Life is a game, some people say. Well, if it's a game, then it has deserved a review.
I shall assume that most people are familiar with the basic rules, so I'll skip directly to the discussion about some concepts, some strategies, and replay value.
Some flawed concept
There are various concepts that are frowned upon in games, and for a reason. Unfortunately, life sports quite a few of them.
One big factor is randomness. There are various game elements that appear to be completely random (in spite of actually following certain hidden rules), and, worse than that,
unnecessarily random, and not adding much to the game play.
Let's start with random starting positions. While random setup helps to keep game play varied, in this case the random starting positions just have too much influence on the kind of options a player has and their winning chances. Some starting positions are just too strong and others too weak. A player starting in certain regions of Africa for example has low chances of going for an academic career, and almost no chance of getting far ahead on the money track. Also, in many cases, the starting position already more or less determines the entire strategy and outlook of a player, and sometimes leaves very little choice. The most egregious cases here are of course those where a player is forced into a certain role and possibly even killed before even getting old enough to take own decisions, let alone reach age of consent. Child soldiers, child pornography and child prostitution are the worst (and unfortunately not exactly rare) cases here. But even those aside, for example players starting in conflict regions or very religious societies usually have very low chances of completely staying out of those things, even after reaching adulthood.
Closely related to that is a certain running leader problem, especially in terms of power and money. Players who are at some point ahead in one of these fields usually will gather more and more, while players starting low have almost no chance of catching up.
Similarly, random player attributes have an unduly large influence. The most prominent example here is gender, which is randomly assigned to players when they start playing, and even though there are some special rules that will allow changing it later, they have so many drawbacks that few people will actually use them. Closely related to that is sexual orientation, though that is one random factor that I personally find quite interesting, because it gives some players a kind of side quest without completely spoiling the game experience for them if they don't complete it. Still, depending on the starting position it might be too much of a disadvantage in some situations, especially in those where public display of queer orientation is threatened with severe social consequences and even death penalty.
Another completely unbalanced random player attribute is disability, both physical and mental. Physical disability such as blindness or dwarfism can have a huge impact on the options available to a player, like for example career choices. As far as mental disabilities are concerned, I wouldn't dare evaluating how much they really influence the player's game experience for the better or the worse, but I certainly find the concept unnecessary.
One more very random element is love, a game mechanism that more or less randomly adds strong emotional connections between players. Worse than that, these connections don't necessarily go both ways; In fact, they surprisingly often don't. Which wouldn't be so bad, if one-way love connections didn't have such detrimental effects on affected players. Reciprocal connections on the other hand usually offer a very big boost to both involved players. Not surprisingly, many players therefore consider this concept one of the best things about the game, even though it reduces predictability. But given how random everything is already, a little bit of extra randomness is probably a small price to pay.
The one concept that truly sucks however and makes playing utterly unpleasant at times is player elimination. Interestingly though, in contrast to other games with player elimination that I have played, the big problem with player elimination in life is not that the eliminated players sitting out are bored -- at least not that I'm aware of --, but rather the negative effect that the elimination of a player has on the players remaining in the game.
Discussion of Strategies
As with many complex games, the best strategies are often very hard to figure out. It's already quite complicated to find the reasonably good ones.
Pure strategies
As far as life is concerned, many players seem to go for money as their main winning strategy. While that strategy by itself is not horribly bad, I personally have the feeling that those players are missing quite a bit of the game play. Also, looking at the outcomes of players who go for that strategy, it seems to stagnate at some point rather than going infinitely upwards, and can even genuinely backfire in some cases.
Another popular but in my humble opinion very much overrated strategy are drugs. They might give a very short immediate boost, but on the long run the strategy always shows an overall downhill trend. So far I haven't met a single player for whom the strategy ever worked out.
Love is a third strategy that is used often, with the player concentrating all efforts on finding and retaining a permanent love relationship. Given how random the concept of love is (as described above), this appears an ill-conceived idea, and while it goes well often enough, it indeed also often goes horribly and painfully wrong, to the point of players dedicating more resources than reasonably justifiable or even comprehensible to gaining, preserving or regaining love. The possible end results are stalking, pathological jealousy, erotomania, suicide, and a whole branch of psychotherapists making a living of it.
Escapism is the fourth of the big strategies, usually achieved through excessive computer gaming and/or submersion in imaginary worlds. In combination with the drug strategy it can lead to long phases of almost complete loss of connection with the outside world. In combination with the love strategy it is expressed through excessive intake of mediocre literature such as Rosamunde Pilcher and soap operas, combined with the firm belief in their realism. It can also lead to sickly sweet plans of marrying in white and living happily ever after, usually without ever accomplishing them. While many players go through a phase of escapism during their transition from childhood to adulthood, continuing the strategy beyond that age can lead to drastically reduced chances of actual accomplishment in the game. Disturbingly, the strategy is just good enough that most players who get stuck in it at some point decide to actively try to perpetuate it. And indeed abandoning the strategy at a later stage often comes with rather severe consequences -- such as realizing how many years of their life they already wasted with it --, which ironically makes continuing the strategy a very tempting choice.
