Understanding Strategic Culture Through Games
mwi.usma.edu
mwi.usma.edu
I also play poker, sometimes with fairly significant stakes, both in cash games and tournaments. I consistently profit, but it's practically impossible for me to quantify my skill, because poker is an imperfect information game.
Many of the principles I've learned about emotional regulation and awareness (recognizing when I or others are on tilt), strategic opportunity cost (which table or house game am I joining), evaluation of expected value (calculating probabilities and assigning weights to uncertainties) come from poker.
I think it's no surprise that many investors use poker as their game of analogy, for the world is indeed a gigantic imperfect information game.
I practice chess to practice logic and consistency, foundational skills that are very relevant to my financial and software development activities. I play poker to remain comfortable in the face of limitless, unclear decisions, where I'm frequently forced to realize a loss despite optimal play.
Strategy requires continuous reclassification between perfect and imperfect information contexts.
Football is not a perfect information game. The opponent may line up in front of you, but you don't know their playbook. Football seems to be one of the biggest games discussed in this article (for good reason: Football + US Military culture are strangely ingrained upon each other)
League of Legends and Starcraft are both games with "fog of war", your opponents actions (scouting, building, etc. etc.) are fully obscured unless you yourself send a scout out. Both games are discussed in this blogpost (mostly LoL)
That would make football a game of perfect information. You know everything about the state of the game. You don't know what your opponent is planning to do any more in chess than you do in football.
Is that fully accurate? Do players know how fast the other teams players run? The frequency with which they can catch the ball? How successful their blocking will be?
The fact remains: you can hide the football and obscure its location. You can position your line in such a way that makes it look like you're going to punt, but in actuality do something different with the ball.
Not everyone sees everything. If the quarterback truly saw everything on the field, the quarterback would never get sacked.
> The fact remains: you can hide the football and obscure its location.
That is fair.
> You can position your line in such a way that makes it look like you're going to punt, but in actuality do something different with the ball.
But that's irrelevant.
Certainly not within the constraints of Football.
The Linebacker's entire focus is going to be on pushing against the other linemen once the play starts. The linemen are not going to know what's going on over there, their eyes are literally not looking at what everyone else is doing. (Well, a decent lineman can sometimes snatch the football if a quarterback throws it too low over their heads. But... linemen definitely don't have their eyes on much of the game)
The fact that you only have two eyes leads to the constraints that is the game of football. Skilled players keep watch over other players: where they are looking and how they are moving.
The "hidden information" is literally their eyes themselves. You can't see things that are behind you. That's how you sack a quarterback: you run at them from an angle that they're not looking. That's why trick plays work, because you have an expectation for how those people will move... except they moved in a way you didn't expect (and were blind to seeing, because you were doing some other job).
A good quarterback takes advantage of this: the top-tier quarterbacks can look at one player (and all the defense start focusing on that player, say the wide receiver), but then blindly throw the ball to someone else (!!!), based off of timing alone. That's why playbooks matter in the game. This isn't even a "trick play", this sort of stuff is the basics of football.
The quarterback never looked at say, his tight-end for the play. The quarterback just "trusts" that the tight-end is in the correct position. By looking at the wide-receiver, the Quarterback is obscuring his intentions and is misleading his opponents.
The thesis of this article is basically an analogy to the Sapir-Worf Hypothesis.
The games that are common in a culture give rise to certain patterns or abstractions, and those serve as a starting "vocabulary" for approaching conflict. Those patterns also embed, and reinforce, cultural assumptions about conflict. The nature of the rules of the game (e.g. perfect-information or not) is not really as significant as the vocabulary they give us.
So Chess gives us concepts like material advantage, and force-projection, and tempo. Those are concepts which still apply, to varying degrees, in games like Starcraft or LoL, despite those being real-time and having fog of war.
