When Play Becomes Serious

One would assume that since play is a relaxing state, and that we do it voluntarily, that playful competition only comes in one flavor. However, living in a world of play, I have come to realize that “casual” is not the only way to play. So what happens when competition becomes serious business? And how do we know when it is? What things change between casual competition and serious competition? And is there any blurring of the line?

In order to try and answer these questions I looked for the fastest way to make a game serious, by making it so that the outcome of the competition affects the world beyond the bubble of play. To do this I proceeded to bet with pool players in the college lounge. The times I bet I played for dollar games and for a meal pass.(if I won I'd get a guest pass, if they won they'd get $6) My first discovery from doing this was that I was a much worse pool player when something was on the line. I played a casual game with my opponent before we played a real one and found that we were of about even skill, however when it came to betting I ended 3 balls behind, a result that cannot be chalked up to luck. I could feel myself over analyzing my shots and thus making worse ones than normal. However since we had played pool before, the competition did not need an extended clarification of rules. This is because there are already a set of working rules for games at the lounge that both of us knew and had agreed upon in prior games.

The second time I attempted playing for money, we played for a dollar game. Since the stake was much less, I felt calmer, but still pretty nervous. The student had just come back from Dublin and was unfamiliar with the pool house rules. This time there was a huge clarification process before the game started .This was to make sure that everyone was playing on the same page. This would have been slightly different in a casual game, with the rules being explained as they come up instead of all at the beginning. Trying the rule as you go approach in the betting game would have led to arguments because one competitor would not be able to trust that the other was unbiased. I won the second game of pool, however I still feel I did worse than in a casual game as the game was very close.

After doing these experiments I was reminded of the games of Magic: the gathering, that I play often and found some similarities to the seriousness scale. Most casual games come with some house rules, one in particular is a “friendly mulligan”, or one free redrawing of their hand, to make sure that there are more quality games played and less one sided matches. This banks on the fact that someone in a casual game will not try to mulligan in order to get the one card they need to make the game one sided, but will work with the hand they are given if it's not terrible. However, when I was testing a deck for a tournament with a friend, we switched play styles immediately. We stopped handing out the friendly mulligans and started to use normal mulligan rules. And we used them as a resource so we could get that one card we needed to win the game. Coincidentally once we were done testing the decks we even switched them out because neither one was fun to play casually. Both would win in a tournament, but it was agreed that they were not very fun to play due to their serious nature. The weird thing here is that I consistently made better plays when the competition was serious than when it was casual, because magic rewards extended thinking. In fact I asked a nearby “impartial judge” to evaluate whether or not some plays would work before I played them. This is in contrast to casual play where I would be very likely to just assume the plays work, and wait to be corrected.

Thus when playing a serious game the players will usually play with more strict rules, think more about their plays and discuss rules beforehand, rather than as they appear. While I personally prefer casual play to serious play, I realize that some people find excitement in having a game dictate an aspect of their lives, and become very good at playing under pressure. In fact many of my friends who attend these tournaments end up making money on their hobby instead of dumping money into it. As for pool, there are people who play professionally and people who bet on it often, however I know that I am not cut out to do either.