Closely related is the strategy of complete submersion in work, with the only exception that instead of imaginary worlds and problems, real ones are used. The most important positive factor here is constant positive feedback from the immediate environment. The big drawback is that the strategy requires a lot of time and energy and leaves little space for change or even choice. Again, the strategy is just good enough that many players choose to stick with it, even though it stagnates soon and has little chance of achieving high results. On the upside, it has also a low risk of complete failure and can thus be considered a rather safe strategy.
A strategy that is almost diametrically opposite to the previous strategy is trying to enjoy life as it is without putting any effort into changing anything about it, or even into maintaining the status quo. As mentioned in the discussion about random starting position above, some strategies are not available everywhere, and this one can only be used effectively in regions with a strong social support system, i.e., Europe. In those situations, the main drawback of the strategy really is that it is frowned upon by other players (because it drains their resources) and might therefore lead to rather adverse reactions by them. Also, it gives very little positive feedback or direct reward. For those two reasons, the strategy is only usable for players who have a thick skin amongst their random attributes, as well as a rather strong self-esteem that doesn't need positive feedback for retention. For players who have those attributes and live in a suitable region, the strategy can work out very well, though.
Diametrically opposite to that (and therefore again close to the work strategy) is the constant strive for approval, respect and/or attention from the environment. The "disease to please" is one form, another one is the "disease to impress". Different as those two might seem, what they and all related strategies have in common is that they heavily depend on positive feedback from the social group. While those strategies work well as long as this positive feedback can be achieved, they drain quite some energy, and on the long run heavily erode self-esteem. Given that many of the other strategies presented here require self-esteem to work properly, it's often hard to get away from this strategy after having used it for some time. But also using this strategy for a longer time has many disadvantages, because it needs a constant increase in intensity to work. This is mostly due to the environment getting used to the player's behaviour and requiring higher dosages of it in order to still give the same amount of positive feedback. For example, people might compliment someone on being slim, but after a while they get used to it, so in order for them to still notice it, the person in question needs to become even slimmer. For someone depending on this strategy, this might well be a jump start into anorexia nervosa. Other frequently found extreme forms are codependency (also known as helper syndrome), workaholism, plastic surgery (taken to the extreme by certain celebrities), various forms of attention seeking, and of course loss of any kind of individuality.
Adventure seeking finally is a strategy that is popular especially amongst younger players, and usually pursued either by extreme sports or extensive traveling. While a good addition to any of the previous strategy, it's barely usable as a stand-alone strategy, mostly because the world at some point runs out of [reasonably safe] sports or [reasonably safe] places.
Many other popular strategies are very similar to those already described. Going for power for example is very similar to going for money, with similar advantages and drawbacks. Religion is mostly a more community oriented version of escapism. Excessive partying doubles as drug usage and attention seeking. Focus on learning is similar to the working strategy. Extreme altruism is another variant on the approval seeking strategy, and can double as working strategy (in social work) and even triple as escapism by concentrating on other persons' problems instead of the own ones. Gambling and other behavioural addictions are close to drug usage, both in effects and outlook. Spending a lot of time on the Internet can slide between escapism and approval/attention seeking, depending on the online activities. (Bloggers such as me seek approval, trolls seek attention, and youtube watchers seek distraction from their own lifes.) Intense sex seeking behaviour [outside of relationships] can either be a very cynical form of the love strategy, or a variant of approval seeking. Hopeless romanticism is a mixture of the love strategy and escapism. Strategies based on friends and family are closely related to the love strategy. And so on.
Mixed strategies
Now that I've presented a bunch of strategies that don't work, let's look into strategies that do. As with many games, the strategies that work best are mixed strategies. Looking at all the strategies above, they all only go wrong in their extreme forms, but can give good results as long as their drawbacks can be absorbed somehow.
Take love for example. The big problem here is not that the strategy is inherently flawed, it's just that it can go down very far in unlucky circumstances. It's therefore very dangerous as a pure strategy, but can work very well if combined with another strategy to fall back to in case things go wrong. Indeed some of the strongest strategies I've seen put a very strong emphasis on love, but always have a backup strategy ready and can pull out when things go badly. In short, love can be a very valuable part of a mixed strategy, as long as a player "knows when to fold 'em". Admittedly, most of us probably need to fall hard once or twice before learning that hope is not a strategy (though hopeless romantics will argue about that).
