Only noobs think I'm elitist

Tobold is making grand claims again, telling us all what to do and the correct way to think. Check this one: Winning is not the purpose of playing.

He almost gets it, but continues straight past. "It is the playing itself which is the purpose of a game, not the winning."

Playing for what? Children play to learn. Adolescents play for fun. But adults play to win. Why? Because winning is a source of fun and a way of learning. It's a two-for-one deal.

However I do agree with his support of the 50-50 win-lose condition. We all start in the middle and then lose or win our way to a bracket with our skill peers. At that point we'll run about 50-50, with possible slight movement if we're getting better or worse, relative to other players. If we look at the overall sample, we will almost never see a perfect 50-50, nor should we expect it, since it would only be achieved by a player being placed perfectly in their skill bracket. But we will see a trend toward 50-50.

But to get back to the title of my post, "They believe that they are superior to the rest of the players." Uh, yea. It's called being better than everyone else, and only noobs strive for anything else.

"By de-emphasizing the importance of winning, we get back to the true purpose of playing, the playing itself and having fun. A good match is one where you had fun, regardless whether you won or lost. If you manage to mentally disconnect having fun from winning, you can get a fun:unfun ratio of much better than 50:50, in spite of the perfectly balanced win:loss ratio."
Good idea. Let's not just reward losers, but also not reward winners.

Or we could ask Ghengis Khan whether he unified the warring Mongolian tribes and kicked some serious ass by "having fun, regardless of whether he won or lost" or if he focused on winning, thereby defeating all the losers and securing a place in history. But maybe Tobold already has his place in history. He's the e-blog-famous apologist for losers.