Since last June, when I started holding myself more to the at least one post per month, I kind of made myself stick to two habits. The first was trying to write something at least once per week, even if I didn’t end up going anywhere just trying to put something down onto paper, or in this case screen, would be helpful at getting me closer to being more consistent with my posting. The second was permission to just delete a draft that I wasn’t feeling, and trust me I have been doing that. This post is an interesting one, because I have written it and deleted it several times. Though I do always feel the need to go back to this rambling topic, partially because it falls into this weird place where it has to do a bit more with my education and professional life rather than board gaming (though there is a very interesting board gaming hook in here). As much as I joke that no one reads this blog, this post is has particularly large “no one is gonna read this” vibes even if I had an audience. What is the point of this? For me as a writer to put myself down before I write perhaps one of my longest and articles on the site.
Can I interest you in this Opportunity?
Opportunity cost is a concept that originally comes from microeconomics and states that if you make a choice between multiple, mutually exclusive alternatives, then you actually incur a cost of not taking the second best option. A standard example of this is if I pay $12 to go watch a movie, I can no longer use that $12 to go get some fast food. If my “internal” value of the movie is higher then the food then I incur the benefit of the movie at the cost of not getting the food. There is a lot of math derived from this idea to therefore tell you what is the best use of your time to maximize the difference between your benefit and your opportunity cost but that doesn’t really matter here.
While the concept of opportunity cost is widely accepted in economic circles and in a lot of business and account environments it’s actually a very silly concept when you consider it as an individual, and once you get past the silliness of it ends up being a depressing concept if you start applying it to your every day life. Want an example? So lets say I am at the store and I am staring at the candy bar display to decide what candy bar to pick out. For simplicity assume all candy bars cost the same amount. I really like M&Ms and I also really like Mars bars. So I take a good long think and I feel like I value the Mars bar only a little bit more (lets say a dollar) than the M&Ms. Now I buy the Mars bar and as much as I enjoy it, I can’t help thinking about whether I truly was able to measure in my mind how much I would have enjoyed the M&Ms and that makes me less happy than if I just walked into the store and the only option at the store was a Mars bar and no other candy existed, heck I think it would have even made me happier if there was only M&Ms and no other choices than having to pick between the two. Effectively the value of the Mars bar was reduced because of the choice between a large number of desirable alternatives. This is what has been dubbed the Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz. Basically too many options leads to all kinds of problems, like feeling overwhelmed, or having increased regret or self-blame when actually making a choice. As Yoram Bauman, the stand up economist, puts it: The worst possible option is between a Snickers bar and a second, identical Snickers bar.
Opportunity Cost in the Microeconomic gaming world
I think you can see where this is going. Or maybe you can’t, but lets take you there. You are sitting down to play the most recent Feld and you have a some number of moves to make, we will expand the number of moves to show the increased difficulty of opportunity cost as we get further.
- You have only two legal placement options: One earns you three points and the other earns you five points. So you see you are really only earning two points by making the better move because the minimum you would have earned is three points (we can simplify that the minimum anyone can earn is three points and then you can just subtract 3 times the number of turns you get from your score and nothing changes. But people like big numbers and always making points so sure you get 3 points no matter what and a good move maybe gets you 6-8 points. So your real benefit is only what you cna make over 3 points. Logically you can expand this option to any number of placements and reduce it until you have only two available options as you remove the worst options. For my random enjoyment I will be including math blocks at the end to signify what we are looking at. For all of these assume each i is an option an x_i is the points value that it produces
- Let us complicate the issue by adding the idea that current moves influence future turns. You have two legal placement options: One earns you three points this turn but gives you the resources to get eight points next turn. The other gives you five points this turn and four points next turn. Now the benefit function changes to not just how many points we can earn the current turn but how many points we can set up to earn over some horizon that we can reasonably thing about. Naturally, the choice you are making is between eleven points and nine points and then the answer seems like the above example, obvious. This is where the choices start to get interesting because all of our choices have follow up implications. Now our function cares about the total number of points over our forseeable turn horizon. How many moves you can calculate forward before randomness or other people (who we have assumed don’t really matter so far….but wait for it) make the benefit function uncalculable is important and really affects your game and how some pesky issues start to show. So expanding our math assuming we are looking out n turns and expand x_it to being the value of option i t turns from now
