Personal Thoughts: Competitive Games

Two boxes sit on the couch cushions, set aside from the gaming table in preparation for our Skies Over Aefala campaign session. The first and smaller of the boxes depicts artwork by Weberson Santiago, a ship sailing in the vast openness of the sea, vibrant yellows, blues, and greens rendered in watercolor's likeness. The ship takes center stage, the focal piece with its many sails reflecting the colors of the surrounding horizon, the bow of the ship nearly glowing with a bronze-y sheen under clear skies. Beneath it the second box, longer, shifts through a gradient of reflectiveness like that of a holofoil card, the top a stained glass illustration of The One Ring forefront to the fires spewing forth from Mount Doom and the anvil upon which it was forged.

For those familiar with board games and trick-taking games in particular, you might have already guessed the two I described: "Sail," designed by Akiyama Koryo and Kozu Yusei and "The Lord of the Rings the Fellowship of the Ring Trick-Taking Game," designed by Bryan Bornmueller. My partner bought them both because 1) he's been wanting them for a while and 2) he knows I struggle to enjoy competitive types of games, preferring to play cooperatively where I'm able.

We played them both on Monday (8.17) and, indeed, I actually had fun, even when we lost a scenario. I didn't care about failing as much as I have whenever I've played points-based games with a clear winner at the end. Even video games like Mario Kart, which I always start off enjoying, begin to frustrate me after a few rounds if I fail repeatedly to secure 1st place. More often than not when our board game group plays, I wind up 5th or 6th overall. If they break out Mario Party, I won't touch it with a 10' pole.

These games got me thinking about my relationship with competitive games vs cooperative games. I actively avoid competitive based games because of my (self-directed) frustrations, preferring to sit by and watch and socialize whenever our friend group meets up for board game night, because I've experienced frustration enough as a receiver to know how it can affect the atmosphere. I don't enjoy feeling frustrated, and I don't want to let those frustrations muddle everyone else's good time. Even games like "Wingspan", which I do enjoy for the puzzle-y, engine optimization mechanics, frustrates me if I score 2nd or lower.

Cooperative based games, however, don't affect me the same way. In "Sail," you and your game partner are just a couple of pirates trying to make it across the open sea while avoiding islands and fending off the impending kraken threat. In "The Lord of the Rings Trick-Taking Game," you and your fellow players are just trying to complete each chapter together while fulfilling objectives. There's really no competition to it at all. Winning relies solely on how well you work together with limited knowledge of what the other player(s) hold(s) in their hand.

Yet why is it competitive games rile me up so much while cooperative games press all the right buttons for engagement and enthusiasm?

That's what I'm hoping to begin dissecting today by looking at my relationship with competitive games. Next week, I'll pick apart my relationship with cooperative games.

Competitive Games: A History with Baggage

Trading Card Games

When I try to recall my earliest memories of versus play against other people, the earliest memories that come to mind revolve around my sisters and me. They both collected "Magic: The Gathering" cards and built decks they'd use to play against each other. With a gap of 6+ years between them and myself, I was far too young to really grasp the method of play, but I still wanted to be included.

So, I was. Kind of.

While my memory of events could be faulty, I do distinctly remember being given a "deck" to play, primarily built out of Land cards (I think) as well as a hodge-podge of different colored creatures that likely would have made any seasoned player weep. I think I recall them trying to teach me the rules at one point or another, but it was never long before I was taken out of the game. I eventually stopped trying.

When I got a little older, I developed an interest in Pokémon. As a result, I played the game cartridges for the first two generations and collected the cards. Without any friends to trade or play with, however, I was never able to acquire the evolutions of certain Pokémon or battle against them, whether in-game or via the card game.

It wasn't until college that I picked up Yu-Gi-Oh! and built a sick magician deck. The only person I played against, however, was my partner, and I suffered from such deeply rooted choice paralysis it took us way too long to complete a single game, let alone two or three. By that point, losing already frustrated me enough that after the first few times I lost to him, I decided to protect us both from the negativity and stopped playing altogether.

Softball

Now, a sport throws an interesting wrinkle into the fabric, doesn't it? You're competing against another team, but you need to work cooperatively with your own team to win. The coach, yours and everyone else's skills, how well you and your teammates work together all factor into your chances.

