I'm going to take a stab at explaining/translating some of the examples from that article. The first is about "mana screw". In Magic: the Gathering, each player has a deck of 60 cards, of which about 2/5 are "land" or "mana", and the rest of which are "spells". Each turn, players draw one new card, put down one land card if they have it, and play spells whose total cost is less than or equal to the number of lands they have. Costs are typically distributed in a bell curve centered at about 3.5. If a player has too few lands relative to the cost of his spells, he can't play them; this is called "mana screw". If he has too many lands, he won't have spells to play with them; this is called "mana flood". Lands and spells also have color; to play a spell, some number of the lands used must be the correct color or colors.

At the start of the game, each player draws 7 cards, looks at them, and decides to either keep them or mulligan, which means he puts them back, reshuffles, and draws a new hand with only 6 cards. (If the 6 card hand is also bad, he can do it again, getting one less card each time.) If the initial 7 cards are worse than average (too few, too many, or the wrong color lands), then the player chooses between a small certain loss (one less card) and an uncertain large risk (you might not draw the lands you need, and be mana screwed). In practice, most players are strongly biased towards keeping hands they shouldn't, which means accepting the uncertain large risk over the certain small loss.

The second issue is "netdecking". Players can either choose the cards in their deck themselves, or get a deck from the internet, usually by looking at a recent tournament and copying the winner's deck, or if they're really serious about it, guessing which decks they're likely to face, choosing a pool of candidate decks, looking at win/loss statistics, and choosing the deck which gives the best chance. Copying a deck that's known to win is much more effective, but making a deck yourself is more fun. As a convenient side-effect, making your own deck gives an excuse for losing.

The third issue, which the article alludes to but doesn't tackle directly, is that MtG involves a large number of easy decisions, with a small number of hard decisions mixed in but not clearly labeled. Players who think too long about all of their decisions are chided for stalling; on the other hand, players who fail to slow down and think will often lose the game because of doing so. Most players can't tell the difference between a hard decision that requires thought, and an easy decision that can be made quickly; instead, they make all decisions quickly until they know they're on the verge of losing; then they switch to thinking carefully about every decision, but at that point it's usually too late.

I don't know how "Bruce-like" I am in issues of personal goals and so on -- probably about average. But I have a freakishly bad case of the Bruce when it comes to competitive games.

I don't win games. Ever. I played Catan every week for a whole summer -- never won. I haven't won a poker game since I was seven. You don't want to know what happens if I try Mario Kart. I used to go bowling a lot -- I never, ever won. I run slower in a race than when I time myself on my own. Come to think of it, I don't believe I've ever won an argument.

The variety of games I suck at is too broad for it to be a simple matter of lacking a skill: I lose at competitions of strategy, probability, hand-eye coordination, and fitness. No. I have some kind of hang-up against winning. I've won "competitions" that involve taking a test or mailing in an application, but I just can't win if I can see my opponent face-to-face. On some level, I really don't want to.

It's got to be psychological. I suppose the cure would be to find a "game" of something that I actually am skilled at, and defeat someone face to face. The weird thing is, that sounds terrifying. Unlike MOR:Harry, I know how to lose; I don't know how to win.

In another thread, PJEby wrote:

So, as of now, I'd say that story was one of the top 5 most valuable things I've gotten from LW.

Seconded.

Damn, it appears I haven't read the off-topic thread where Magic players were sought after.

So let me state here that Magic was my number one passion between ages 14-20 or so. I sold my collection (including the Power Nine and other goodies) in order to donate to SIAI, though.

(Haven't regretted it, even though Magic is such a hugely fun game.)

Interesting connection here with "Breakdown of Will" (which I finally received and read yesterday): Ainslie hypothesizes (rather convincingly) that pain and negative emotion are also associated with a burst of "reward" -- i.e. attention and interest. This might be where "Bruce" comes from... not to mention other forms of drama addiction.

(I'm tempted to link to this article from my blog as well, but the jargon really does make it a tough read. Maybe I'll wait until it can supplement a more substantive Bruce-related post of my own.)

