3 ms·

As the title implies, the game was designed to be a lot like real life, and it sounds like that from your POV it has succeeded.

epistasis 7y ago
Reminds me of the story of the lucky coin: > If 1024 fair coins are each tossed 10 times, chances are good (> 63%) that at least one will come up heads 10 times in a row; and that coin will be proud to explain how its skill, faith, guts & determination made its achievement possible, and how that combo can work for you too. https://twitter.com/bayesiangirl/status/1214753289528434688?s=21 https://twitter.com/bayesiangirl/status/1214753289528434688?...
- dagav 7y ago
  And the 1,048,576 other coins who never tried to flip, because they knew that getting 10 in a row was just luck, will live lives of quiet desperation.
- misterbwong 7y ago
  I get your (and parent/grandparent's) points but this line of thinking leads to unnecessarily cynical and pessimistic thinking rather than recognition that success/failure are inherently probabilistic. Yes, plenty is out of our control and luck is often ignored. Yes, some people get really lucky and some people get really unlucky and it sucks. However, this doesn't mean that "skill, faith, guts, & determination" have nothing to do with their success. These behaviors/traits increase your chances at success and positive outcomes, period.
  - lukifer 7y ago
    It's a paint-mixing problem: every success story is some blend of skill, merit, grit, pre-existing resources, and dumb luck; and post-hoc, it's non-trivial to tease out the exact causes and proportions in a success story. From the point of an individual actor, I agree: it's always correct to maximize your agency, knowing full-well that there are factors outside your control that might unfairly sink you (or, unfairly cause someone to out-compete you despite shortcomings). That in no way contradicts the idea that there may be ecosystemic benefits to providing resources to maximize the odds of success. To use a trivial example: if I'm a hardware vendor hosting an app store, the success of each app will be a blend of skill and luck. But if I provide tools like ratings, analytics, and discoverability, I can potentially increase the odds that meritocratic apps succeed. (Take it as read that poor interventions could also make this go the other direction.) One curious quirk is that in the space of game design, this luck/skill dichotomy is flipped on its head, and turned into an explicit goal: that a satisfying game should permit the winner to believe they won on skill, while the loser believes they lost on luck. There's a great talk from MtG creator Richard Garfield on the subject [0]; I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions what inferences we should draw from this in the "game" of market competition. :) [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av5Hf7uOu-o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av5Hf7uOu-o
- Natsu 7y ago
  As a counter-point, there's also the tale of the FPS, where the person who has spent 10,000 hours mastering the game will invariably hear that he's a cheating, hacking n00b when he beats the same guy 20 times in a row due to "luck" despite not using any cheats, because the other guy is an idiot with no strategy who can't even aim.
  - dorgo 7y ago
    On the other hand noobs are more likely to score by pure luck. In poker there is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_beat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_beat
- refurb 7y ago
  This is overly black and white thinking. “Because luck is involved, it’s only luck that matters.” When in reality, it’s luck and effort that matter. You can’t control the luck part, but you can control the effort part. It's similar to health - a great deal of how healthy you are has to do with luck (e.g. genetics). If someone said "the health game is rigged so there is no use in trying to be healthy" we'd think they were nuts.
  - epistasis 7y ago
    > Because luck is involved, it’s only luck that matters. I don't think that's a reasonable conclusion from the story, it's setting up a situation that is pure luck, and asserting that people will take credit for their luck. It's not saying that everything in the real world is actually luck.
vsareto 7y ago
Give everyone 10x the bank's cash as inheritance and you'll also learn a lot of real life lessons from it.
- jandrese 7y ago
  A more realistic solution would be to have one player start with half of the bank and already owning most of the properties. Two other players start with the regular starting cash. Everybody else starts with nothing. Then they must praise the first player for being such a stunning businessman if he wins.
  - vsareto 7y ago
    A bunch of rich people competing with one another even though they have everything they'll ever need is pretty realistic too.

epistasis 7y ago

Reminds me of the story of the lucky coin: > If 1024 fair coins are each tossed 10 times, chances are good (> 63%) that at least one will come up heads 10 times in a row; and that coin will be proud to explain how its skill, faith, guts & determination made its achievement possible, and how that combo can work for you too. https://twitter.com/bayesiangirl/status/1214753289528434688?s=21 https://twitter.com/bayesiangirl/status/1214753289528434688?...

dagav 7y ago
And the 1,048,576 other coins who never tried to flip, because they knew that getting 10 in a row was just luck, will live lives of quiet desperation.
misterbwong 7y ago
I get your (and parent/grandparent's) points but this line of thinking leads to unnecessarily cynical and pessimistic thinking rather than recognition that success/failure are inherently probabilistic. Yes, plenty is out of our control and luck is often ignored. Yes, some people get really lucky and some people get really unlucky and it sucks. However, this doesn't mean that "skill, faith, guts, & determination" have nothing to do with their success. These behaviors/traits increase your chances at success and positive outcomes, period.
- lukifer 7y ago
  It's a paint-mixing problem: every success story is some blend of skill, merit, grit, pre-existing resources, and dumb luck; and post-hoc, it's non-trivial to tease out the exact causes and proportions in a success story. From the point of an individual actor, I agree: it's always correct to maximize your agency, knowing full-well that there are factors outside your control that might unfairly sink you (or, unfairly cause someone to out-compete you despite shortcomings). That in no way contradicts the idea that there may be ecosystemic benefits to providing resources to maximize the odds of success. To use a trivial example: if I'm a hardware vendor hosting an app store, the success of each app will be a blend of skill and luck. But if I provide tools like ratings, analytics, and discoverability, I can potentially increase the odds that meritocratic apps succeed. (Take it as read that poor interventions could also make this go the other direction.) One curious quirk is that in the space of game design, this luck/skill dichotomy is flipped on its head, and turned into an explicit goal: that a satisfying game should permit the winner to believe they won on skill, while the loser believes they lost on luck. There's a great talk from MtG creator Richard Garfield on the subject [0]; I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions what inferences we should draw from this in the "game" of market competition. :) [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av5Hf7uOu-o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av5Hf7uOu-o
Natsu 7y ago
As a counter-point, there's also the tale of the FPS, where the person who has spent 10,000 hours mastering the game will invariably hear that he's a cheating, hacking n00b when he beats the same guy 20 times in a row due to "luck" despite not using any cheats, because the other guy is an idiot with no strategy who can't even aim.
- dorgo 7y ago
  On the other hand noobs are more likely to score by pure luck. In poker there is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_beat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_beat
refurb 7y ago
This is overly black and white thinking. “Because luck is involved, it’s only luck that matters.” When in reality, it’s luck and effort that matter. You can’t control the luck part, but you can control the effort part. It's similar to health - a great deal of how healthy you are has to do with luck (e.g. genetics). If someone said "the health game is rigged so there is no use in trying to be healthy" we'd think they were nuts.
- epistasis 7y ago
  > Because luck is involved, it’s only luck that matters. I don't think that's a reasonable conclusion from the story, it's setting up a situation that is pure luck, and asserting that people will take credit for their luck. It's not saying that everything in the real world is actually luck.

vsareto 7y ago

Give everyone 10x the bank's cash as inheritance and you'll also learn a lot of real life lessons from it.

jandrese 7y ago
A more realistic solution would be to have one player start with half of the bank and already owning most of the properties. Two other players start with the regular starting cash. Everybody else starts with nothing. Then they must praise the first player for being such a stunning businessman if he wins.
- vsareto 7y ago
  A bunch of rich people competing with one another even though they have everything they'll ever need is pretty realistic too.