"Win at what you do" is one of those rah-rah go-getter mindset phrasing that has infected the Western world. Do you "win" at being happy? Having fulfilling relationships? Is everything a game/competition, to be measured with winning and losing?
If you choose to strive for a fulfilling relationship, and you succeed in achieving that then yes, you've won.
I only use the analogy of life as a game because it resonates with me. There are other ways to phrase what I'm saying.
But I don't want to win. This is an important nuance.
Do you know what winning means? It means the game is over. It means there's no more challenge, no more adversary. It means boredom and purposelessness.
Rather than winning, what I want is to fight. Focusing on the outcome of the fight is missing the forest for the trees - the fun is in the conflict, in the struggle with your opponent(s), in the instinctive collaboration with your occassional teammate.
In the glory of the defeat, as well as victory. Unless you've got firsthand experience of this, you won't believe how wonderful it feels to get your ass handed to you by a truly superior player.
To put the gaming analogy aside, life will always have its ups and downs. Life will always take you somewhere unexpected. Fixating on outcomes will blind you to opportunities and invite needless suffering into your life.
A superior player can easily trap you in a corner and take your life down to half or more with a single combo string. It's like playing chess against someone entirely more skilled; everything you try to do gets responded to at a level far above you. There really isn't any "wonderful" about it; you could end up watching a video and getting the same result, for all you could do in the match.
There is no "glory" in this. A lot of the "play to improve" mindset is a result of needing to make a stupid level of effort to win games, with players going on long loss series due to low population and over-skilled players in the brackets they are in. This is why the fighting game genre struggles to get new players in the game at all-you have to work so much to get to where the fun is or to feel good about your efforts.
Overall, I agree with your point. This is the reason I don't play those games, or in those ultra-competitive brackets.
I don't think we're necessarily contradicting eachother. I choose to play fighting games for the fight, rather than the victory, and thus tailor my choices within that genre to suit me.
To offer a couple of 'parallel' examples to your own:
Player A is at a significantly higher level than player B, and 'stifles' player B through consistent reads and conditioning. Nothing player B tries works, everything player B does seems to play exactly into player As hands.
This is almost a restatement of your example, except it was a highly rewarding experience for me. In the language of cognitive psychology, it brought about a powerful flow state.
The two key differences: 1.) that the skill imbalance was not too great - just great enough - and 2.) that the nature of the game's design and the players' choices in tactics/playstyles ommitted the more obnoxious elements of combat.
My second parallel example is simply my first, reversed: I am player A, and my opponent is player B.
Everything plays out the same. Interesting, that.
Because implicit in player A's skill is that they are in control of the fight - they can, usually, make things fairly unpleasant and dirty for the opponent. It doesn't take much to push someone past the mental edge, to knock them off balance and keep them there; to destroy their flow state.
Why is player A so restrained? He didn't want to win, he wanted to fight.
Players motivations in games are often what makes the difference between a positive and a negative experience. So we nicely return to the beginning: if you're focused on winning, you're not going to have a good time and neither are the people playing with you.
In example 1, the player often DCs or rage quits, because there's no value in such a matchup. If they see the end of the match, they quickly leave to find one more balanced to their skill. You could have just stayed in training and worked on labbing combos for all the effort you went through.
And labbing is one of the big problems of that genre, where people feel they have to train hard just to have fun.
The second...yeah, no they usually demolish them and move on. A high skilled player also gets little value out of owning someone, and they often smurf in lower ranks for an ego boost. "Watch me stream bronze to grandmaster!"
A lot of this is more people trying to convince people to stick with something despite a lot of negative experiences. Fighting games are seriously at risk of being a dead genre, and a lot of the problems are not easily solvable.
It depends on the person. You're right that games that cater to the lowest common denominator and allow casual players occasional wins are way more popular. But for most multiplayer genres there are people that derive most of the satisfaction they get from gaming from playing competitive stuff with a super high skill cap.
I like Arena FPS games like Quake. Most people don't. Some like going for world first raid boss kills in MMOs, most MMO players just want to kill some of the bosses eventually or get some shiny loot without much effort.
I've made peace with the fact that most popular online games cater to casuals. I'm getting older so its hard to justify spending as much time as I used to anyways. I still love intense competition. I'm nowhere near the best in the world and I never could have been, but the pursuit of self improvement is still fun.
The problem is that the high end is absurdly high in skill. Like a casual may be bad, but he is not going to be as bad in relation to the average as a high skilled player will be good. There will always be someone who can beat the toughest content in a game using a guitar hero controller or something.
Competition sucks because of this. The high end often has insane talent and makes something their life; how on earth can average people even exist in an ecosystem like this?
It takes a particular personality to enjoy learning these punishing titles and from my personal experience it seems that the way people respond to this form of learning through loss is transferable to other domains outside of games.
I worry those kind of games will eventually mirror rl sports, where we have a professional class and a majority of watchers.
I think having an outcome in mind is important as your north star and/or driving force, but I agree about fixating on it.
This seems totally backwards. Winning is fun, but you don't choose a game because you like winning it, you choose it because you like playing it. All games can be won, but they all play differently.
You can't be Charlie Brown all the time. Ironically Peanuts is probably one of the original takes on this whole debate; Charlie Brown actually faces a lot of despair over losing. The animated special where he travels to the spelling bee is one of the most painful things I have watched because its so realistic; in the end there really was no answer given to him.
This isn't true for everybody. There are genres of games dedicated towards extremely challenging mastery where a single win will require hundreds or thousands of losses. Plenty of roguelikes and roguelites like Spelunky and Caves of Qud fall in this category.
And yes, you stop even those games; eventually you hit a plateau where you see enough and dont advance in skill enough to shelve the game for something much better.
Another case in point is Bruno Bettelheim - if you read his Wikipedia page, does he come off as a winner or a loser? He seemed very accomplished at one point in time. The article seems to indicate peoples' views of him changed after his death - that he was basically a fraud and an abuser, and did even more harm through the influence of his psychological theories.
Yes, indeed everyone wants to achieve their goals. That's vacuous and tautological, and no one was talking about that.
> Yes, indeed everyone wants to achieve their goals. That's vacuous and tautological, and no one was talking about that
My point is that choosing your goals is important. You might achieve your goals and then realize that you didn't even care about achieving them in the first place.
The "winning with respect to others" seems like a detail to me. It doesn't matter if it's winning with respect to others or yourself, as long as you understand what you're doing and are happy with it and the possible outcomes.
If someone wants to grind away to build a billion dollar company then so be it, as long as they understand what that means.
Sometimes, when the conditions are just right and my legs are in good shape and my mind is in the right place, I have one of those amazing ski runs that is just perfection. And it’s great.
But other times, I also have fun. And I don’t end up with a score telling me how I did on each turn or anything like that.
I log most of my trips on Strava, mostly as a way to stay in touch with friends around the world, but intentionally avoid the run-counting and speed-tracking gizmos, to help preserve this “did I enjoy myself or not?” metric.
Relatedly, I’ve intentionally slowed down when skiing on lift access. The ride down is more fun than the ride up, ans the lift is a fixed cost. So I get a better ratio of enjoyment by turning more, and thus sitting on the lift less.
I find the combination of talking about "winning" and "game" in a sense of "having relationships" completely forced and odd. Those two really dont mix well. In the context of personal relationship, association with game and winning is typically related to toxic relationships.
And for what it's worth, having a fulfilling relationship takes a bit of an effort too.
Thinking a desire to win is necessary to exert effort is intriguing.