Some ‘radical’ theorists describe life as a game. This can seem simplistic or even dangerous, but I think it’s really just misunderstood.

“Game” is a loaded word that means different things to different people. To most laypersons, games are trivial, played for amusement. I think this explains a lot of the resentment and criticism directed at Neil Strauss’s iconic manual “The Game”, which a guide to being a pickup artist. Because it objectifies women as mere playthings, targets for conquest.

Or does it?

A game is a concept that can be taken very seriously– far more seriously than you might imagine. In the abstract, a game is a scenario or context with specific rules that govern interactions between agents. The idea is for players to develop a masterful understanding of these rules so as to make the best possible decisions to achieve their desired outcome.

If you read The Game carefully, with an open mind, you’ll find that it’s more than a bunch of prescriptions and cheap tactics- it’s ultimately a kind of philosophy, focused on being attractive- about not only being yourself, but being your best self. Strauss actually warns about the danger of the conquest-obsessed mindset– because it’s unsustainable, and eats you alive from the inside. (A lot of critics of the book seem to miss this out entirely.) Erich Fromm fans will find this consistent with the idea that Being is a superior mode of existing to Having.

So Life is a game, and so’s your career, and so’s romance, and anything involving choice, really. A game is simply a way of seeing things– whether it’s Texas Hold’em Poker or international relations. (At this stage I think it’s important to remind everyone that we can extract the map from the territory, but we cannot generate the territory from the map. Game theory might help us to make better decisions, but it is no substitute for actual living.)

The economist Adam Smith was originally a philosopher, and he ended up developing the the field of economics while exploring morality. He wanted to figure out how to make effective moral decisions- to seek the greatest good. (Or, as a gamer might describe it- he wanted to know how to Win at Life.) He could easily be described as a game theorist- and in a sense, we all are. In this regard, economics is a tool we use to make sense of the circumstances that we define with game theory.

The most important thing to note is that not all games are zero-sum games like Chess. In Chess, Black’s victory is indistinguishable from White’s loss. The only way to win is to defeat your opponent. Those are the conditions for victory as defined by the game’s designers. (Who designed Chess? The same people that invented language: Everybody, and nobody.) And here we see the emergence of the I-win-if-you-lose mindset.

“I win if you lose.” This idea made a lot of sense in the tribes that people lived in for tens of thousands of years- conflict was brutish and short, and interactions between tribes would have been straightforward- fight or flee. And it’s a simple idea, one that can be simply understood and quickly executed. In the days of Genghis Khan, this sort of ruthlessness boosted your survivability. I think this is why we still tend to have a habit of  going on ’tilt’- of chasing our losses when we know we ought to cut and run- because it’s somehow encoded in our genes. (You can read about it in some pop-psychology books-“Risk” by Dan Gardner is one of them.)

Times have changed, and life has gotten a lot more complex. There’s a lot more depth, beauty and subtlety. It is no longer possible to crush your enemy completely- which is why terrorism is proving so difficult to ‘defeat’. We can’t bomb terrorism to submission. They’re willing to die to kill us. (As Russell Peters put it- “You kill me? I kill me!) The only way to end terrorism is to give them a compelling reason to live– that is, to invoke the win-win situation.

Your win no longer has to come at my loss. The win-win situation is not only likelier now, it’s also highly desirable. Different people play the same game in different ways, for different reasons, to achieve different ends. The highest objective, though, which most of us should be able to agree on, isn’t usually “win at all cost”, or “defeat as many people as possible”, but to have played well- and often the best way to do that is to assist, aid, manage and inspire others. Here we begin to see the parallels between Life and games. (And how ideas from folk like Jesus and the Dalai Lama- compassion, mercy, patience and grace- turn out to have immense survival value, and make wonderful strategic sense.)

(Jesus would have kicked ass at World of Warcraft- and not just because of the whole Resurrection deal, though that’s pretty damn sweet too.)

So how do you win at relationships?

First of all you begin by acknowledging that it’s not a zero-sum game. One person’s pleasure and happiness does not and should not have to come at the expense of another’s. You don’t win by “conquering” the other person and subjugating them to serve your will. That’s outright unsustainable- and even if it weren’t, it would be terribly inefficient. Even if you wanted to be coldly calculative about it- from a pragmatic perspective, economies function better when men are free, rather than slaves- and when women serve their own interests rather than those of the patriarchy.

The world is too complex for us to even pretend to know. We don’t even know what’s best for ourselves, so it’s preposterously ignorant of us to think that we know what’s best for each other. The theorist in me likes to contemplate if the abolishing of slavery and the “provision” of women’s rights were consequences of such pragmatic concerns (economic sustainability), rather than lofty morality. (After all, women made a lot of progress in the workplace when we had a shortage of men thanks to war.)

