The Glory Of Competition
I was watching a sports game and reflecting on the nature of competition. For every winner, there must be a loser. And for all participants (or teams) except one, their run must end in defeat. It seems tragic, but I don’t think it’s as simple as “winning is good” and “losing is bad”.
I’ve written before about having an effective competitive mentality, but here I want to write about what makes competition so great. I’m sure I’m not the first to express this idea, but I think competition is about so much more than winning. So where to start?
Well, first, there’s the struggle of taking up a task and facing off against someone else, knowing that you may not succeed. I find that struggle to be incredibly enjoyable, of taking up a challenge of your own volition (that part is important) and committing yourself to performing at the highest level that you can. I think that video games are an excellent space for individual struggles, where you can largely customize a puzzle of sorts to complete and make the rules yourself. There is a great diversity of different challenges and skills to be honed in video games, and the obstacles you are up against will usually comply with the difficulty you set up.
But in a competition with another human, you often won’t be able to choose all the rules. This is especially true of competitions involving large numbers of people, and this rule applies to video games as well. If you pick a ruleset for playing a multiplayer game, you may be able to control your actions, but you won’t have influence over the rules your opponent uses. Self-imposed challenges will often not be reciprocated by another human. But if you can find a game with a series of rules that you are willing to operate within, you will often find a far greater diversity of experiences than you could without other people, albeit within the rules that you both have agreed to.
I think there’s something beautiful about two or more people putting all of their effort into a task, knowing that victory is uncertain, but having decided that either the possibility of victory or everything that comes with the experience regardless of victory are worth the effort. But it isn’t just about the moment; there’s also something amazing about the preparation that precedes the moment. For people of varying levels of talent and ambition, they may spend only an hour a week or longer than a full-time job’s worth of effort leading up to that game, but either way, that preparation will speak for itself when it’s time to enter the field of battle.
I also want to emphasize the varying levels of ambition in particular, as it’s an aspect of competition that is often implicitly relevant, but is not always mentioned explicitly. People compete with so many different goals in mind. For some, the goal is the challenge in the moment. For others, it’s watching the fruits of their preparation beforehand bloom. Still others are there to be part of a community and form some social bond or reach a particular level of skill. And of course, there’s those who want to become the absolute best they can be. Which one motivates me? Most of them (did you expect me to say all?).
These differences in motivation manifest in the way players perform: for example, those who want to be challenged may handicap themselves, perhaps by adding extra limitations, like playing a tennis game with only their weaker hand or intentionally picking a weaker team to try to carry that team to victory. Those who want to actualize their preparation may discover new tactics that other players haven’t explored yet. Those who want to be part of a community may try to perform in a way that will make them popular, appealing to exciting performances that the crowd respects or showmanship, even potentially at the expense of an easier victory. Those who want to reach a particular level of skill may use strategies that stop working above that level in order to take the path of least resistance, like lobbing the ball repeatedly in tennis against players who aren’t good enough to spike it back. Finally, those who want to be the best they can be may attempt difficult strategies and mentally prepare themselves to suffer short-term failures in order to reach perfection and ascend to the top of the Pantheon in due time. Try watching a favorite player or team of yours while thinking about this and you just might learn more about why they stepped onto the proverbial court.