Upcoming Riskgaming Events
After a bunch of fun in December launching Powering Up, our Riskgaming scenario on China’s electric vehicle market, we will be debuting our next game on the future of biotech later this month in New York City and Los Angeles. Come join! It’s a fun, cocktail-style setup similar to our DeepFaked and DeepSixed game that explores the radical inventions coming out of biotech the next few years and how we should respond.
No biotech or Riskgaming experience required. Just curiosity for the future of technology.
As with all of our events, we are constrained by fire code, so do sign up with alacrity below:
- Flatiron, New York City, Thursday February 20 from 5:00pm ET to 8:00pm ET
- Marina Del Ray, Los Angeles, Wednesday February 26 from 5:00pm PT to 8:00pm PT
Happy Presidents’ Day!
It’s Presidents’ Day in the United States on Monday, so enjoy the long weekend for those who can.
We will return to our regularly scheduled column next week.
Podcast: Luck rules our lives, so why don’t we teach more about it?
Laurence Pevsner and I talked with Nicholas Rush Smith, director of the Master’s Program in International Affairs at The City College of New York and its Graduate Center. We talk about the power of play, how dopamine affects the learning cycle, why losing is the best education for winning, and luck and contingency in international relations.
Feel free to listen to the entire conversation, but here’s a condensed and edited version of my favorite highlights. Nick joined us for a runthrough of Powering Up, which is where we started the conversation.
Nick Smith: I played Patrick Wong, who is running the China aspect of U.S. General. I felt pretty invested in Patty by the end of round one. I was reading his little bio, I was like, "Oh, man. This guy seems like he's got the future, but he's got this very difficult set of internal politics that he's going to be dealing with Detroit." I was quite invested in how Patty, as an individual, was going to fare.
The emotion that comes with that can be incredibly valuable because, while we often talk about games and rational strategies, the fact is that our rational strategies are affected by the emotions that we bring. And in fact, rationality and emotion are deeply connected with one another. And so, after round one, realizing I'm really doing a bad job gave me impetus to pull back both for the company generally, and then for Patty as an individual.
Danny Crichton: Last year on the podcast, I talked to Kelly Clancy, who wrote a book called Playing With Reality: How Games Have Shaped Our World. One of the things she emphasizes is the dopamine loop. That the way we learn is by surprise. We're in the woods, something surprises us, something is dangerous, something is safer. We're hungry, the food works or it doesn't work. We learn from that.
When I look at international relations and international economics, so much can be textbook or case studies. I'm reading this and I'm like, "Yeah. It makes sense. Okay. Yeah. Facts, everything's logical." And you forget.
When you actually have to play this role and you have to play this character, and then someone backstabs you in scene four. Or, in your case, you got into a rut because you made a decision in the first scene or two and you're like, "Shit. I really screwed up. I need to turn this boat around immediately." That's a dopamine hit. And it may not be a positive one, but it was an unexpected one. You're not going to forget how you got out of that slump and caught up.
A lot of it is kind of negative, but it's also much more realistic to a competitive market.
Laurence Pevsner: One of the books the CEO of Osmo, a portfolio company, gave to us was A Theory of Fun by Raph Koster, a game designer. He argues that the losers tend to learn a lot more than the winners. If you just win, then you're like, "I'm so great, I don't need to learn anything." But if you lose, then that's where the real learning comes in. And that's the whole point of a game simulation environment; this is a place where it's okay to lose. It's okay to be wrong, and you're going to learn from it.
One of his other points is about, in game designer terms, called the skin of a game. What's the story around the game versus the actual function and design and rules? There's a lot of debate in game design about whether the skin matters. But he suggests imagining a game where there's a well, and you, as the player, are trying to fit different-sized people into the well. They're bodies, essentially, and you're trying to just make a perfectly neat stack in the well.
It’s a horrific concept, right? You're basically imagining a concentration camp burial or something. But it's also, from a game design perspective, Tetris. And this is one of these things where the skin matters so much. The emotional valence of playing Tetris would be completely different with that sort of skin on top of it.
Nick Smith: Well, and it's also interesting thinking about the difference between the rule-bound nature of a game and the unbounded nature of play. We often think of games as, well, you play a game. But the reality is that play is a free-form activity that children do without rules or where making up the rules is part of the play. That is slightly different from a game like chess, where the rules are very strongly set.
David Graeber's Utopia of Rules has some really interesting reflections on this dynamic, this relationship between rules and play. And he makes an argument that, on the one hand, play is beautifully freeing. But play also has a kind of terrifying quality that leads us to want the rules.
So for example, imagine existing in a world of playful gods. There'd be no worse world than having a playful god sitting over top of us, precisely because it would be such a god who'd be completely unfettered.
As I was finishing up his book in the last couple of weeks, it made me think about the way in which Ian Curtiss, your game designer, would bring in these random events at the end of every turn in Powering Up. He was a kind of godlike figure who was playing around with us, announcing news out of the blue that would fundamentally reshape the conditions under which we were playing.
And frankly, it had that kind of terrifying god-like quality to it. Every time, he would say, "All right, new news." And honestly, I would shrink in my chair.