Like Sapir-Worf, we can argue about the extent to which thought is actually molded by the available vocabulary. I think it makes ideas quantitively more accessible, which isn't the same as qualitatively unavailable. I think there is some value in examining to what extent a certain cultural assumption pervades all our models of conflict, and what the consequences are of invalidating that assumption. The article mentions the finite-ness of conflict, I'll bring up another which is the bounded-ness of the area of conflict.
> Tablut starting position: lighter "Swedes" start in centre; darker "Muscovites" start at the board's edges. Based on Linnaeus' sketches reproduced in Smith (1811).
Oh those Muscovites! While the article focuses on strategic lessons, it seems that games are also a medium for passing down historical ones.
For example: consider two programmers who both know C and PHP. One of the two learned C first and PHP later, the other learned PHP first and C later. How would their coding (and/or problem solving) styles differ?
A strategic culture based on these games might think that brute force is always the best "strategy". Sound familiar?
I think the best game to teach the essence of strategy is Roshambo, or "Rock-Paper-Scissors". According to game theory, the optimal strategy (Nash Equilibrium) is to pick your move at uniform random, in which case you will "not lose" 66% of the time. But in face-to-face practice, a skilled Roshambo player will outright win more than 33% of games. How? Because humans are not robots and aren't good at RNG. Fundamentally, strategy is not about studying game rules and theory! It is about understanding your opponent's perspective and thus forecasting their next move. RPS provides an excellent platform for understanding strategy in this context, especially when done in real-time, face-to-face.
Even in the domain of robots, RPS offers insight into how a simple but nontrivial game can lead to complex metagames of composite strategies. See how Python bots can achieve 80% winrate against a field of lesser bots [1].
[1] - www.rpscontest.com/leaderboard
- one of the devs of that site, Byron Knoll, was my best friend in kindergarten, though he moved away and we haven't spoken much since
- I get a very different vibe from rpscontest --- a sort of "the wicked are punished by the wicked" vibe. Nobody can play non-optimal moves forever and get away with it---one of the bot devs is gonna lose his shirt in the market one day. (Yes, it is extremely weird that I moralize this)
One problem with heavily using sports, gaming, and war analogies to talk about strategy is that the discussion starts to make no sense at all to people who aren't interested in those things but who do care about strategy.
But I guess if you're the Modern War Institute at West Point, you know your audience pretty well, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Where else do you exercise an interest in strategy outside of games, sports, and war? Business, maybe? I'm just not sure if this criticism sits on solid ground. Let me know.
I have an interest in strategy but don't care about sports. That said, I'd guess I'm in a minority and it's very hard to write for 100% of an audience.
The reality is the polar opposite of a game: Games have rules and fairness; warfare has almost no rules (by definition - it exists where rules and laws fail), and nobody wants a fair fight - they want a massacre (or surrender). Games have no stakes - they are for entertainment, and no matter how many points you score, you drink a beer with your buddies that night; warfare is life and death - you literally might not sleep again, some of your friends in your unit will likely be killed in the next battle, your loved ones and society might be destroyed, and the brutality and pain is commoplace. And the responsibility, stress and pressure are enormous - if you mess up, you don't kick the ball out of bounds, your friends die.
In histories of some wars I've read about - and it's probably true for others others - describe that before the war people are very excited for it; I have felt that powerful urge myself. IIRC, people had picnics to watch early US Civil War battles, and soldiers can be very excited to. The reality then hits quickly, as people experience things too horrible to describe on HN, including the horror of killing other human beings, often in gruesome ways. Even in the relatively low-level wars the US recently was involved in, even the very well-trained, very safe (relative to other wars) soldiers who have a safe home to return to, have very high PTSD and suicide rates. As has been noted throughout history, warfare changes the survivors for the worse.
Maybe there are some things that could be gained from games, but I imagine training would be far better. Imagine someone who played software developer games (if only such fun toys existed!) as preparation for being an actual software developer. It might be a nice intro, but mostly irrelevant to actual training.
EDIT: To be clear, I think the article may be more descriptive - how certain games affect thinking - than prescriptive - 'we should learn through games'.
