While we wait for our newest Scrub Reporter to talk about life as a new player in Magic: The Gathering, I thought I’d take this week to come clean. I started this column a few years ago as a bright-eyed Magic player with a good sense of self-deprecation. But my “Hey I’m new! Haha don’t I suck?” attitude masked a darker secret: I’m bad at games. All games. Video, card, board…
I’m just no damned good.
I wanted to know if applying game theory to my gaming life could help me get better. Game theory, as described by Roger B. Meyerson in his book Game Theory: Analysis of Conflict, is, “the study of mathematical models of conflict and cooperation between intelligent rational decision-makers.” I thought this course of study could unlock the key to poor track record as a gamer, so I reached out to Professor Laurent Mathevet, professor of economics and game theory at NYU. As he began to describe game theory, I realized this wouldn’t help me in my struggle.
Professor Mathevet explained that there are two main modes of study in game theory. “There’s one that’s more introspective where you make assumptions about people’s ability that may not reflect real-life computational power.” And, he went on, there’s also, “evolutionary, or learning-related, in which case the game is played repeatedly and we learn about each other.” In one set of studies, two ideal players play over and over again, near-perfect from the start. In the second set of studies, the players adapt, evolve, and learn about each other as the games go on.
So could game theory help me be a better player? No, probably not. Mathevet explained that the focus of game theory isn’t to help a person get better at a game, it’s more about analyzing decision-making. “Some people say that game theory does not help people win games,” he offered. “The concept of making mistakes repeatedly, or being in an unstable situation, is assumed away. The idea of game theory is, if we are to play a game many, many times, and learn everything that can be learned, where would we get at the end of time? At the very end, when we’re near-perfect, and we’ve learned everything about each other, what would be the stable point that we reach?”
He goes on to explain how hard it is to study decision-making trends in a wild environment like a game of Magic. “It’s not clear what a mistake is, and what it means to learn. I’m learning about something that’s fixed, and that’s much easier to approach, but if I’m learning about something that’s learning about me, it becomes much more difficult to track. So if you look at a game of tennis, and there’s one player that’s doing worse and worse, it’s not clear whether the other guy isn’t making mistakes, or is learning about the losing player faster.”
But Mathevet did have some advice for me. When I asked his opinion on how I could get better at games, he replied, “I would say: Invest. Invest in knowledge. Basically… learn.” In other words, the more one studies a game, the more one learns the ins and outs of it—and the ins and outs of his or her opponent—the more one can become a better player. The more one can come closer to that hypothetical ideal player that Mathevet and his students study in game theory talk about. As for me? I’ll just keep losing. Because becoming the ideal player sounds like a ton of work.