Playing to Learn

Hey folks, and welcome back. I hope you enjoyed the first instalment of Bonus Experience, in which I tried to provide some hard evidence as to why discussing the games we play is important. From here on, rather than building from the advice of the community at large (which is pretty easy to find in any number of places), I’ll be talking about some more original ideas of how to maximize your learning experience. I want to share my approach for learning games in general, and Warmachine/Hordes in particular, in an efficient manner. Playing games and discussing them is a little too trial-and-error for me.  I prefer a more direct approach: playing games for the purpose of learning. But before we get into the details of that, I’d like to talk about how I came up with this approach (it involves losing a lot!).

Sometimes I lose at games, and this is me. Please note that all of my Warbeasts are in the Dead Pile.

A Tale About Tilting

As many have, I came to Warmachine/Hordes from a background in competitive Magic: the Gathering. Of course, once I started Warmachine, my Magic playing hours decreased dramatically. However, I still considered Magic my competitive game, and Warmachine something I just did ‘for fun’. Yes, I just implied that I was playing a game that wasn’t for fun, so you might see where I’m going with this.  I was playing Warmachine whenever I could (though at the time I didn’t have many opponents!) and only playing Magic in tournaments – usually with prizes on the line. And although I was still good at the game, I was finding my tournament placings were slipping, and I wasn’t going home with prizes very often. It all came to a head at what should have been a very special tournament, and was, but not for the reasons I expected.

Most of our tournaments are hosted by a local store, but this one was different; it was a charity event being put on by our local head judge. I was really interested to see what sort of a tournament he would run on his own, good causes are good causes, and the proposed prizes were pretty attractive. Of course, I wasn’t attending to win prizes, I was attending to contribute to a good cause and have fun. Unfortunately for my good intentions, I started winning. I won two rounds, then lost one. I laughed it off, because in a six round tournament, who really cares about one loss? Then I lost another round, and realized that the first loss had affected me much more than I’d thought. I wasn’t playing well any more (what is often termed ‘being tilted’), and if I wanted any prizes, I had to win all of the remaining rounds. So obviously, I lost the next one and dropped from the event. It was one hell of a wake-up call. What happened to having fun for a good cause? All it took was the promise of victory being dangled in front of me and all my good intentions went out the window. It was time to rethink my approach to competitive games.

What Needed to Change?

So why this obsession with winning? I realized that it wasn’t about the prizes … it was about the pride. Like many who play competitive games, I am a self-professed nerd. Like most self-professed nerds, I think I’m a pretty smart guy. Strategy games are more than just entertainment for me, they’re mental exercises. Moreover, they’re mental contests. They are an opportunity for two smart people to sit down together and, at least to some degree, figure out who is the intellectual superior. And if, even subconsciously, that is the intent … then losing doesn’t just mean you lost a game. It means you are less intelligent. And no smart guy wants to feel dumb. I’m no psychologist, I don’t know if there’s a good explanation for all this, but I realized that for me (and, I hypothesize, many people like me) there was a lot more invested in winning strategy games than I had ever assumed. And, there was one more important piece of the puzzle: only in a mental exercise could we ever assume that we could maintain top competitive form without regular practice!

This is my martial art, but this is not me.

I’ve practised martial arts for going on ten years now, and been a teacher in some capacity for over half of that. And I would never ask one of my students to perform advanced techniques flawlessly if I knew they hadn’t had time to practice in weeks. I certainly wouldn’t ask that of myself, and it should be clear to everyone that this is true for any athlete. If you’re going to be competing, you must practice and train for hours upon hours for every event. But for me, playing Magic, I was letting myself assume that because I had been good at it once, that was enough. I didn’t need to practice, it was enough to just show up at events and I could expect to win. When I put it this way, it sounds kind of crazy, but that’s where my head was at, and I don’t think I’m alone. That’s when I realized that if I wanted to play Magic in tournaments any more, I would have to choose: either practice (ie, play games!) or admit that I wasn’t going to win. And I made the promise to myself that I would not allow this to happen with Warmachine. Fortunately, it’s much easier to do this from the beginning than to realize it several years of gaming later!

The Method

So, what was the plan? What did I do to improve on this? Well, I devised a method: Playing to Learn. We’re all familiar with playing to win. There’s plenty of information out there on the proper attitudes to have and strategies to employ in order to win games, but it’s a long, slow process to learn it all. And if you’re like the me I described above, where losses are somewhat personal, that can be a painful process. So I looked back at my experiences with playing games and with martial arts, and tried to figure out what practice, the thing I said I needed for games, was really doing for me. I decided that effective practice meant going through the motions with the intent of learning something. This could be something as simple as ‘am I good enough’, in which case your goal in a practice game would be just to win, but it could also be as complex as ‘do I understand this game’, which might take you many, many practice games to answer. Over the next few instalments of Bonus Experience, I’ll be giving some examples of situations where I was able to use this approach effectively, for now I’ll summarize.

I teach chemistry, but this is not me either.

When playing to learn, we should be establishing a goal for the game that is not necessarily to win. It might be learning the rules, it might be practising with a specific card, model, or list; or trying to thwart one small part of your opponent’s plan. The advantage of this is not just in the improvement of your skills; it also allows for victory even in games where you lose. If I’m playing a game to see how a specific unit works with a specific caster, and I get to use that unit to its full potential, then even if I lose the game I still got something out of it. In a case like this, losing the game doesn’t matter nearly as much to me. It’s also worthwhile to note that while your opponent will generally try to stop you from winning the game, it’s usually possible to choose a learning objective that they can’t really interfere with. I find that feeling like I’ve lost control is one of the most aggravating experiences about a bad loss, and choosing a goal like this allows you to maintain a bit of extra control over the game.

So for now, I leave you with this general idea of how to get a bit more out of your games. Don’t just talk about them after the fact, start planning before you even start. Maximizing experience is our goal here, and that really means not doing anything aimlessly. Have a goal in mind that you are confident you can achieve – it really does help get the most out of your learning experience. Next time I’ll get into some more specifics, talking about dealing with shortcomings in my primary faction: the often-lamented ‘pillow-fistedness’ of the Circle Orboros.

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