If anything, the USA's obsession over logistics is pretty damn obvious when it comes to games we all enjoy. SimCity, Farmville, Cookie clicker, OpenTTD, Two Point Hospital / Theme Hospital, Rollercoaster Tycoon.
Even Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 has a weight assigned to every object, rules for how much a cart can carry, the number of horses needed for your cart, the relationship of the strength of the horse multiplied by the quadruped bonus vs the dragging capabilities (not the lift-capabilities of the creature) + the large bonus applied to the creature. etc. etc.
Yes, I'm that dungeon master who makes his players explain to me, in detail, how they really moved the 100,000 coin from the dragon hoard to their base. 50 coin is a pound, so that's 2000 pounds they have to move. Bag of Holding / Magic can only carry a few hundred pounds, and there's lots of other treasure around.
Well, yes. That's what this blogpost is about.
American sports do NOT have ties: Baseball gets an extra inning, Football goes into overtime. Etc. etc. As such, American strategy is "win or lose", because these games influence our decision making skills and our behavior.
It is the imperfection of games, and how these "imperfect games" apply to our psychology that the article is about. Because American ideology is "win or lose", we are unable to comprehend situations like, say... Afghanistan (where there is no such thing as "win" or "lose").
That "win or lose" mindset is brought upon us and reflected upon Baseball, Basketball, Football, and other games. Our culture creates our society, and that culture and thinking seeps into our strategic thinking of wars.
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Its wrong, but it happens. Because so many of our soldiers play Football, the effects of Football strategy and football analogies grossly affect our thinking of war. Probably to our detriment (but probably beneficial in some circumstances).
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The game of Go, is the big Chinese game of strategy. Warlords and generals from the past 3 millennia have played the game of Go. Surely this has also affected Chinese war and strategy?
Many of Sun Tzu's sayings about war are just as applicable to the Go board game. As such, it is clear that the game of Go has affected war-strategy. The "Beat" of offense, defense, sacrifice... its all there in Go. Its very fundamentally different from Football or Chess, and therefore its easier to see how it influenced Chinese style thinking (contrasting against American / Football style thinking).
In the game of Go, there is "win" or "lose", but its really a reflection upon the territory you gained or lost. Games of Go are often decided by +/- 20 points (ex: I have 180 points an the opponent has 160 points, in a hypothetical Chinese counting game). Because I have more points, I "won".
But this style of game might be better at understanding the grayness that goes into "win" or "loss"... at least better than Football or other games. Especially because in Go, there are positions (ex: Seki, Ko, etc. etc.) that locally are ambiguous, you really can't say who "won" a Seki or "won" a Ko by looking locally. The global-effect of the position really makes the "win" or "loss" mindset irrelevant. (Usually the defender likes Seki, usually the attacker likes Ko. But... its complicated and really depends on the board state)
A Seki, by Japanese counting, is a local position where ZERO points are awarded to both players in the Seki-area. Nominally this is a tie on the win/loss scale, but you can imagine that forcing this "zero points" situation can be beneficial to one player or the other. So if we are to look at the local position and say "win" vs "loss", the words just don't make sense. Its a seki, its neither a win nor a loss. You'll have to look at the whole board, and the history of all the moves to see which player really benefited from it.
Perhaps a Chess-player would call a Seki a zugzwang: the only way to win is to not make a move (but in Chess, you're forced to move every turn, while in Go, you're allowed to pass your turn). Since Seki positions exist in Go, and because Go is popular in China (and ancient Chinese Generals), but not popular in the USA (and this "Seki" position really doesn't come up in any of our games), you can imagine that the Seki-position will affect Chinese Strategic thinking, but not necessarily American-Strategic war thinking.
