Across a Table, Darkly: Learning from Other Players

I spent many years working out at various martial arts school. When I lived in Atlanta it was pretty easy to visit schools, hang out with other practitioners, as well as go to class at your home studio. The things I learned about body mechanics have come in very handy when it comes to keeping a squirming toddler in place long enough to change a diaper. It might sound like I drifted from style to style, but I was pretty much in class four nights a week at the same school. I went through forms, weapons, and sparring with the same people for a long time. But we didn’t get together outside the classroom very often. When we finally did, though, our conversations—though not on martial arts—were long and comfortable, as if we’d been having these talks for years.

So I keep wondering what we’re learning about each other when we sit down with a board game between us?

Sure, boardgames aren’t as physical as the martial arts, and I think that the way my martial friends and I engaged each other on that very basic, physical level had something to do with how our comfort in conversation grew without actually talking to each other. But games reveal the intellectual contact points between players. I’m not suggesting that you must be an academic research scientist to really get together over games. I mean intellectual in the broader sense of all the kinds of thinking you bring along wherever you go.

It’s easy to think of the intellectual as being more abstract than the body, and in many ways it is. But at the same we engage the world pretty much entirely with our brain, so a game—a kind of play that very explicitly stimulates the mind—should reveal a lot about the people around you.

Maybe even things they don’t want you to know.

We can think about issues like analysis paralysis, king making, ‘tells,’ or even ideas about good losers and bad winners are all things we can learn about the other people at the table. But the people we play with learn a lot about us, too. How do you react under pressure, or when a goal is out of reach? Can you continue to have fun even when you’re losing…maybe even losing badly? We learn some very subtle things about each other at the game table. Don’t believe me? Businesses like to run simulations games to learn these very tendencies. And to build teamwork skills, of course.

In my martial arts days, my teacher suggested that I and my classmates go work out with other schools. There comes a point when you know your sparring partner too well and you can get complaisant. So we’d find a lot of other people to work out with, to keep us sharp. But with board games, there’s no reason to push that edge. At least, not with the same issues at stake. We might find more people to game with in order to work on our poker face, to see how we might be interpreting rules, or simply to meet new people over a neutral, fun activity. But playing the same people year after year seems to me a way to learn to be comfortable with others, to deepen friendships and community.

If you and I were to sit down with a game right now, what would we learn? Who know? But it could be the start of a beautiful friendship.

(Thanks to AnnuverScotinExile and Spielstein for the photos.)

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James Engelhardt

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