What is Better Than Winning?
We have all heard that famous quote:
Winning Isn’t Everything. It’s the only thing.
While Vince Lombardi definitely said this, UCLA Bruins Coach “Red” Sanders likely said it first. Regardless of who said it first, virtually every coach since then has repeated some variation of this. And we all know the reasons why. Dedication, effort, the strive to make winning our sole and dedicated focus increases our chances of winning. It is this struggle that we find compelling.
Well, let’s be clear. It is the struggle of two evenly matched teams we find compelling. However, we know from experience that evenly matched contests are not all that common. In fact, many games that have a winner are described as, “meaningless”, or “pointless”.
Is Winning Really The Only Thing?
Is it possible we could play for other reasons? This must be true, given that only one team can win it all. If you have no chance of winning, why play at all? To reframe the question, if winning is not the most important thing, then what could be?
Competition Serves a Biological Purpose
There is an idea among behavioral biologists that a behavior that transcends race, culture, and time likely serves an evolutionary imperative. Virtually every human society we know of had some form of “sports” competition. Why?
Two reasons:
- To train people to perform under pressure
- To identify the “best” so society can extract the maximum benefit from them.
John Wooden called performance under pressure, “Competitive Greatness.” It is possible that performance under pressure may best be developed in humans through competition. The Sioux for example encouraged their boys from a young age to compete in all manner of games (Drury, 2014). These games directly related to developing skills the boys would need to provide for and protect the tribe. “Winning” was how they selected their future leaders, but everyone was expected to contribute. The Sioux raised their next generation of leaders through competition that prepared the braves for the tasks they would have to perform as adults.
But it is not only for performance, competition can also be a tool for society to identify the most qualified. Getting into medical school is notoriously competitive, but so are many of the best schools. Why? Because having a surgeon who is on top of her game when your loved one is on the table would be ideal. Societies strive to allocate their best people against their hardest problems. Leadership is organically manifest when skill and calm, stable, courage confront difficult challenges.
Focus on Growth
To come back to the question if winning is not the most important then what is? What about developing as many people as possible to perform under pressure? If that’s the case then perhaps competition does not have to be limited to an elite few. What if we expand the ideal to be as inclusive as possible? How could we maximize the number of people that benefit? Could we focus on challenging players to grow to their fullest potential? Could we create more opportunities for more people to participate?
I believe we can.
While winning may require single minded determination, creating opportunities for people to compete does not have to be so narrow and rigid. Unfortunately, the attitude created by, “winning is the only thing” has pushed many competitions to allocate a disproportionate number of resources to an increasingly tiny number of competitors — the elite few.
If instead you can focus on maximizing participation and growth, you find opportunities to create a better experience for the majority of competitors.
The Application
Since we do the most work with video games, I’ll use a video game tournament as an example. Most tournaments focus on double (or sometimes single) elimination brackets. However there are other ways to run events. The Swiss Bracket System (developed for chess in the late 19th century) has a very interesting feature. No one is eliminated from competition. That’s right. Every round, everyone keeps playing if possible. And progressively each round, players (or teams) are filtered to their best matched level of competition.
Our own esports open uses a novel form of bubble sort to avoid eliminating players until the very end of the event. We have even pioneered running “competitions” in our Virtual Esports Open with games that have no obvious mechanism for competition such as Minecraft, Animal Crossing, and AmongUs to name a few. The point is we are able to generate community engagement and expand our net to maximize the inclusion and participation to a wider audience. More people feel connected and discover their potential for growth.
Conclusion
While winning feels better than losing, when it comes to developing character, capability, and mental fortitude, winning is not the only thing. Creating an environment where you maximize the potential of as many people as possible?
That may be the only thing that matters.