As a kid, I developed an interest in T-ball and then softball, primarily because of my older sister, who was a phenomenal player and my biggest role model. I enjoyed T-ball tremendously. Indeed, I remember my team nicknaming me "Smiley" at one point or another. It didn't matter which team won as long as everyone was having fun and putting forth good sportsmanship. And it was fun.

Yet that changed as I became old enough to transition from T-ball to actual softball.

We were playing a home game. Our pitcher could throw a mean ball, but she was just as likely to let the other team walk as she was to strike them out with her fast and loose pitches. We played our best, but we still lost. As usual, we gave the other team polite fives to show good sportsmanship, but I vividly recall two of my teammates, the pitcher and her sister, bawling because we'd lost.

I said something along the lines of, "It's just a game. There'll be another chance," and was immediately reprimanded with comments of, "It is not just a game." They wanted to have their pity party, acting like it was the end of the world, and our coach didn't help matters because he was quite clearly disappointed in us. He was also the type of coach to try and control when and how we batted — a signal to let the strike happen here, one to swing there even if the pitch was a ball, etc. It was a mess.

Nobody was there to have fun anymore. It was all about winning, and if we lost, parents got angry, coaches got angry, teammates got angry. It's hard to enjoy something when you're surrounded by so much anger. If you're there just to "have fun," you're not taking it seriously enough.

I started hating softball. I dreaded each and every game, wishing and praying it would rain or storm and force a cancellation. I thought it was because I hated the sport itself — the running, the training, then more running — and then I thought I hated it because I was never going to be as good as my older sister (multiple home runs, star pitcher, MVP with her base stealing), but no, it was because of my team and the coach and the comments from other parents. My team was made up of a clique of popular kids who cared way too much about their make-up and hair. I was 100% not that kid. I'm still not that kid.

Nowadays, I enjoy playing catch and batting, and while teaching in Japan I enjoyed playing softball during teacher's sports day. Even if I took it way too seriously, it didn't frustrate me to the same extent when we lost. I was just happy I got to flex my long-rusty skills.

Watching Competitive Sports

"Oh, come on! [Insert angry tirade against the ump, other driver, or other team here.]"

I wonder if part of the reason I hated watching sports on TV growing up, aside from finding them dreadfully boring, was because of how angry the people around me would become. If something went wrong, it was always someone's fault, even the team we were supposed to be supporting if they made a "stupid mistake." Sure, there would be cheers when a play went well or we scored the final point to secure victory, but I'm not convinced the roller coaster ride through the various levels of Anger Mountain was worth it.

It only lasts for a brief moment, but the movie "Elemental" does a phenomenal job showing how toxic fans can be, not only toward the competing team but their own as well.

(Really, this sport makes no sense.)

The overall negativity is rather tame and quickly overtaken by Wade's infectious enthusiasm, but it does remind me of those brief flares from my own family members while watching American football and NASCAR. Somewhere along the way as I matured from childhood to adulthood, I learned that anger was the only correct response to losing.

"Halo: Reach"

Ahh, and nothing says infuriating like playing online against others for the first time.

In college, my partner and I played "Halo: Reach" online during almost every free moment we had. It's how I got to know his other friends, who then in turn became my friends. I enjoyed the game as a way of hanging out with everyone online, but man did I hate losing. I developed a competitive streak so intense (obsessive even) that any time I scored lower than anyone on my team, I felt a twinge of frustration, even if we had won. I cared about my kill average and not falling below a certain threshold; I wanted to prove I could be the #1 player even against those who had played the "Halo" series for far longer than I had. I rarely was.

It created this nasty feedback loop. The frustrations I felt would affect my performance negatively, which would then fuel said frustrations further, which would impact my performance, continuing ad infinitum until we stopped playing for the evening or I pulled off an exceptional kill streak, assassination, or otherwise. Yet the high of those achievements never lasted long.

The amount of cumulative anger I felt across that time became the straw that broke the camel's back, though I didn't realize it until years later, after I had moved away from nearly all competitive games.

