[HN Gopher] Understanding Strategic Culture Through Games
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Understanding Strategic Culture Through Games
Author : jonbaer
Score : 60 points
Date : 2022-03-24 06:49 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (mwi.usma.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (mwi.usma.edu)
| WJW wrote:
| 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?
| wolverine876 wrote:
| People embrace romantic notions about warfare and like to imagine
| a fanastical version of it. Call of Duty does very well! We tend
| to think of warfare as a game.
|
| The reality is the polar opposite of a game: Games have rules and
| fairness; warfare has almost no rules (by definition - it exists
| where rules and laws fail), and nobody wants a fair fight - they
| want a massacre (or surrender). Games have no stakes - they are
| for entertainment, and no matter how many points you score, you
| drink a beer with your buddies that night; warfare is life and
| death - you literally might not sleep again, some of your friends
| in your unit will likely be killed in the next battle, your loved
| ones and society might be destroyed, and the brutality and pain
| is commoplace. And the responsibility, stress and pressure are
| enormous - if you mess up, you don't kick the ball out of bounds,
| your friends die.
|
| In histories of some wars I've read about - and it's probably
| true for others others - describe that before the war people are
| very excited for it; I have felt that powerful urge myself. IIRC,
| people had picnics to watch early US Civil War battles, and
| soldiers can be very excited to. The reality then hits quickly,
| as people experience things too horrible to describe on HN,
| including the horror of killing other human beings, often in
| gruesome ways. Even in the relatively low-level wars the US
| recently was involved in, even the very well-trained, very safe
| (relative to other wars) soldiers who have a safe home to return
| to, have very high PTSD and suicide rates. As has been noted
| throughout history, warfare changes the survivors for the worse.
|
| Maybe there are some things that could be gained from games, but
| I imagine training would be far better. Imagine someone who
| played software developer games (if only such fun toys existed!)
| as preparation for being an actual software developer. It might
| be a nice intro, but mostly irrelevant to actual training.
|
| EDIT: To be clear, I think the article may be more descriptive -
| how certain games affect thinking - than prescriptive - 'we
| should learn through games'.
| LambdaTrain wrote:
| "Implicit learning is "nonepisodic learning of complex
| information in an incidental manner, without awareness of what
| has been learned."
|
| If I am terrible at online competitive games, does it reflect my
| poor implicit learning ability on strategy?
| invalidOrTaken wrote:
| Performance in games like this is a child with many fathers.
| It's more likely that you underestimate the amount of work some
| people put into improving, and also underestimate the role of
| luck.
| WJW wrote:
| Depends on the type of game I suppose, not all are high-speed
| button pressing fests. If you are terrible at high-APM games
| like Starcraft then it might be more due to hand-eye
| coordination skill than due to strategy skill, if you are also
| terrible at online chess then it might be due to strategy. Both
| hand-eye coordination and strategic thinking can be improved
| through practice though.
| canniballectern wrote:
| > 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 -\\_(tsu)_/-
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| 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.
| Mezzie wrote:
| 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.
| lmkg wrote:
| 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.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| "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...
| 58x14 wrote:
| 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.
| dragontamer wrote:
| > 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)
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > 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.
| Pelerin wrote:
| > 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?
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| 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".
| dragontamer wrote:
| 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.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > 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.
| dragontamer wrote:
| > 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.
| gryn wrote:
| 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.
| m0llusk wrote:
| 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 might be reasonably certain to
| work. Possibly the best thing that games offer is the ability to
| contrast with the many details of any conflict.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| 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.
| dragontamer wrote:
| > 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
| games" apply to our psychology that the article is about.
| Because American ideology is "win or lose", we are unable to
| comprehend situations like, say... Afghanistan (where there is
| no such thing as "win" or "lose").
|
| That "win or lose" mindset is brought upon us and reflected
| upon Baseball, Basketball, Football, and other games. Our
| culture creates our society, and that culture and thinking
| seeps into our strategic thinking of wars.
|
| ------
|
| Its wrong, but it happens. Because so many of our soldiers play
| Football, the effects of Football strategy and football
| analogies grossly affect our thinking of war. Probably to our
| detriment (but probably beneficial in some circumstances).
|
| -----------
|
| 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?
|
| Many of Sun Tzu's sayings about war are just as applicable to
| the Go board game. As such, it is clear that the game of Go has
| affected war-strategy. The "Beat" of offense, defense,
| sacrifice... its all there in Go. Its very fundamentally
| different from Football or Chess, and therefore its easier to
| see how it influenced Chinese style thinking (contrasting
| against American / Football style thinking).
|
| In the game of Go, there is "win" or "lose", but its really a
| reflection upon the territory you gained or lost. Games of Go
| are often decided by +/- 20 points (ex: I have 180 points an
| the opponent has 160 points, in a hypothetical Chinese counting
| game). Because I have more points, I "won".