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The blogpost asks: will "respawn" in MOBA, Call of Duty, and other modern video games change the psychology of the next-generation soldier? Or is the "respawn" mechanic going to allow the next-generation soldier to better come to terms with death? (a concept that's completely devoid in Football / Baseball). Is the "pretend death" of respawn-based gameplay a good or bad thing to our individual psychology / understanding of war? Who knows, but in 30+ years or so, when today's generation grow up to be the next-generation of generals and war-leaders, we can almost certainly see Counterstrike, Call of Duty, Starcraft, or DOTA references in the Presidential War Room.
This is largely a blogpost about how these games are imperfect at understanding war. But we humans keep using games as war analogies for some reason, despite their imperfections.
One of the interesting things about Chinese history is that they expanded by getting conquered (multiple times), most recently with the Manchus who became the Qing dynasty. Given the time scales involved I don't think it is a deliberate strategy, but perhaps the reason it's worked in China does has something to do with their historical approach to war/strategy.
In fact the final game of this past season famously ended up in a situation where there was a strong incentive to tie - both teams would make the playoffs is they tied, whereas the loser would be eliminated from championship contention.
The game ended up tied near the end of extra time, and a big part of the drama was the resulting prisoners’ dilemma. Would the teams call a “truce” and let the game end in a tie - at the expense of a third team - or would one of them defect and try to win the game?
I mean, there are very good reasons to do this: wars are very expensive to fight for training purposes. Games are stake-less and can be repeated (or over in 20 minutes, or have the rules change as desired, or...)
Fidelity is useful, but it's not of absolute importance. There can similarities without identity.
Football, despite all of the military grandstanding that goes on TV, is just a game. Its how people have fun.
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This article is about how these games ("just for fun") end up affecting military strategy, despite clearly not being about war at all.
IE: America's ability to trust the NCOs in the field might very well hail from football. The Offensive coordinators do grand strategies, but they leave their trust to the Quarterback (who is like a squad-leader / NCO in the military analog).
Similarly: your Baseball nerds can crunch numbers and statistics, and provide all kinds of strategies recommendations to the Pitcher. But at the end of the day, its the Pitcher (and the catcher) who decides what kind of ball to throw.
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America's "decentralized" military structure / supreme trust in the NCOs in the field comes from somewhere. Maybe from the sports we play. These games have affected our military's organization structure at a fundamental level... despite having nothing to do with war.
If they really had nothing to do with war, why would they affect our thinking about it?
I'm not saying sports, games, etc. were instituted explicitly as wargames. Rather, I'm saying that while there are obviously differences between games and war, there are similarities---enough that there are lessons one can learn about war, from games. The parallels are many: adversarial conflict, mass coordinated action, risk..."some reason" seems a little too mock-mystified to me.
Shared cultural interests.
Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, Jesus / Christianity, maybe even Buggs Bunny and Mickey Mouse even, will affect our culture and shape our views of war. Also Chess, Football, NASCAR, etc. etc.
Meanwhile in China, maybe Go, Xiangqi, Ping Pong, Soccer, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Buddah, Journey to the West (aka: the Monkey King), and other such cultural icons will affect Chinese thinking of war... whether or not its a legitimate analogue or not.
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Thus, this article's discussion and musing. Next generation generals will be affected by PUBG, League of Legends, Starcraft, and Call of Duty players. These shared cultural experiences, for better or worse, will affect the strategic thinking of the next wars.
Games are activities with rules, designed to establish fairness (which is desired by participants), be fun, and they have essentially zero stakes - when the game ends, everyone is the same as when they started.
Warfare has (almost) no rules, by definition; warfare is where civilization and rules have failed. Nobody wants fairness; you don't seek a fair fight, you seek to massacre the enemy soldiers (or they surrender); and the stakes couldn't be higher - life and death for you, your friends, and possibly your loved ones and your entire society. Make a wrong decision in warfare and you don't lose a game - the person next to you is dead and maybe many more.
Humans perform very differently in those situations. Handling the stress of the latter is a major part of warfare.
If I am terrible at online competitive games, does it reflect my poor implicit learning ability on strategy?