There are different types of games. The simplest ones are what we call zero-sum games. In order for one player to score a point, the other players lose the opportunity to score. I’m reminded of a game I used to play as a child called “Hungry Hungry Hippos.” In this game, the goal is to capture as many marbles as possible. Every time I capture a marble, the other players lose the opportunity to capture that marble. That’s a zero-sum game.
Parking lots are zero-sum games. When I put my car in a space, all other drivers lose the opportunity to park there. People often find zero-sum games frustrating because if enough people score, you find yourself locked out. Just watch the parking garages on a college campus during the first day of classes to see what its really like to play zero-sum games.
I do wonder how the psychology of professional sports would change if we turned them into zero-sum games. Imagine a basketball game in which both teams start with 100 points. When a team scores a basket, they capture points from the other team’s total…
Other games are infinite.
Actual professional sports work this way: there is no rule limiting the number of points possible in a soccer match. For practical purposes, we place other constraints on games like these so that they don’t go on forever. We have a clock that runs out, or a number of innings to play before the teams call it quits.
People gravitate toward infinite games because of the unlimited possibility. We also like infinite games because many are actually endless. We don’t play these games to win, we play these games so that we can continue playing these games – the chance to play is the entire point. I’ll never try to “win” playing catch with my 4-year old. The point of playing catch with my kid is that I get to play catch with my kid.
That’s the brilliance of World of Warcraft. There is no end to the game. The developers simply release a new expansion to give players a chance to keep playing, because the players like to play.
One thing about games:
Whether they are zero-sum or infinite, people don’t like playing games they aren’t good at. If the learning curve is too steep, we tend to walk away and find something else to do. That’s why many more people pay to play World of Warcraft (which costs money) than Eve Online (which is free). I think this may also be why more people study business than engineering. Business isn’t easy, but many of the concepts pull from everyday experiences that we can synthesize together. Engineering, on the other hand, requires far more “first-time ideas” to be learned – and fitting those into a degree program that is the same length of time as a business degree requires a steeper curve. Both fields require climbing to the top of a hill in (roughly) the same timespan. But one hill is taller than the other for most of us.
Learning is an Infinite Game
Learning is an infinite game. If I learn a new concept, I have not taken away the opportunity for others to learn it. On the contrary! By learning a collection of concepts, I am likely to synthesize some new idea for everyone to learn (should they choose to). Learning isn’t just about consuming ideas, but also about creating new ones.
Many schools pit their students against each other – either explicitly with ideas like class rank, or implicitly with practices such as curving grades. The idea that only some students can earn an “A” in a course implies that others must earn lower grades. Adjusting final grades to make this happen (fitting the bell curve) is an external influence on the game that makes it unfair. Imagine the angst we’d produce if we started making baskets count for fewer points if one team were far ahead of another in a basketball game.
Learning is an infinite game. If I learn a new concept, I am rewarded with the opportunity to learn new concepts that rely on it. The point of learning isn’t to win – its to keep learning. Continuing to play the game IS winning the game.
Educators are Game-Makers
And we have a critical role: to keep the learning curve appropriately steep. Too easy, and we squander an opportunity for something deeper. Too hard, and people walk away. This is why the typical person has played far more games of checkers than chess.
I think this may be the hardest part of teaching a course. We have no control over the experiences our students had before walking into our classroom. Each person’s level of preparedness will be different – the sum of their experiences to that point. This is why I think it is critical to assess prerequisite topics in the first week of class. Skipping this step would be a bit like trying to drive to Denver after having been blindfolded and dropped off in an unknown location. If we don’t know where we are, we have no idea which direction to head.
Winning the Game
Far too often, we treat learning as a zero-sum game. We behave as if there are a limited number of diplomas to award each year. Some have to fail so that others can succeed. Teachers adjust the rules to keep things finite. The curve gets too steep, so students either leave or find hacks to earn the points without learning the concepts. In the end, nobody wins the game but everyone loses.
There is another option: recognize that learning is an infinite game. The score is irrelevant. We can lose, but we can’t win – other than by recognizing that winning the game of learning looks like continuing to play.
