Understanding Strategic Culture Through Games • Hacker News Board

Re: Understanding Strategic Culture Through Games

#11

Post by WJW » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 5:56 PM UTC

As the article mentions real conflicts are much more complex than any game, but there might still be cultural influences on the preferred strategies even in highly complex conflicts. I wonder how much the order in which you learn such principles has an influence, and if you could predict this influence if you knew the background of each participant in sufficient detail.

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?

Re: Understanding Strategic Culture Through Games

#12

Post by dragontamer » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 6:16 PM UTC

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #5

m0llusk wrote: post #4

Completely disagree. Games are idealizations of combat that leave out some of the most important details. Logistics and support are absolutely critical to any kind of force projection. Politics and morale are also essential for success. Hardly any games even attempt to expose such critical details. Because of this they end up putting emphasis on speed and formation that may be removed from what is possible or what mi…

Command: Modern Operations models a lot of that. I believe it is also used within the military. Wargames were used by the Prussian army and are credited with helping them defeat the French in the Franco-Prussian War (after that most militaries adopted them).

The Wargaming hobby is largely about logistics though. Wargamers play Hearts of Iron for a reason, as well as "Campaign for Africa" (and start counting your "pasta" tokens, which require an additional "water" token to cook, etc. etc.).

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.

Re: Understanding Strategic Culture Through Games

#13

Post by 58x14 » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 6:17 PM UTC

This article and discussion is centered on perfect information games. I play Chess at ~1600 ELO. My path to improvement is clear.

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.

Re: Understanding Strategic Culture Through Games

#14

Post by dragontamer » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 6:50 PM UTC

58x14 wrote: post #13

This article and discussion is centered on perfect information games. I play Chess at ~1600 ELO. My path to improvement is clear. 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 regulatio…

> This article and discussion is centered on perfect information games

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)

Re: Understanding Strategic Culture Through Games

#15

Post by lmkg » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 6:59 PM UTC

Some of the other comments here are discussing the extent and ways in which games do or don't succeed in modeling real conflict. Having read the article, I think that's missing the forest for the trees.

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.

Re: Understanding Strategic Culture Through Games

#16

Post by jeffreyrogers » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 7:00 PM UTC

dragontamer wrote: post #8

m0llusk wrote: post #4

Completely disagree. Games are idealizations of combat that leave out some of the most important details. Logistics and support are absolutely critical to any kind of force projection. Politics and morale are also essential for success. Hardly any games even attempt to expose such critical details. Because of this they end up putting emphasis on speed and formation that may be removed from what is possible or what mi…

> Games are idealizations of combat that leave out some of the most important details. 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 game…

> 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?

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.

Re: Understanding Strategic Culture Through Games

#17

Post by Mezzie » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 7:33 PM UTC

DiggyJohnson wrote: post #3

canniballectern wrote: post #2

> there is almost no one who would not understand, “It’s fourth and ten—we have to punt.” 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)_…

Well, the same is true if you try to talk about a strategy and people aren't familiar with its domain. ;) 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.

You forget politics, at all levels, formal or not.

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.

Re: Understanding Strategic Culture Through Games

#18

Post by pphysch » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 7:37 PM UTC

Games like League of Legends and most physical sports are red-herrings when it comes to thoughtful strategy, because frequently you can win these games by simply outperforming your opponent in raw strength or agility, even if they have the theoretically superior strategy. Among these games, it is relatively uncommon to have perfectly matched opponents where strategy determines the victor.

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

Re: Understanding Strategic Culture Through Games

#19

Post by pfisherman » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 7:46 PM UTC

dragontamer wrote: post #8

m0llusk wrote: post #4

Completely disagree. Games are idealizations of combat that leave out some of the most important details. Logistics and support are absolutely critical to any kind of force projection. Politics and morale are also essential for success. Hardly any games even attempt to expose such critical details. Because of this they end up putting emphasis on speed and formation that may be removed from what is possible or what mi…

> Games are idealizations of combat that leave out some of the most important details. 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 game…

American football does have ties. If the score remains tied after one period of extra time the game ends in a tie.

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?

Re: Understanding Strategic Culture Through Games

#20

Post by thaumasiotes » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 7:50 PM UTC

dragontamer wrote: post #14

58x14 wrote: post #13

This article and discussion is centered on perfect information games. I play Chess at ~1600 ELO. My path to improvement is clear. 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 regulatio…

> This article and discussion is centered on perfect information games 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",…

> Football is not a perfect information game. The opponent may line up in front of you, but you don't know their playbook.

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.