How David Beats Goliath — a lesson in game design
Malcolm Gladwell’s latest article, “How David Beats Goliath,” is a must-read for anyone interested in game design. Or business strategy.
It’s all about how underdog outsiders can come to a “game” (meaning, a formal structure of rules with win conditions) and because they are free of social preconceptions of how it “should” be played, can use unorthodox tactics to win. The article purports to be about game-playing strategy, but I think it has just as much to say about how you set up your rule systems as anything else.
“Eurisko was exposing the fact that any finite set of rules is going to be a very incomplete approximation of reality,” Lenat explained. “What the other entrants were doing was filling in the holes in the rules with real-world, realistic answers. But Eurisko didn’t have that kind of preconception, partly because it didn’t know enough about the world.” So it found solutions that were, as Lenat freely admits, “socially horrifying”: send a thousand defenseless and immobile ships into battle; sink your own ships the moment they get damaged.
This is the second half of the insurgent’s creed. Insurgents work harder than Goliath. But their other advantage is that they will do what is “socially horrifying”—they will challenge the conventions about how battles are supposed to be fought.