Game-Playing

There is just not enough time in one day to do all the things you want and so you just cruise around picking up the little things when you ought to be saving up your cash and energy and resources for the big things. But sometimes scoring little points seems more fulfilling than not scoring anything for a long while as you wait for the big ones. It's a matter of which game you're playing.

Take word games for example: I've realised that the brain power required to find a 12-letter word just doesn't provide the rewards equivalent to finding five 4-letter words in the same time. So the small scores win in things like Scramble. But in Scrabble, even with time limits, a 7-letter word has a huge bonus and is worth thinking about.

Then there are the long-term planning games which allow you to stockpile stuff. Stockpiling without doing anything is the best policy. But that human itch that makes us want to check our stockpiles every few hours and do something with them is the greatest enemy of rational policy. I noticed today that somebody, by stockpiling without fighting, had built up a huge personal resource level while remaining at a low accomplishment level. This fellow was thus able to remain under the radar, immune to harassment and happy to just bum around doing... nothing.

There are implications in these small, perhaps petty, games that we play on Facebook or in real life. These implications are all part of game theory, that esoteric combination of psychology and statistics. They are played out on a larger scale in diplomacy, politics, economics and various social milieux. Do you work on safety? Is it better to emphasize health? Entertainment or culture, which is better and can they be the same thing? What role does science play? Or a huge workforce? Shall we go for prosperity at all costs, hoping that the others will follow?

And the biggie: if you give up all things for the sake of the kingdom of heaven, how does that change the world?