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Understanding Strategic Culture Through Games

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Re: Understanding Strategic Culture Through Games

#21

Post by Pelerin »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #20
dragontamer wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> You know everything about the state of the game

Is that fully accurate? Do players know how fast the other teams players run? The frequency with which they can catch the ball? How successful their blocking will be?

Re: Understanding Strategic Culture Through Games

#22

Post by dragontamer »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #20
dragontamer wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If Football was a game of perfect information, you wouldn't have trick-plays like false-punts or false-field goals.

The fact remains: you can hide the football and obscure its location. You can position your line in such a way that makes it look like you're going to punt, but in actuality do something different with the ball.

Not everyone sees everything. If the quarterback truly saw everything on the field, the quarterback would never get sacked.

Re: Understanding Strategic Culture Through Games

#23

Post by nickdothutton »

“4000 years ago the Chinese invented “Go”. Unlike Indo-European Chess, Go takes longer to play and uses a larger board. In Go, the goal is not to confront your opponent directly as one does in Chess. The winning system in Go is to surround them gradually and occupy their territory.”[1] You really can learn a lot about a people from their games. [1]. https://blog.eutopian.io/huawei-5g-the-uk-gets-a-lesson-in-g...

Re: Understanding Strategic Culture Through Games

#24

Post by thaumasiotes »

dragontamer wrote: post #22
thaumasiotes wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If Football was a game of perfect information, you wouldn't have trick-plays like false-punts or false-field goals. The fact remains: you can hide the football and obscure its location. You can position your line in such a way that makes it look like you're going to punt, but in actuality do something different with the ball. Not everyone sees everything. If the quarterback truly saw everything on the field, the quar…

> If Football was a game of perfect information, you wouldn't have trick-plays like false-punts or false-field goals.

> The fact remains: you can hide the football and obscure its location.

That is fair.

> You can position your line in such a way that makes it look like you're going to punt, but in actuality do something different with the ball.

But that's irrelevant.

Re: Understanding Strategic Culture Through Games

#25

Post by thaumasiotes »

Pelerin wrote: post #21
thaumasiotes wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> You know everything about the state of the game Is that fully accurate? Do players know how fast the other teams players run? The frequency with which they can catch the ball? How successful their blocking will be?

Random elements do not interfere with perfect information. Adding a coin toss to chess won't make it a game of imperfect information. It will make it a game that is less deterministic than chess-without-the-coin-tossing. The opposite of "perfect information" is "hidden information", not "fallibility".

Re: Understanding Strategic Culture Through Games

#26

Post by dragontamer »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #24
dragontamer wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Football was a game of perfect information, you wouldn't have trick-plays like false-punts or false-field goals. The fact remains: you can hide the football and obscure its location. You can position your line in such a way that makes it look like you're going to punt, but in actuality do something different with the ball. Not everyone sees everything. If the quarterback truly saw everything on the field, the quar…

> If Football was a game of perfect information, you wouldn't have trick-plays like false-punts or false-field goals. > The fact remains: you can hide the football and obscure its location. That is fair. > You can position your line in such a way that makes it look like you're going to punt, but in actuality do something different with the ball. But that's irrelevant.

> But that's irrelevant.

Certainly not within the constraints of Football.

The Linebacker's entire focus is going to be on pushing against the other linemen once the play starts. The linemen are not going to know what's going on over there, their eyes are literally not looking at what everyone else is doing. (Well, a decent lineman can sometimes snatch the football if a quarterback throws it too low over their heads. But... linemen definitely don't have their eyes on much of the game)

The fact that you only have two eyes leads to the constraints that is the game of football. Skilled players keep watch over other players: where they are looking and how they are moving.

The "hidden information" is literally their eyes themselves. You can't see things that are behind you. That's how you sack a quarterback: you run at them from an angle that they're not looking. That's why trick plays work, because you have an expectation for how those people will move... except they moved in a way you didn't expect (and were blind to seeing, because you were doing some other job).

A good quarterback takes advantage of this: the top-tier quarterbacks can look at one player (and all the defense start focusing on that player, say the wide receiver), but then blindly throw the ball to someone else (!!!), based off of timing alone. That's why playbooks matter in the game. This isn't even a "trick play", this sort of stuff is the basics of football.

The quarterback never looked at say, his tight-end for the play. The quarterback just "trusts" that the tight-end is in the correct position. By looking at the wide-receiver, the Quarterback is obscuring his intentions and is misleading his opponents.

Re: Understanding Strategic Culture Through Games

#27

Post by invalidOrTaken »

pphysch wrote: post #18

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…

Two things:

- one of the devs of that site, Byron Knoll, was my best friend in kindergarten, though he moved away and we haven't spoken much since

- I get a very different vibe from rpscontest --- a sort of "the wicked are punished by the wicked" vibe. Nobody can play non-optimal moves forever and get away with it---one of the bot devs is gonna lose his shirt in the market one day. (Yes, it is extremely weird that I moralize this)

Re: Understanding Strategic Culture Through Games

#28

Post by invalidOrTaken »

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…

>This is largely a blogpost about how these games are imperfect at understanding war. But we humans keep using games as war analogies for some reason, despite their imperfections.

I mean, there are very good reasons to do this: wars are very expensive to fight for training purposes. Games are stake-less and can be repeated (or over in 20 minutes, or have the rules change as desired, or...)

Fidelity is useful, but it's not of absolute importance. There can similarities without identity.

Re: Understanding Strategic Culture Through Games

#29

Post by gryn »

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…

nitpicking on terminology, but if the world is anything it's a game of incomplete information, not imperfect information. and this make things much harder than poker where you know the game you're playing and so does every other player,and there exist layers of common knowledge.

Re: Understanding Strategic Culture Through Games

#30

Post by wolverine876 »

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…

Also, games and warfare are opposites in most ways:

Games are activities with rules, designed to establish fairness (which is desired by participants), be fun, and they have essentially zero stakes - when the game ends, everyone is the same as when they started.

Warfare has (almost) no rules, by definition; warfare is where civilization and rules have failed. Nobody wants fairness; you don't seek a fair fight, you seek to massacre the enemy soldiers (or they surrender); and the stakes couldn't be higher - life and death for you, your friends, and possibly your loved ones and your entire society. Make a wrong decision in warfare and you don't lose a game - the person next to you is dead and maybe many more.

Humans perform very differently in those situations. Handling the stress of the latter is a major part of warfare.

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