Board Games

My family never really played board games or card games with each other while I was growing up despite owning "Sorry!" "Mouse Trap," "Go Fish" and more. I would take the games out and set them up to play in the way that bored kids do by using my imagination to play the way I wanted instead of following any actual rules. (Seriously, setting up the mouse trap and triggering it was like the best thing ever.)

It wasn't until 2021 or 2022 that I sank my teeth into my first real board game, and when I inevitably lost, I felt that same rush of frustration and negativity — fully stirred by my own feelings of failure and beliefs that I "should have done better," by the way! The feeling repulsed me, surfaced flash backs of my "Halo" days and how much I disliked exuding that kind of energy.

I played a few similar board games here and there early on, hoping to conquer those frustrations, but no matter how I tried, I couldn't find the joy in the game itself, focusing only on the end result and how it fared against others. Games I love the premise of such as "Scythe" and "Expeditions" I couldn't accept defeat with a, "You'll do better next time," approach no matter how hard I tried.

I can see where it all ties together, too. In our board game group, there's one player who tends to win more often than others in strategic types of games. Whenever he does, especially if it's a new game, he'll make comments such as, "I had no idea what I was doing," or, "I wasn't even trying," which bounces off hard against my own nature of giving it my all.

Those losses, the rules overload whenever I'm learning a game for the first time, and the risk of analysis paralysis became so overwhelming that it was just easier to say, "No thanks," and choose to sit out and watch from the sidelines instead.

The Common Denominator

I never had a positive experience with losing, or if I have, it's so rare that it gets washed away amidst the swelling tide of accumulated negativity.

Think about it. I was surrounded by positive reinforcement to view losing as a negativity. If you lose, if you do something wrong, you get angry or others get angry at you. The counter-balance would have been playing games against friends or family as I grew up, learning how to be okay with not reigning victorious. As far as I can recall, I never had that experience.

Untangling that knot as an adult takes a lot more work, like unlearning a bad habit, because there's years of reinforced learning that needs dismantling alongside the construction of a more positive association. We're not building from the ground up like we do as kids; the tower needs to come down first.

Maybe that's not as impossible as it seems. Watching the group play "Snailed It!" last night, I actually had the thought, "This might be a game I would enjoy." Funnily enough, it's a trick-taking game like "Sail," and "The Lord of the Rings Trick-Taking Game," I mentioned above, but "Snailed It!" is a competitive one. You have a column of 4 snail cards set in the middle of the table. On the left and right you place a number card, randomized from a small, designated deck. The goal is to close the gap between the two numbers, because if any gap remains, other players who have the numbers in between can throw them at you and say, "Snailed it!" requiring you to draw from the penalty pile, thus adding cards to your hand a la "Uno."

It's a numbers puzzle, far more abstract than a game like "Scythe" or "Wingspan." There's no race to collect the most stars or accumulate the most victory points from various pools of possibility. You place a number, try to empty your hand, then tally the points for that round once someone runs out of cards. Simple. And I really do enjoy my numbers puzzles.

More importantly, there's really no way to bully someone like you can in even a game like "Uno," making it a good jumping on point for someone more sensitive to that kind of competitive play.

When trying to change aspects of yourself, it's important to start small. Softening the edge of a competitive streak is no exception.

Summary of Notable Accomplishments (8.12 - 8.18):

• Built With Science: Completed my 5-day split for the first time!

  • Legs (2x)

  • Chest

  • Shoulders (done the same day as chest)

  • Arms

  • Back

• Pilates has been amazing for loosening up any remaining tension from weight lifting

• Read some more "Ultralearning," making it to 50% of the way through the book

• Completed a number of wawfuls that have been sitting on my to-do list since April/May

  • This is probably my biggest accomplishment of the week, honestly. Those wawfuls were becoming quite the unruly stack

  • I still have to sort through some junk....

• Made some tweaks to my Session 0 summary template in preparation to continue compiling them with Claude

Real Talk:

• What makes (or has made) you irrationally angry (or frustrated), and from where does that feeling originate? What's the history behind it? If you've managed to change your perspective on the cause, what steps did you take to do so?

This Week's Obligatory Cat Pic: Qiri