Playing to Win or Playing to Struggle

Does winning matter to you?

It has been made known to me over the past two years that I am an incredibly competitive person.

This conception of me as this hypercompetitive player of board games has come up over the many board game sessions we’ve played together at Playlogue, and been solidified with a successful smear campaign by our game designer Russell. 

There are certain disadvantages to having been identified as an intensely competitive player – if there’s a Take That mechanic, it is likely that I will bear the brunt of it, especially if there isn’t any player that’s clearly in the lead at that point. (Well, either me or our other incredibly competitive designer Key.) Obviously, having other players gang up against you by default can be dire for any strategy.

Hence, I’m writing an entire blog post to prove to my colleagues that I really don’t care about winning – or, at least, that I don’t care about winning in the way that they think.

This difference comes in the distinction between achievement play and striving play, as defined by philosopher C. Thi Nguyen.

Achievement play is quite straightforward – it’s playing to win, whether that winning is “for its own sake, or for something that follows from winning, like goods and money”. A poker player who plays for money is a good example of this, or people who simply play games to win.

Striving play, on the other hand, is “playing for the sake of going through the struggle to win”. 

At first glance, this may seem counterintuitive – don’t we play games to have fun? But I think many of us passionate about board games can resonate with the idea of seeking that struggle. For me, the winning doesn’t matter that much if the struggle isn’t satisfying. I’m sure some of you are familiar with the feeling of winning an easy or straightforward game, and experiencing a feeling not of triumph but of underwhelm – like, “Oh, that was it?”

The process of strategising, of evaluating which modes of acquiring victory points (VP) to prioritise at the expense of others, of assessing whether to play consistently and conservatively or go all-in to either succeed handsomely or fail terribly, certainly feels like a struggle at times. But, for me, it’s also what makes board games so interesting – and fun. 

Take Fly-A-Way, for example. Maybe you’re in the fortunate position of having two birds you could possibly save on your turn – but not both.

You could save the Asian Rosy Finch with the longer migratory route and a high number of bird points, immediately earning a windfall of VP. Or you could save the Eurasian Oystercatcher which doesn’t give you many points off the bat, but gives bonus VP for every Wetland bird another player saves. 

If you’ve had prior experience with the game, you might have more information that can help you with your strategy. Perhaps saving the first bird with the long migratory route requires you to place links on the southern part of the map, closer to Australia, and you know that there aren’t as many birds that pass through there compared to the northern part of the map that runs through Asia. Placing links there might not be as good an investment as placing them on the linkways in Asia – where future birds saved in the game would earn you a good number of cumulative VP.

Your decision would have to consider other factors as well, such as how far you are into the game. At the late-game stage, you might just be trying to get as many VP as possible before the endgame triggers, and there aren’t many remaining birds to save anyway for strategic link placement to matter as much (since you only score through links every time a bird is saved). And the bird that gives you VP for every other Wetland bird saved would no longer be as valuable as if you’d saved it near the start.

In this example, the rules and mechanics set forth by the game designer define your considerations and your actions – in other words, your agency. This is why Nguyen suggests that game designers “work in the medium of agency”. They don’t just create the gaming environment and obstacles – they also give players goals (help save birds and get as much VP as possible) and abilities (through bird powers of the birds you save), which shape the type of agency that the player can inhabit during the game.

This ties in nicely with another one of Nguyen’s central ideas – that what makes games a distinctive art form is their way of “specifying particular modes of agency”. To break that down, the way you’re able to exercise your agency in the game, through the actions you take and the abilities you have, is what sets games apart from other art forms.

When victory is straightforward without requiring much intervention (or struggle) on my end (in the form of strategising), the ways in which I can exercise my agency feel more limited, or less interesting. Maybe that’s what makes “easier” games feel less gratifying. 

If winning is no longer satisfying or worth pursuing without the struggle, then it seems that the struggle is essential for winning to matter. This is something Nguyen talks about – in striving play, players must become temporarily invested in winning in order to have the struggle. (The struggle can’t be the explicit goal during the game, or players would just make decisions that prolong the struggle in ways that don’t make sense.) Caring about winning definitely makes for a more gratifying struggle. But that’s the extent of what winning means to me.

Winning does matter, but it’s only a temporary goal in service of a larger one – the goal of the struggle.