Mammon in the Executive Suite, or: meaningful suboptimal play
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Together with “Play to Lose”, “Play to Win” has seen an interesting uptick in the last couple of years. I first encountered the phrases in Jesse Ross’ dungeon crawling story game, Trophy Gold. They're among the player principles, which advise you to both ‘play like your character’s life depends on it’ and 'embrace your end, and make it memorable’ when it inevitably comes. The doomed, treasure hunting outcasts you’ll be playing will come to life that way all the better.
You can’t play both to win and to lose. Well, at least not literally, and it’s that contradiction that makes clear Trophy Gold’s principles are about a certain attitude, a certain posture. After all, you’re playing a role in this game. I think a lot of role-playing games share this subversive relationship to "winning" and "losing". It might even be one of the key contrasts between rpgs and other tabletop games, especially their cardboard cousins, board games.
In Games: Agency as Art, C. Thi Nguyen focuses on the type of play that characterizes most conventional board games, sports, and a lot of video games as well. He calls it ‘striving play’. He writes: ‘A striving player acquires, temporarily, an interest in winning for the sake of the struggle.’ Winning, here, could mean gathering the critical amount of victory points, or it could mean staving off losing a game of Tetris. Whatever it is: it’s a goal you strive for to experience how you’ll behave while doing that.
A striving game’s goal must be wholeheartedly pursued. From a meta-perspective, the player is more interested in the struggle than the victory, but in the moment, it’s the victory that counts. In other words: striving play is playing to win, literally. Which—and this is why I’m bringing Nguyen into this—is not quite what Ross has in mind for the players of Trophy Gold.
No, when a role-playing game tells you to "Play to Win", it creates a certain tension. Isn't this game supposed to help us play pretend? Now it's acting like a whole different game altogether. How am I supposed to win the game of storytelling?
Tim Denee's Deathmatch Island makes great use of this tension. In that game, the player characters awaken on a boat, their memories in a jumble. They quickly find some laminated instructions. They've been 'selected to participate' in a game. 'Winning will mean fame, freedom, and unlimited wealth,' the note says. After explaining what will be demanded of them on the island their boat will soon reach—the phrase 'battle royale' tells it all—the note signs off like this: 'Good luck, competitor. Play to win.'
This mantra returns throughout Deathmatch Island. Production, the sinister force behind the game, keeps coming back to it, and in the final stages of the third island the characters will be forced to make a choice: play to win, or break the game. You see, by this point, only the player characters are still alive. If they all choose to break the game, they get a chance to see past the veil and throw a wrench in Production's plans. But if even one of the characters chooses to play to win, it's a fight to the death—with any gamebreakers at a disadvantage.
Taking some cues from hidden role games, Tim Denee here presents a choice between striving or story. Will you trick your fellow competitors into a false sense of rebellion and take that d10 'backstabbers' die? Or will you try to band together for nothing more than the chance to tell a different story about yourself?
Deathmatch Island's Endgame is a prisoner's dilemma that intentionally makes a categorical error. Playing to win gets you a clear, mechanical advantage. Breaking the game gets you into a lot more trouble, all entirely fictional. But: the fiction, of course, is where role-playing happens. That's what I find so interesting about this flirtation with striving. Through contrast, it brings out what this game is all about, namely: narrative.
In striving terms, breaking the game could be described as suboptimal play. You give up your chance to win to do, well, whatever brings all of you together. It's meaningful, sure, but it could also get you killed. In other words, here we reach the other tenant of Trophy Gold's pair again: playing to lose. Only, it's a little softer. It's not losing, per se, but it certainly isn't winning anymore.
I came across another example of meaningful suboptimal play in a game that could've easily been a pure striving game: Two-Hand Path by Mikey Hamm. This is a solo game about being a wizard after an apocalypse, trying to gather supplies and medicine by venturing into dangerous dungeon-like levels. Much has been made of the most eye-catching feature of this game: the character sheet. It's a picture of two hands on which you draw your own power–ups, scars, and tattoo's to record your progress and develop your character.
In Two-Hand Path you cast spells by playing a version of Yahtzee that uses all those dice beyond the regular six-sided ones. Each room in a level asks you to make one or more specific combinations, like a specific total or three-of-a-kind. If there's still enemies in the room after you've given that your best try, you suffer damage.
The rooms have text too, some of that great, compact prose Hamm is known for. Like this bit from the front entrance of the Supermarket:
Automatic doors slide open as you near, panes long since smashed out. Glass crunches beneath your feet. A pack of ghouls huddle in self-checkout, gnawing on old bones.
This sets the tone, but it's like the art on a board game: not unnecessary, certainly, but entirely opt-in. One could easily play Two-Hand Path without giving much attention to the narrative, playing a very fun, push-your-luck type of game.
That is, until you get to the Hotel. 'The war that broke us made them rich,' the introductory text says. Up in the executive suite the devil of greed awaits you: Mammon, guarding a power-up. If you were lucky, you caught the elevator after beating 'the world's largest bouncer'. If your luck stank, you've just fought your way through the atrium and up flights of stairs. Tough fights. The 'Defense Force' in the stairwell takes three different combinations to beat.
Mammon is dressed in silk, surrounded by fresh fruit, French wine and classical art. To beat him, you need four-in-a-row, a 1, and a total of exactly twenty. But there's also an alternative way to "beat" the room, and it's so much easier: cut a deal. That only takes one combination, one that you've seen before: a total of exactly twenty. Isn't that tempting? You'd be trying to make that combination anyway, so you can even see how the fight goes before you decide to sell your dignity for some treasure.
The greed demon deals three whopping damage per round, so cutting a deal is, without a doubt, the most optimal play here. Trying for that four-in-a-row, well, you'd do that just for the fictional honour of your character. That's what it looks like if we stick to the striving lens. From the perspective of narrative, this game challenges you to tough out this last fight, even though you're already hurting. You can't let greed win, not again, not after it already took and disposed of the world itself.
Role–playing games have such an interesting relationship to that second half of their name: their game-play, their mechanics. When I first reached the Executive Suite, some of the language these games were using clicked for me. Trophy Gold and Deathmatch Island aren't just using those terms figuratively. Sure, those treasure hunters and competitors aren't risking their lives for the narrative—they have a goal in mind. But beyond that, these games are borrowing the language of striving games to create a contrast that actually brings out the stories they want to tell.
I wonder if there are other ways for role–playing games to flirt with their board game cousins. I also wonder if other parts of the role–playing hobby relate differently to striving play. I could see games that are more about player competence instead of character narratives have a very different relationship to goal-oriented play.
