I see the point you’re getting at, and I agree that there’s a real failure mode here about I’ve been annoyed in similar ways. Heck, I kinda think it’s silly for people to show up to promotions to receive the black belt they earned, but that’s a separate topic.
At the same time, there’s another side of this which is important.
At my jiu jitsu gym there’s a new instructor who likes doing constraint led games. One of these games had the explicit goal of “get your opponents hands to the mat” with the implicit purpose of learning to off balance the top player. I decided to be a little muchkin and start grabbing peoples hands and pulling them to the mat even when they had a good base.
I actually did get social acclaim for this. The instructor thought that was awesome, and used it as an example of how he wanted people to play the games. In his view, as in mine, the point of the game is to explore how you can maneuver to win at the game as specified, without being restrained by artificial limitations which really ought to be accounted for in the game design.
If the new instructor would have tried to lecture us about playing to some underspecified “spirit” of the rules instead of the rules as he described them—and about how we’re not earning social points with him for gaming the system—and was visibly annoyed about this… he would have been missing the point that he’s not earning social points with me, and likely not with the others either. And I wouldn’t much care for winning points with him, if that’s how he were to respond. It’s a filter. A feature, not a bug.
Breaking the game is to be encouraged, and if playing the game earnestly doesn’t suit the intended purpose, “don’t hate the player, hate the game”. In his case, the game wasn’t so broken so as to ruin the game so it turned out to be more fun and probably more useful than I had anticipated. Maybe it wasn’t quite optimal, but it was playable for sure. In your case, the broken game is the sign that calibration isn’t what we care about—because that annoying shit was calibrated, and you weren’t happy about it. What we need is a better scoring rule that weights calibration appropriately. Which exist!
Any time we find ourselves annoyed, there is a learning opportunity. Annoyance is our cue that reality is violating our expectations. It’s a call to update.
I see the point you’re getting at, and I agree that there’s a real failure mode here about I’ve been annoyed in similar ways. Heck, I kinda think it’s silly for people to show up to promotions to receive the black belt they earned, but that’s a separate topic.
At the same time, there’s another side of this which is important.
At my jiu jitsu gym there’s a new instructor who likes doing constraint led games. One of these games had the explicit goal of “get your opponents hands to the mat” with the implicit purpose of learning to off balance the top player. I decided to be a little muchkin and start grabbing peoples hands and pulling them to the mat even when they had a good base.
I actually did get social acclaim for this. The instructor thought that was awesome, and used it as an example of how he wanted people to play the games. In his view, as in mine, the point of the game is to explore how you can maneuver to win at the game as specified, without being restrained by artificial limitations which really ought to be accounted for in the game design.
If the new instructor would have tried to lecture us about playing to some underspecified “spirit” of the rules instead of the rules as he described them—and about how we’re not earning social points with him for gaming the system—and was visibly annoyed about this… he would have been missing the point that he’s not earning social points with me, and likely not with the others either. And I wouldn’t much care for winning points with him, if that’s how he were to respond. It’s a filter. A feature, not a bug.
Breaking the game is to be encouraged, and if playing the game earnestly doesn’t suit the intended purpose, “don’t hate the player, hate the game”. In his case, the game wasn’t so broken so as to ruin the game so it turned out to be more fun and probably more useful than I had anticipated. Maybe it wasn’t quite optimal, but it was playable for sure. In your case, the broken game is the sign that calibration isn’t what we care about—because that annoying shit was calibrated, and you weren’t happy about it. What we need is a better scoring rule that weights calibration appropriately. Which exist!
Any time we find ourselves annoyed, there is a learning opportunity. Annoyance is our cue that reality is violating our expectations. It’s a call to update.