|
| But this style of game might be better at understanding the
| grayness that goes into "win" or "loss"... at least better than
| Football or other games. Especially because in Go, there are
| positions (ex: Seki, Ko, etc. etc.) that locally are ambiguous,
| you really can't say who "won" a Seki or "won" a Ko by looking
| locally. The global-effect of the position really makes the
| "win" or "loss" mindset irrelevant. (Usually the defender likes
| Seki, usually the attacker likes Ko. But... its complicated and
| really depends on the board state)
|
| A Seki, by Japanese counting, is a local position where ZERO
| points are awarded to both players in the Seki-area. Nominally
| this is a tie on the win/loss scale, but you can imagine that
| forcing this "zero points" situation can be beneficial to one
| player or the other. So if we are to look at the local position
| and say "win" vs "loss", the words just don't make sense. Its a
| seki, its neither a win nor a loss. You'll have to look at the
| whole board, and the history of all the moves to see which
| player really benefited from it.
|
| Perhaps a Chess-player would call a Seki a zugzwang: the only
| way to win is to not make a move (but in Chess, you're forced
| to move every turn, while in Go, you're allowed to pass your
| turn). Since Seki positions exist in Go, and because Go is
| popular in China (and ancient Chinese Generals), but not
| popular in the USA (and this "Seki" position really doesn't
| come up in any of our games), you can imagine that the Seki-
| position will affect Chinese Strategic thinking, but not
| necessarily American-Strategic war thinking.
|
| --------
|
| The blogpost asks: will "respawn" in MOBA, Call of Duty, and
| other modern video games change the psychology of the next-
| generation soldier? Or is the "respawn" mechanic going to allow
| the next-generation soldier to better come to terms with death?
| (a concept that's completely devoid in Football / Baseball). Is
| the "pretend death" of respawn-based gameplay a good or bad
| thing to our individual psychology / understanding of war? Who
| knows, but in 30+ years or so, when today's generation grow up
| to be the next-generation of generals and war-leaders, we can
| almost certainly see Counterstrike, Call of Duty, Starcraft, or
| DOTA references in the Presidential War Room.
|
| 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.
| invalidOrTaken wrote:
| >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.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Despite the deep cultural connections between Football and
| the US Military, no one I'm aware of actually thinks of
| Football practice as military / war practice.
|
| Football, despite all of the military grandstanding that
| goes on TV, is just a game. Its how people have fun.
|
| -------
|
| This article is about how these games ("just for fun") end
| up affecting military strategy, despite clearly not being
| about war at all.
|
| IE: America's ability to trust the NCOs in the field might
| very well hail from football. The Offensive coordinators do
| grand strategies, but they leave their trust to the
| Quarterback (who is like a squad-leader / NCO in the
| military analog).
|
| Similarly: your Baseball nerds can crunch numbers and
| statistics, and provide all kinds of strategies
| recommendations to the Pitcher. But at the end of the day,
| its the Pitcher (and the catcher) who decides what kind of
| ball to throw.
|
| ---------
|
| America's "decentralized" military structure / supreme
| trust in the NCOs in the field comes from somewhere. Maybe
| from the sports we play. These games have affected our
| military's organization structure at a fundamental level...
| despite having nothing to do with war.
| invalidOrTaken wrote:
| >These games have affected our military's organization
| structure at a fundamental level...despite having nothing
| to do with war.
|
| If they _really_ had nothing to do with war, why would
| they affect our thinking about it?
|
| I'm _not_ saying sports, games, etc. were instituted
| explicitly as wargames. Rather, I 'm saying that while
| there are obviously differences between games and war,
| there _are_ similarities---enough that there are lessons
| one can learn about war, from games. The parallels are
| many: adversarial conflict, mass coordinated action,
| risk... "some reason" seems a little too mock-mystified
| to me.
| dragontamer wrote:
| > If they really had nothing to do with war, why would
| they affect our thinking about it?
|
| Shared cultural interests.
|
| Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, Jesus / Christianity, maybe
| even Buggs Bunny and Mickey Mouse even, will affect our
| culture and shape our views of war. Also Chess, Football,
| NASCAR, etc. etc.
|
| Meanwhile in China, maybe Go, Xiangqi, Ping Pong, Soccer,
| Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Buddah, Journey to the
| West (aka: the Monkey King), and other such cultural
| icons will affect Chinese thinking of war... whether or
| not its a legitimate analogue or not.
|
| ------
|
| Thus, this article's discussion and musing. Next
| generation generals will be affected by PUBG, League of
| Legends, Starcraft, and Call of Duty players. These
| shared cultural experiences, for better or worse, will
| affect the strategic thinking of the next wars.
| pfisherman wrote:
| 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?
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| > 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.
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| 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).
| dragontamer wrote:
| 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.
| dijerido wrote:
| One of the first games mentioned is Hnefatafl. According to
| Wikipedia, "The only variant of tafl where a relatively
| unambiguous ruleset has survived into modern times is tablut."
|
| > Tablut starting position: lighter "Swedes" start in centre;
| darker "Muscovites" start at the board's edges. Based on
| Linnaeus' sketches reproduced in Smith (1811).
|
| Oh those Muscovites! While the article focuses on strategic
| lessons, it seems that games are also a medium for passing down
| historical ones.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tafl_games
| pphysch wrote:
| 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
| invalidOrTaken wrote:
| 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)
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(page generated 2022-03-25 23:01 UTC)