> Games are idealizations of combat that leave out some of the most important details.

Well, yes. That's what this blogpost is about.

American sports do NOT have ties: Baseball gets an extra inning, Football goes into overtime. Etc. etc. As such, American strategy is "win or lose", because these games influence our decision making skills and our behavior.

It is the imperfection of games, and how these "imperfect games" apply to our psychology that the article is about. Because American ideology is "win or lose", we are unable to comprehend situations like, say... Afghanistan (where there is no such thing as "win" or "lose").

That "win or lose" mindset is brought upon us and reflected upon Baseball, Basketball, Football, and other games. Our culture creates our society, and that culture and thinking seeps into our strategic thinking of wars.

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Its wrong, but it happens. Because so many of our soldiers play Football, the effects of Football strategy and football analogies grossly affect our thinking of war. Probably to our detriment (but probably beneficial in some circumstances).

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The game of Go, is the big Chinese game of strategy. Warlords and generals from the past 3 millennia have played the game of Go. Surely this has also affected Chinese war and strategy?

Many of Sun Tzu's sayings about war are just as applicable to the Go board game. As such, it is clear that the game of Go has affected war-strategy. The "Beat" of offense, defense, sacrifice... its all there in Go. Its very fundamentally different from Football or Chess, and therefore its easier to see how it influenced Chinese style thinking (contrasting against American / Football style thinking).

In the game of Go, there is "win" or "lose", but its really a reflection upon the territory you gained or lost. Games of Go are often decided by +/- 20 points (ex: I have 180 points an the opponent has 160 points, in a hypothetical Chinese counting game). Because I have more points, I "won".

But this style of game might be better at understanding the grayness that goes into "win" or "loss"... at least better than Football or other games. Especially because in Go, there are positions (ex: Seki, Ko, etc. etc.) that locally are ambiguous, you really can't say who "won" a Seki or "won" a Ko by looking locally. The global-effect of the position really makes the "win" or "loss" mindset irrelevant. (Usually the defender likes Seki, usually the attacker likes Ko. But... its complicated and really depends on the board state)

A Seki, by Japanese counting, is a local position where ZERO points are awarded to both players in the Seki-area. Nominally this is a tie on the win/loss scale, but you can imagine that forcing this "zero points" situation can be beneficial to one player or the other. So if we are to look at the local position and say "win" vs "loss", the words just don't make sense. Its a seki, its neither a win nor a loss. You'll have to look at the whole board, and the history of all the moves to see which player really benefited from it.

Perhaps a Chess-player would call a Seki a zugzwang: the only way to win is to not make a move (but in Chess, you're forced to move every turn, while in Go, you're allowed to pass your turn). Since Seki positions exist in Go, and because Go is popular in China (and ancient Chinese Generals), but not popular in the USA (and this "Seki" position really doesn't come up in any of our games), you can imagine that the Seki-position will affect Chinese Strategic thinking, but not necessarily American-Strategic war thinking.

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The blogpost asks: will "respawn" in MOBA, Call of Duty, and other modern video games change the psychology of the next-generation soldier? Or is the "respawn" mechanic going to allow the next-generation soldier to better come to terms with death? (a concept that's completely devoid in Football / Baseball). Is the "pretend death" of respawn-based gameplay a good or bad thing to our individual psychology / understanding of war? Who knows, but in 30+ years or so, when today's generation grow up to be the next-generation of generals and war-leaders, we can almost certainly see Counterstrike, Call of Duty, Starcraft, or DOTA references in the Presidential War Room.

This is largely a blogpost about how these games are imperfect at understanding war. But we humans keep using games as war analogies for some reason, despite their imperfections.