Losing gracelessly

[rowyn]

I'm a poor loser. But I'm working on it.

Losing gracefully is, I think, a more important skill than being good at a game. If you can lose gracefully, you can have fun in defeat. And no matter how good you are, occasionally you're going to lose.

I lost a game of Settlers of Catan while I was visiting Kage in July. And I was snappy about it. Ok, it was late, and I had a headache, but that's no excuse. You'd think I could manage to lose ONE game with cheerful aplomb, but nooooo, I had to be mean-spirited about it. Sigh. Sometimes I think it's harder to be chipper about losing when you're good at a game. You get used to winning, and then you feel like you must've messed up somehow in order to have lost.

Playing a lot of games against computer AIs hasn't helped me any in that respect. First off, in most computer games, the computer is a bad player and usually loses. Second, if you start to lose, you can often go back to a save, or restart, so that you don't have to keep losing. And last, the computer doesn't care if you pitch a fit when you lose, so there's not much incentive to control your temper.

Lately, though, I've been playing WarCraft3 against human opponents. This is because WarCraft's AI has two modes: "easy" and "almost impossible." And "easy" mode is only available in the campaign, which is a lot like one really long tutorial. Really, really long.

In skirmish mode, the AI is a lot harder to beat than your average person. It took a few days for Trask to convince me of this, but he eventually succeeded, and now I mostly play against people. And I lose a lot. (You can see my track record here if you want.) According to the site, I've lost only a little over half of all the games I've played, which surprises me. It feels like I lose more often.

Anyway, when I first started playing with Lut, it was driving me nuts when I lost. But I'm getting more philosophical about the whole thing . Occasionally, it'll still bug me to lose. But I don't mind much now. As Myrral might say: "Well, that sucked. Moving right along … " :)

Comments

On Enjoying Losing

[telnar.livejournal.com]

Rowan,

I think that losing gracefully is a necessary but not sufficient skill for having fun in defeat. In the games where I might be alleged to have skill, I can still lose for a variety of reasons: bad luck, sloppy play, or my opponent's skill. Most of the time I can tell the difference. Bad luck is an irrelevancy to me. I've admitted to actually hoping to roll badly when I play backgammon against you (I seem to have more fun when I lose to you, and bad luck is the only no-fault way to reduce my odds). My opponents' skill is generally something that I can learn from, and it also increases the challenge and interest of the game, so losing because of that doesn't bother me at all either. I'm a little less happy to lose because of sloppiness, but that is usually a side effect of being tired or not wanting to play at full intensity, so I can live with it.

The problem is that even though I come fairly close to the limit case of being indifferent to whether I win or lose, some of the same skills that help me to win also help me to enjoy the game. In games where I lack skill, I don't really understand what is happening well enough to know why I lost or to appreciate the fine points of my opponent's winning strategy. Similarly, I have a harder time thinking through the problems posed by my own position and am less likely to appreciate unusual events which occurred. Part of the fun of playing a game, at least for me, is being able to visualize new strategies based on what I saw happen. Especially in more physical games, I often find myself unable to do this well (being to busy doing a mediocre job at fulfilling the game's minimal requirements), which makes me less interested in the game.

I guess all I'm really saying is that the problem of enjoying a game while losing can be more complex than the problem of losing with grace.

Telnar