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To this day I am still trying to find a balance between fighting to win, and fighting to learn. Like what the article (below) says, often times winning and learning are at odds. Have a look.



Playing to Win, Part 3: Not Playing to Win
Author: Sirlin

Ok, ok. I’ll let you in on the secret: “playing to win” at all times is counter-productive. If you want to win over the long-term, then you can’t play every single game as if it were a tournament finals. If you did you wouldn’t have time for basic R&D, you’d never learn the quirky nuances that show up unexpectedly at tournaments, and you are likely to get stuck honing sub-optimal tactics.
Basic R&D
Playing to win and playing to learn are often at odds. If you play the game at hand to maximize you chances of winning, then you won’t take the unnecessary risks of trying out new tactics, counters, moves, patterns, or whatever. Playing it straight is the best way to win the game at hand, but at the cost of valuable information about the game that you may need later, and valuable practice to expand your narrow repertoire of moves or tactics.

Here’s a simple example from Street Fighter. Let’s say I know for a fact that one split second from now my opponent will do a particular “super move.” To win the game at hand, the smartest thing to do is just block the move, but that doesn’t teach me a whole lot. How invulnerable is his super move, anyway? Could I have stuck out an early kick that would knock him out of his super? Or could I have waited for the “super flash” to happen (signifying the beginning of his super move) and then done an invulnerable dragon punch 1 frame later? Maybe my invulnerability will last longer than his and I’ll knock him out of it. Maybe his will always win. That’s valuable information to have for the time when you have zero energy and the opponent forces you to block the super move and die. This situation will happen in the tournament, so you better know what your options are.

Very often in “casual play” I will forgo the safe option in order to try possible counters to certain moves. Even if I lose a game when a possible counter turns out not to work, the knowledge gained is well worth it, since I’ll never make that particular mistake again (I hope!). If you really want to play to win, you have to know all the options open to you at every moment, and that doesn’t happen without a lot of disastrous experiments.

This concept applies to pretty much any game, of course. “Will my 6 corsairs really beat his 12 mutalisks in StarCraft?” Or, “I know I have the flak cannon, but will the shock rifle combo work just as well around corners in Unreal Tournament?” You will never know unless you try it.

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