Learning to Lose

Is this Loss?

My single biggest weakness as a player of games – nay, as human being- is that I basically don’t know how to lose. That might sound like a weird thing to say given how much losing I do, but it’s true: losing is an art form all of its own, and learning to do it gracefully is important.¹ Recently, as part of my self-training in Getting Better At Losing, I’ve incorporated a mantra-like slogan into my internal dialogue:

Sometimes you win, sometimes you learn.

Now, astute philosopher-kings will notice that this mantra isn’t actually true. In fact, one of the brutal facts about games with variance and imperfect information is that ‘randomness’ slows down learning. You won’t always know for sure if you could have won a game with better play, or if the random access agenda lottery was simply not going to pan out for you. So, losing doesn’t equal learning by default. You have to work to extract lessons from some losses, even the inevitable ones!

All games have “problems”, so don’t chalk this next statement as a criticism or clickbaity hot-take - but Netrunner has an issue where it often happens that you feel like you can win, but you’re actually dead on board. You can call this the 6-0 Problem: you have 6 points, they have nothing, but you’re not going to win. MtG has this too in some matchups: you’re playing burn, you get them to 2 life, you’re at 20, but you have an empty hand and they have a full grip of countermagic and a Batterskull² just hit the stack. You’re dead. It doesn’t feel like you’re dead, but you’re very dead.

In Netrunner this happens most often as Corp, where you’ve scored a bunch of agendas, but they have you on remote and R&D lock, and you have nothing in HQ or R&D to alter that outcome. You’re dead. It doesn’t feel like you’re dead, but you’re very dead. Alternatively, as Runner, you might have stolen 6 points, but you’re on 2 credits, 2 irrelevant cards in hand, 1 click, and you just saw Punitive on top of R&D. Same deal.

It gets worse though- in the Corp case above, sometimes you’re not actually dead dead. You’re just 97.2% dead. If you can somehow get the exact cards in hand and dodge the worse possible Maw triggers for 3 turns in a row, you can win! Should you play it out?

This is where learning to lose comes in. The answer depends on what you are doing. Are you playing for a Top 16 cut spot at Continentals? Then absolutely yes, you try and dig for that 2.8% outer you champion you. But where I struggle is that I sometimes burn 20 minutes of my precious free time on a casual Jnet lobby game for no damn reason.

This should be a larger UI element.

The other aspect to “learning to lose” is accepting loses without it eroding your sense of self-worth. Netrunner is a demanding game- the rules are complicated, there are many cards with unique lines of text or effects, they have surprising/unintuitive conditional clauses, there’s a ton of memory baggage, every board position has imperfect information with combinatorial possibilities, how you play can change on the matchup and even opponent pilot. I take every loss as evidence of my cognitive shortcomings, which can start to make my pastime look a lot less fun.

RTFC, you do know how to read right?

Managing Expectations

It’s important to remember that to be a contender at something like Netrunner you need-

1. Reps and dedication. I am not playing for multiple hours on Jnet every day, or even every week. Some people simply have more willingness to dedicate time to being good at ANR, and they will always have percentage over me. End of story.

2. Focus and vitality. I have a somewhat demanding day job which eats up a lot of my mental stamina. So even when I do decide to boot up Jnet on a Wednesday at 730pm EST, I’m not exactly playing fresh. The youngster on the other side might be awake and full of Adderall vs. my aging prefrontal cortex and a cranky arthritic foot.

3. Luck. Sometimes I am playing fresh and focused; have been getting a lot of reps; and playing a proven deck to the best of my ability and the cards just do not cooperate. It’s not chess.

Something I do sometimes to get over a loss streak is boot up a smurf and just absolutely crush some unsuspecting soul with the most NPE garbo I can find on NRDB. Why? Because I’m allowed to and it’s a little hilarious. I’m sure I’m on the receiving end of that treatment some percent of the time too, so fuck it. Hey, this is Rapa-Nui’s Netrunner Blog, not Mr. Roger’s Prosocial Ethical Kumbaya Story Circle Netrunner Blog³.

Tilt

This word apparently originates from pinball. I thought it was from poker, but it makes sense: you get frustrated with the pinball machine’s inherent variance, and you decide to literally tilt the machine so the ball goes where it is “supposed” to. Tilting in card games manifests as making analytically inferior decisions due to wanting a higher variance outcome. You feel you are “owed” a win by fate, so you just say “screw it YOLO” and surprise surprise there’s Mr. Punitive again.

I tilt under a variety of circumstances – my opponent is playing something that induces analysis paralysis/despair: my brain starts yelling “what am I supposed to dooooooo” and analytical thought ceases. Another is when I experience a high variance negative outcome: Deep Dive R&D with 16 cards and 3 agendas but hit 0. “why am I even playing this”. Yet another is when my opponent plays extremely slowly and I’m trying to get reps. “what a waste of time”

Learning to lose means learning to not let these circumstances dictate my internal emotional state; to retain an air of stoicism even in the face of absurdity or adversity. To some degree, I don’t think I can eliminate tilt- I play games in part to feel things going full-blown Spock is simply not my style. The main thing I can work on is trying to figure out a way to enjoy my wins as much as I do, without allowing myself to take the losses as hard. Easier said than done. One thing I can’t really do is simply go in with the expectation that I’m 100% dead money- I know I play worse when I’m already convinced of the inevitability of losing, so I avoid that mindset as much as possible.

Enjoying Losing

One of the things I like about Netrunner is that more than almost any other competitive game, losing can be surprisingly fun. Netrunner has a somewhat high tendency compared to other CCGs to create “nail biter” end game states, where the winner of a match can boil down to access lottery or finding the right card with a few ‘click to draw’ actions or calling a bold bluff. Losing these can be (relatively) great, especially when I felt both my opponent and I played well and that my opponent totally understands that things could have gone very differently. When I get this feeling, it makes me want to play more, and losing really can feel like a learning experience. I find that this type of game is also extremely prosocial: the GG WP at the end comes across reverberating with honesty rather than as a mere courtesy. In general, I think NSG’s vision for the game has generally channeled it in that direction, as we have less ultra-lopsided/polarized matchups in the meta at the moment.

Let’s say I’m testing two decks. Deck A seems to give me a 55% win rate vs. Reg Anarch, but the games are lopsided: if they Bankhar very early, it’s kinda rough. Deck B seems to give me a 50% win rate, but even games that I lose end up in “nailbiter” type situations. It’s interesting to consider whether I should look very closely at how variance has broken in those “close game” end states, because it’s possible that deck B is actually better, but variance nudged the percentages a bit lower. It’s also worth considering if I’m just going to have a better time in the tournament playing Deck B: at least I’m going to always be “in it”, rather than have some type of polarized non-game. Or maybe, the correct choice for a competitive event is actually the opposite for someone who still struggles with emotional regulation: just play the lopsided deck and shrug it off if they Turn 1 Bankhar. I haven’t figured this one out for myself yet.

Dear reader: how do you cope with losses of win-and-in matches? How do you deal with losing streaks? Do you have tilt-prevention strategies? What’s the worse kind of loss in ANR? Share your thoughts in the comments!

1. Note: I try not to be sore loser, which is a different type of immaturity, and have thankfully gotten better at that- although we all falter from time to time.

2. For people born after 1772 CE, that’s a resilient card with a life-gaining ability.

3. “What happens if you lose when you’re playing the allegedly NPE deck?” you might ask. I mean, it happens! I usually just stop playing at that point. Probably for the best.