Or perhaps “lofty morality” too emerges from an intuitive appraisal of inefficient, ineffective circumstances. Perhaps we are offended by immorality because we sense that there’s something terribly uneconomical about it all! That’s a wonderfully elegant perspective. A sense of morality is ultimately rational, and economical. We fight for what’s moral because it’s ultimately in our self-interest. Even if it’s not immediately obvious.

Sorry, I digress- back to relationships! I once asked an artist- how do I get better at drawing portraits of people? Her answer: draw everyday objects. I said- but I want to draw people realistically! And she said- can you draw a pear realistically? Touché.

So before we figure out how to “win” in a romantic relationship, let’s look at something far simpler- like a game of Left4Dead. In L4D, we have a team of 4 individuals seeking to survive from checkpoint to checkpoint, battling zombies along the way. They have to share resources and protect one another in order to survive.

Teamwork matters. It’s impossible to survive with a traditional “me-first!” mindset. We have to look out for one another. If any of us dies, we lose 25% of our firepower, which diminishes the odds that any of us would survive by even more than that.

(By how much, exactly? That’s a study I’d love to see! How much does the death or absence of a teammate reduce the overall team’s survivability?)  One thing we know for sure- a team of 4 friends is far more likely to survive than a team of strangers, because strangers are less likely to look out for each other and more likely to look out for themselves.

Competence matters. There is one instance where 4 strangers are more likely to survive than 4 friends- and that’s when the strangers are all good at the game, and have an implicit mutual understanding of how the game is to be played- as compared to 4 friends who have no idea what they’re doing. At the highest level, though, teamwork makes all the difference. This is why All-Star teams never perform as well as we expect them to- because the teamwork isn’t as effective. There’s less synergy. (Buzzword check!)

So we can then consider broader ideas, like sports teams. If you take 11 awesome football players from all over the world, and pit them against a decent team like say, Manchester United, who’s going to win? Most probably Manchester United. This probably repeats itself for most of the teams in the Premier League. (I’m not sure how far down the table we could go. Would this still apply if we’re talking abou Aston Villa, or Wigan? Your thoughts please!)

What are the conditions for winning in a relationship? There aren’t really any. You define them yourself, within the context of your unique relationship. It’s up to you guys to decide what you want. Winning at relationships isn’t about hitting a target, it’s about constant striving, constant communication, constant adaptation. Sounds difficult? It is.

I felt somewhat qualified to talk about this, largely because I’m still with the same girl I first fell in love with, about a decade ago. (“How do you guys do it?!” is  a question we get asked a lot.)

It was the first romantic relationship either of us got involved in- we met in primary school, when we were 10- and we got together when we were in secondary school, when we were about 14. We did separate for a while- I think we got kinda sick of each other, and needed our own space to figure out who we were outside of the relationship- but neither of us dated anybody else, nor ever found any replacement for what we found in each other. When we got back together, it was like breathing fresh air after an hour of having our heads held underwater.

What’s the secret? It’s hard work, really. You’ll never find any long-lasting couple that didn’t work hard to keep things together. People are difficult to live with. (You wouldn’t be able to live with yourself if you didn’t deceive yourself about the amount of shit you put yourself through.) Both of us are incredibly stubborn, and neither of us wants to give up on the relationship, no matter how bad it gets. We both firmly believe that we can make things work, so we do. We never go to sleep with an unresolved argument. (Sometimes this means sleepless nights, but in the long run, it benefits the relationship.) It often feels like it’s us against the world, and in that we have a certain solidarity, a certain kinship. We are best friends more than we are lovers, and I think that’s a vital element of our relationship.

We’ve had our bad moments, of course. And we always learn more about ourselves and each other when we’re in those moments. One important thing is never to bring up anything older than a couple of months (or weeks, even) in an argument. Never say “you always,” if you want someone to change their behaviour. Always forgive. Always ask questions. And always communicate to ensure that you’re both getting what you want, that you’re both learning and growing along the way, that it’s in both of your respective self-interests to go on. Some people say relationships are binding commitments- I think a relationship only works well when we work hard to keep it relevant to each other, every day.

In Summary:

Be individually competent and sustainable sustainable. You have to be able to take care of yourself, to carry your own weight. Be a symbiont, not a parasite.

Seek mutually beneficial outcomes. It doesn’t always need to be equally beneficial, but it helps to build goodwill if it is.

Learn to see yourselves as part of a team. (Some would say “one soul in two bodies”, which is kind of extreme. But you get the idea.)

Communicate. Good relationships can fall apart over time if people get complacent. Never get complacent. Constantly re-evaluate where you are, and where you want to go.

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Ask me anything you like, and I’ll answer it best as I can!