. However, the game says they still chase victory points the same way, perhaps with more emphasize on denying the other players to put off the end of the end of the game. In practice, players in this situation often start ignoring victory points. They 'stop playing' as many people would say. I wouldn't be that harsh. If they stopped playing, they would leave the table and go do something else. I say they stop playing Twilight Imperium and start playing something else. This can easily become a big problem as the game, not just the players, assumes that everyone is doing his job. Because an aspect of the game is territorial control, not every player can directly effect every other player. If a player stops playing TI in lieu of something else this can act as a king making move. Perhaps he turtles to build up tech, allowing his neighbors free reign. Or perhaps he decides to wage all out war no matter what the cost against a player who has slighted him in the past. Both of these actions drastically change the game being played causing frustration for the other players because their strategies are invalidated by it. Yes, this has happened to me. Yes, I hated it, even if had made me win (I don't remember how it went, just that it happened and the player was even vocal about it). This is really kind of rude, as one player is denying the rest fun. I understand that the inevitable loss may make the game less fun somehow for that player, but everyone agreed to play the game for a few hours ago and agreed to play it out to the end. This kind of behavior is violating that agreement, as the player is not playing the game.

The reason I see victory points as valuable in and of themselves is that they determine who wins. In chess the checkmate determines who wins. However, that doesn't mean you don't want to make moves that bring you closer to checkmate but don't get give you checkmate. You need to make the intermediate moves or you'll never get to checkmate. Similarly, victory points may not win the game now, but in the end that's what's going to do it. In the chess case, taking pieces isn't measured because it only may help you achieve checkmate. Okay, I'll be fair, there are cases when you don't want victory points, you want to keep the highest number of victory points that another player has, or could have in the future, low. But still, victory points are worthwhile, they are always good to have. I extend this to unwinnable situations because it makes some sense, it's simple, and it allows everyone to play the same game. What I'm saying here is an assumption of any game with some kind of victory point, if only because it gives something for 'losing' players to do. More broadly, I think any 'losing' player should still be trying to win. Just because it's not possible, doesn't mean it's not still desirable. Moreover, the victory points give explicit non-binary payoffs. There is no longer just win and lose. There is the number of victory points at the end of the game. What's interesting is the fact that a losing player plays for something else proves that he can still enjoy his predicament. He merely misunderstands what his goal should be.

Here I've only talked about not playing the game as a matter of perspective. I'm just talking about players thinking differently about what the game is that they are playing, while they are all following the same rules. It's also possible for people to think that different rules will be followed, which creates it's own set of problems that I might discuss more later. That, though, falls under cheating most likely. It will tend to be the GM who is also the organizer and rules authority, who will say that one game will be played when he really means that game modified in some way. Even the perspective issues I bring up here though, can cause problems for the players, as it puts strategies designed for one game into another.