Similar to a good finance portfolio, a good life strategy therefore contains a lot of very different aspects, which might well mean combining all of the pure strategies mentioned before. A good portfolio might for example contain some "safe" strategies, such as work or learning, and some risky but profitable ones like love or adventure seeking.
Tactics
Reminder for the not so game theory savvy people out there: Strategy is the long term plan, tactics is the short term procedure used to carry out the strategy. Some of these tactics could also be considered smaller strategies, since they are not broad enough to be used as pure strategies, but are rather long-term for tactics.
Other than strategies, the available tactics in life are rather manageable, but often underestimated. Some examples of notable tactics in life are:
- Health care. Almost obligatory part of every strategy.
- Humour. Very valuable for almost all strategies (except maybe religion), but often underrated.
- Self-confidence. Also valuable in virtually all strategies.
- Relaxation, inner calmness. Popular especially in eastern traditions, useful in almost all strategies.
- Distraction. Basically a short-term version of escapism, and as such quite useful in some situations.
- Self-pity. Efficient for cushioning setbacks, but counterproductive when used excessively.
- Social interaction. Almost all strategies involve a lot of interaction amongst humans and therefore benefit from interaction skills.
- Empathy. Closely related, it is also valuable in virtually all strategies.
- Honesty. Roughly balanced between positive and negative effects. If used consequently, the positive effects will after some time start to prevail, and can therefore be part of a long term strategy.
- Arrogance, devaluation. Frequently used as a counter mechanism in strategies that drain self-esteem. Helps to create a false feeling of self-esteem by looking down onto others, but causes enough other problems on its own, especially in strategies dependent on positive feedback from other people.
- Passive-aggressive behaviour. Wide spread, though not very effective.
- Denial. Prevents some of the negative effects of realizing that a strategy went wrong, but also prevents or at least reduces motivation for change.
- Copying. Imitating another player's strategy as a substitute for developing one for your own. Requires similar goals and player attributes in order to work at all, and is dangerous even in those cases. Can also be played as a stand-alone strategy, or, more precisely, as a tactics without a strategy to serve. Depending on whether one or more persons are copied it's either akin to following someone else home after having forgotten one's own address, or randomly following people in a shopping mall hoping to find what you are looking for, without even knowing what you are looking for.
- Perfectionism. While it sometimes can improve things, it often is just a huge waste of time. (For example, it just made me spend a lot more time onto this posting than I had planned.)
- Last but certainly not least: Reflection. Helps evaluating the current situation and fine tuning or modifying both strategy and tactics.
One game option that should not go unmentioned at this point is suicide, i.e. a voluntary premature opt-out of the game. I generally wouldn't consider it a good option unless you don't mind missing a significant part of the game, your current game score is already below zero
and it's very likely that from that point it will only go further down, or at least stay significantly far below zero for a significantly long time. Of course, "significant" here is a very subjective measure. Suicide certainly doesn't give a positive end result, but I acknowledge that in some situations, the best thing to hope for is to end non-negative. That being said, I personally have the feeling that many people are opting for it too quickly as a fast way to reset their score to zero, rather than trying to go through the negative phase and getting back into the positive region again.
Replay value
What kind of replay options are available depends a lot on the religious system used. In some systems, for example Christianity and Atheism, there is basically no replay possible. Christianity offers a kind of follow-up game though that I haven't tested yet.
Other systems offer replay, either with or without preservation of information. While some players fancy the idea of starting over new while keeping all the information gathered in the first play, I personally think that making up your strategy as you go along is part of the fun of the game.
The alternative is starting over without the gathered information (or simply in an environment where the gathered information is useless, which can be achieved quite effectively by random starting positions and values). The second game would therefore start basically with the same preconditions as the first. While I wouldn't mind another round under these conditions, I don't really see the point.
Rather interesting however is the karma variant, in which the starting position in the next game depends to some extent on the performance in the previous one, making it somewhat similar to card games like Career Poker.
Verdict
Life is an extremely complex game, and figuring out good strategies is in fact one of the most interesting things about it. As with many other games, how much fun you have playing it depends a lot on how you play it and how well you play. Let's face it, Chess is no fun either when you have no idea what's going on, and/or when you throw a tantrum about every lost piece.
Still, there is a lot of randomness and a lot of unbalanced concepts. Even things that follow rules often appear to happen randomly. Don't get me wrong, randomness can very well keep a game interesting, but in this case it's just too much for my taste, especially because there is no effective mechanism to level it out. Also the imbalance between randomly assigned player attributes is just gross.
I very much like the basic idea of the game and most of the time enjoyed playing it so far, but at this stage I'd consider it an early prototype at best.
-- Birgit
