RogerBW's Blog

There's a certain mentality in games (particularly wargames, but others too) which seems to be associated with tournament play.

By "tournament play", I mean any formally competitive play. There may be prizes, or just kudos; it may be run by the publisher, or by some other organisation; but in some way a victory will be recognised and bruited about, in some way that's more than just club bragging rights.

So, understandably enough, there's more emphasis on winning than on having a game that everyone enjoys; a "good game" becomes one in which the speaker won. Now, it may just be that I'm not terribly good at many games, but the ones I like most tend to be ones that I can enjoy even when I lose. (See the Chain of Command tag for battle reports that illustrate this.) I'll call the contrasting extreme "social play": it's still a gathering to play games rather than to socialise, but one of the goals is that everyone should enjoy the experience. (There may well be more table chat than you'd get in a competitive game.)

As competition increases, rules-lawyering tends to become more important (whether the game attracts people like that or just encourages them). Because it matters who wins, there's more incentive to argue about rules, which creates a toxic social atmosphere; this isn't something that happens if you're just playing for interest.

What's more, the game becomes less realistic. No game is perfect, obviously, but when one's playing socially it's quite reasonable to say that while the rules do technically allow one to do this, it's not really plausible, and so one should do that instead. (For example, in X-Wing, the tactic of blocking in one's own shuttle with asteroids so that it remains in one corner of the table, even though it technically isn't allowed to stay still.) But in a competitive game, those little loopholes become the potential edges that could lead one to victory, and there's a race to the bottom: with other things equal, players who take them will beat players who don't.

In wargaming this also leads to one-off thinking, where you expend all your forces because there will be no consequences in any future battles. (In a wargame tournament, you start with fresh forces in round two, not with the army you managed to salvage from round one.) This happens in quite a few games anyway, but again the tournament mentality promotes it.

"So just don't play with people like that." Which is fine, but if there's enough of a tournament ethos about it, those are the people who are playing the game. The social players who are thinking about taking it up may well be put off by a competitive community; the two sorts of player don't really have a lot to say to each other. (That said, I've been fortunate enough to find X-Wing players who are more interested in playing than in winning at all costs, even in my limited tournament experience.)

So what is a solution other than simply playing different games? Clearly there's demand for tournaments, or these players wouldn't exist in the first place. I suspect one answer may be more referee fiat, which should put off the ultra-competitive types and make rules-lawyering irrelevant. And individual tournaments could be structured as campaigns, with each player's surviving forces taken into account when setting up the next battle, though someone who comes up against a strong opponent in their first game will be in trouble. But the only long-term answer seems to me to avoid having valuable prizes in the first place.