There's one example of the Bruce Effect that immediately jumps at me because it

a)Has been incredibly active in my life

b)Squares so well with the adaptionist explanation of the Bruce Effect

My chief form of self sabotage has always been with the opposite sex. Someone will hit on me, or my own advances will begin to go somewhere, and I'll do something to bring things to a halt. On present reflection it feels very much like I'm afraid of the challenges that would follow - that flirting with someone I find really attractive feels like embarking on some terrifying balancing act, and the failure is a return to the natural order of things - reassuring and predictable. The kind of thinking that might lead someone to avoid seeking higher status within a peer group which he didn't feel capable of maintaining.

It's possible that naming the part of us that makes us lose is oversimplifying the problem. We can consciously come up with rationalizations for why achieving one result counts as a "win" and another result as a "loss". But clean win/lose states don't exist in real life, which is much more messy. Instead winning and losing is achieving different results.

Is it possible that Bruce is just playing a different game, rather than solely attempting to make "me" lose my game? Bruce may actually be the person who wants things that we can't easily rationalize that we (me and Bruce as one person) want.

I can play a game of bowling against a beautiful woman and tell myself "I want to win this game". However, if Bruce has reason to think that losing is going to help my cause with the woman more than winning, and Bruce knows he wants that woman, then he may try to win his game at the expense of me winning mine. My lazy brain can't come up with the reasons why Bruce want's to throw a gutter ball (to get the woman) and Bruce can't figure out why I'm trying to throw strikes (to achieve my conscious win-state). If Bruce wins then my conscious mind is mad at Bruce for causing the loss without understanding why he did it (my brain is too lazy to figure it out).

Maybe if I beat Bruce then he may similarly be able to make my victory bittersweet without me being able to rationalize the reason for it, thus giving more reason to cave to Bruce in the future.

Sorry, but Rizzo's writing style is absolutely awful, and the content is no better.

I removed the "Recommended Reading" part from the title; I feel this can be implied and I'd hate to see lots of "Recommended Reading" every time something was linked. Hope that's okay, if not you can always edit back.

I have a Magic deck, but I don't often play. That's because Magic is not only an interesting game, its been carefully designed to continually suck more money out of your pocket.

Ever since it was first introduced (I happen to own a first generation deck) the game has been slowly increasing the power levels of the cards so that older cards are less and less valuable and one needs to buy ever more newer cards just to stay competitive.

Add to this the fact they regularly bring out new types of cards that radically shift the power balances in the game and one finds that it becomes a very expensive hobby to keep up with if you want to play with a random assortment of your friends.

So, like Warhammer 40K (another game known for being designed to be a money sink), I've deliberately stayed away from being competitive at. Oh, I have a few decks back from when the game was launched and recently was gifted another few by a friend who wanted to play, and I really do enjoy playing, but I'm not going to let myself get sucked in.

I play magic. Well, at least I used to. Never competitively though, at least not in meatspace (or magic online, apprentice ftw). And I agree - there's a great connection to rationality. One problem with the game though: to truly enjoy it's dynamic nature, which is one of the great things that sets it apart from other games, it takes a significant continuous financial investment in new sets. It's the reason I never played competitively.

I'd wager that there's at least one other mtg player here. How many people are named Zvi?

There's a set of 3 (I think) articles on starcitygames that performed an act of reduction in magic theory. It was a great example that I kept going back to when reading Eliezer's stuff on reductionism. For those that know the terms, the author reduced tempo to a more general notion of card advantage. I'll try to track the articles down.

Edit: here are the articles. If you don't understand magic terminology... sorry. If you do, I think the articles are great from a theoretical perspective. However, from a practical perspective, the traditional notion of tempo may be more useful. I'm probably not a good judge of that, however. For one, I haven't read the articles in a while.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

Arguably, card games in general can be a good tool for learning rationality. I knew that there was no point to dwelling on inaccessible options before I learned cassino, but when I learned cassino, I got to see the good ten sitting on the table and a distinct lack of tens in my hand and really understand that there would be no ten of diamonds for me this time and I should focus on the spades or something.