Danny Crichton: As a side note, my favorite part about Utopia of Rules is the post office. I had no idea that in the 1800s, the federal government was essentially the post office. Something like 75, 80% of all federal jobs were the post office masters of all these small cities all across America. If you think about it, it makes sense. The post is the only way to get information from the West Coast to the East Coast. But I was blown away by that.
But I think you're getting at something Kelly was also getting at with her book, which is why do we care about games and chance and gods? She has multiple chapters on that as well. You are in this world that is unstructured, things happen randomly, you're grasping for some sort of metaphor for, what is happening to me? Why did I have all this bad luck?
We, as story creators, are always looking for a way to understand what's happening to us. Chance, probability, dice rolls — those are metaphors for saying, look, every day, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.
Nick Smith: Totally. The language of chance is itself a story we tell ourselves about the structure of the market. So, to build on both your points about narrative, part of what I told myself about these cards is, this is really bad luck. But, as you've since explained to me, those were loaded dice. I was assuming that they were fair dice, in part because I had an opaque view of what the structure of the game was. The narrative of bad luck helped me get through it, but it also, in its own way, has the potential to deceive multiple decisions.
Danny Crichton: I think if you look at the political science literature and the philosophy literature, there's been a growing subfield of “luck studies,” if you will, of people who get lucky in their careers. One of the counterpoints to, say, meritocracy is, well, some people get lucky early on for whatever reason, they have a network effect that grows very early, and without that, they would never have succeeded. There's so much stochastic calculus going on in everyone's lives that you have to have systems to undo that or level the playing field.
I have not seen as much about luck in the international relations field, despite the fact that it feels like luck plays an even larger role there, just given the complexity of the international system. Think of classic chaos theory. It seems like luck emerges from that system much more than even domestic politics.
Nick Smith: I think the term of art would be contingency. Contingency is certainly something IR theorists have thought an awful lot about. One of my favorite books on this is a book by Christopher Clark on the origins of World War I, called The Sleepwalkers.
One of the things that he argues quite explicitly is, look, you cannot understand the origins of a gigantic event like World War I without understanding both the contingent structure of events and the ways in which people at the time were telling stories about what caused those events. As an example of this, he's got this extraordinary chapter on the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Which, I have to admit, prior to reading Clark's book, I didn't realize what a complicated event the actual assassination was.
Ultimately, somebody shoots the Archduke, but instead of going to the hospital, he gives a speech. It's amazing. He basically says, "I come here to visit you people, and this is how you repay me, by shooting at me while injured?" I mean, it's kind of unbelievable. And then, of course, he dies. And talk about contingency. It is bad luck on a certain level, but it's also just a really bad decision to not go to the hospital.
But in the wider world of Europe at the time, this guy's bad contingent decisions very quickly gets narrativized in this nationalistic framework that Austro-Hungarians, et cetera, have to defend their empire.
To think back to the structure of Powering Up, it's amazing how quickly people come to adopt narrative roles. Like me as Patty, I very quickly decided, "all right. I'm going to be a mover and shaker here." And again, that's a really great part of the learning, is that the emotion drives outcomes.
🔊 Listen to the full episode of “Luck rules our lives, so why don’t we teach more about it?”
Lux Recommends
- Peter Hébert enjoyed reading about the diamond industry’s crisis amid the rise of lab-grown alternatives in Bloomberg’s “The $80 Billion Diamond Market Crash Leaves De Beers Reeling.” "The pain is spreading across the world: Chinese retailers have been shipping back tens of millions of dollars of unsold gems every month; Botswana, which hosts De Beers’ largest mining operations, has voted in a new ruling party for the first time in six decades as plunging diamond revenue reverberates through the economy; in India, factories have been shuttered and put up for sale.”
- Grace Isford recommends Sebastian Raschka’s essay on “Understanding Reasoning LLMs.” “Developing a DeepSeek-R1-level reasoning model likely requires hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars, even when starting with an open-weight base model like DeepSeek-V3. This can feel discouraging for researchers or engineers working with limited budgets. The good news: Distillation can go a long way.”
- Laurence loved Tim O’Reilly’s latest essay, “The End of Programming as We Know It.” “It is not the end of programming. It is the end of programming as we know it today. That is not new. The first programmers connected physical circuits to perform each calculation. They were succeeded by programmers writing machine instructions as binary code to be input one bit at a time by flipping switches on the front of a computer.”
- One Riskgaming reader (and me) really enjoyed this piece from Frank Hoffman on “Risk: A Weak Element in U.S. Strategy Formulation” (PDF) from the Joint Forces Quarterly. “Too often reservations or questions about key assumptions are seen as bureaucratic resistance, instead of what professional planners expect from a rigorously structured method.”
- Finally, Laurence, Deena Shakir and our scientist-in-residence Sam Arbesman all enjoyed Charles C. Mann’s essay in The New Atlantis on “We Live Like Royalty and Don’t Know It.” “[Thomas Jefferson] lived in a world of horse-drawn carriages, blazing fireplaces, and yellow fever. But what most separates our day from his is not our automobiles, airplanes, and high-rise apartments — it is that today vast systems provide abundant food, water, energy, and health to most people, including everyone at the rehearsal dinner. In Jefferson’s time, not even the president of the United States had what we have. But few of us are aware of that, or of what it means.”
That’s it, folks. Have questions, comments, or ideas? This newsletter is sent from my email, so you can just click reply.
