(2022-01-11) Chin The Dangers Of Treating Life As A Game

Cedric Chin: The Dangers of Treating Life as a Game. Late last year I wrote an essay titled Are You Playing to Play, or Playing to Win? which seems to have haunted a great many people. (2021-09-21-ChinAreYouPlayingToPlayOrPlayingToWin)

what’s the problem with this view? The problem, of course, is that it uncritically treats life as a game. (Real World Game)

It is sometimes very useful to think of life as a game. For instance, I’ve written at length on using the ‘metagame’ to identify the very edges of some skill domain, in order to build a learning syllabus for yourself. (see (2020-02-25) Chin To Get Good Go After The Metagame)

But there are limits to the idea, and I think it’s worth calling out those limits.

I’ve mentioned some of these limits in passing in my previous pieces.

Unlike games, however, real-world domains have no set rules: they are vastly more complicated and interesting, because the rules change only when someone notices the rules have changed.

I think it’s fairly obvious that real world games have no clear rulesets, beyond that which you discover to be true for yourself

But the most important limitation of treating life as a game is that all game analogies assume clear win conditions that are shared by all the players. Life has no such thing. (games theory)

look at what we’ve just done: the frame we’ve used assumes that the game of business is to ‘maximise enterprise value; get rich in the process’.

1985 meeting in Wichita, Kansas, where a 45-year old Charles Koch, the CEO of Koch Industries, flipped the finger at a contingent of Morgan Stanley bankers; the bankers were incredulous that he refused to take the company public.

One could say that Charles Koch was playing a different game

It’s probably unfair to describe Charles Koch’s refusal to take his company public as a scrub move — he had, after all, sufficient free cash flow from both the Pine Bend refinery and his commodities trading subsidiary in the summer of 1985. Koch didn’t lack for capital; he was simply playing a different game.

If Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s game is ‘get humanity to electric vehicles’, then if, say, Tesla goes bankrupt but every other car manufacturer gets into EVs, Musk can retire and say that he had a great run and he won his game

Don’t Lie About The Game You’re Playing

we may only say that someone is a scrub if we know what game they’re playing.

the only thing I can say with confidence is that you shouldn’t act like a scrub with reference to the game that you’ve chosen to play, but more importantly, you shouldn’t lie to yourself about what game you’re actually playing.

the only person who truly knows the game he’s playing is Musk himself; we can only speculate from the outside.

make sure you know what game you’re playing, and don’t lie to yourself about the conditions necessary for your definition of success

Kris Abdelmessih has thought a lot about the overlap between life and games

Abdelmessih was a trader for much of his career, and he likes to quote from this 2011 James Somers article:

• games are constrained in a way that the real world isn't
• In some ways those constraints are what make games mentally satisfying, because they relieve us of what existentialists called "the anxiety of freedom." By giving us obvious, well-defined goals, they save us from having to define success.
• Humans crave that kind of structure, probably because we get so little of it in real life.
• Think of the pleasure we get crossing things off lists, the thrill of reaching "inbox zero" or finishing a book. We want to accomplish things and, maybe more importantly, we want to know that we've accomplished them.
• Games (and video games in particular) exploit that essential insecurity. They're engineered to unfold as a series of short feedback cycles.
• Now think of what a trader does.
• Trading is one of the few jobs with an actual leaderboard

It’s worth reflecting on the idea that while many of us may treat game analogies as simple lenses for the world, there are whole vocations for which life can be best seen as a game. Trading, for better or worse, is one of them.