- Now we are going to add in player interaction which we haven’t been assuming up to now. For simplicity we start with the two player option. You yet again have two possible moves. One of them increases your score by two and takes away an opportunity from the opposing player that would gain them five points forcing them to only be able to take a move to earn three points. Alternatively you can take a move that earns you six points but you leave the move open that gives them five points. At this point you have to change your view point about what points are. Your choices are not between six and five points. But about gaining a relative positive two points or positive one point. The move that gives you fewer points is obviously superior because you don’t really care if you have the most points just if you have more points than your opponent. As always you can do this function to as many moves as you want and slowly reduce it down to your two best options. Then again we can move to expand this to the potential points you and an opponent can earn over several turns and expand your function to looking at the difference over some kind of turn horizon rather than a single turn. To signify this in our math lets assume that the second players points are represented for y_it
- So far I have been able to assume that you have an infinite option and then you reduce it down to only two trivially. If you have four options versus three option you can reduce it down by removing the worst option. Same for expanding something from two turns to three turns (assuming no randomness enters the system and nothing changes). This is where I have actually put a new point to expand on an idea. What if you have two opponents instead of one? Of coarse you can do the calculation but lets say player3 is losing quite significantly. If you can take a move that gains you five points, gives player2 the ability to get 3 points and gives player3 an option of eight points. That doesn’t seem like such a bad option. Your real current rival is player2 not player3. So maybe giving them more points is ok especially as they aren’t close to catching up to you. But what if they are close to catching up, or on the cusp of it? In math terms the idea would be that the marginal value of an extra point for player2 is higher thanc for player3. Now this becomes who do you think will play better over the course of the rest of game. Now the benefit function becomes complex. As you care about relative scores, based on current total score but also in some ways how you feel they will do over the course of the game. Maybe the reason player3 has such a low score now is that they have been building up an engine that will allow them to score a huge number of points near the end of the game, even if they score fewer points each turn. Then maybe helping them out early in the game where they are supposed to be doing poorly is not a great idea. Things are truly complex here, and most of the time outside of the ability to actually make highly informed decisions based on the full information because the full information just takes too long. I am not going to post the math for this…because if I am being honest I am not sure how to appropriately manage it without expanding it….a lot and I don’t imagine most of my non readers have a msters in mathematics.
Side Note: Analysis Paralysis
Hey remember when I said up above that ultimately increasing the number of options leads to us being overall unhappier. The same thing happens in board games, though sometimes it emerges in different ways. Some people really don’t like picking the move that is not optimally efficient, leading them to sit and ponder for many minutes what is the best choice and most optimal move over a much longer time horizon while the rest of the players stare at their watches. Sometimes this emerges in players who want to make the best move or want to do well and take so long as to not be embarrassed. Sometimes it comes from a compulsion that this game is a puzzle and it needs to be solved so they are going to figure this out because that is what they enjoy the most. Sometimes the individual may get overwhelmed with the options and be upset when they feel they made the non-optimal move (even when they misjudge what the optimal move is). The unfortunate part of this, is that more likely than not someone is going to be upset and rightfully so. Board games are not just mathematical exercises, they are social ones (unless were talking about solo games…but were not), so while we can enjoy the options that a game presents I don’t think we always need to figure them all out at the onset. But that isn’t what this discussion is about its just an additional idea.
Opportunity cost in boardgaming on a Macroeconomic scale
So the heading may be a little misguided. Generally macroeconomics refers to economics measured on a national scale or on focus on trading between countries. That doesn’t really translate well to what we have been talking about so far. To strain the analogy if microeconomic decisions are the decisions made within a game, macroeconomics are decisions being made about your board game collection as a whole. Early on we have our one of two games and we love them and we play them constantly and we enjoy them and we play them five or six or seventy three times and we are happy. At some point we learn just how big the board game world is and we start acquiring and we get more and more games until we have unplayed games sitting on our shelves, or even worse unplayed games IN SHRINK sitting on our shelves.
Firstly I would like to focus on the choice of “what are we going to play?” When you reach for a game off your shelf with all your choices what are you pulling down? The old trustworthy Catan or Ticket to ride? The new hotness that you really need to force your friends to play to justify the amount you paid for the Kickstarter? Something that you have been hankering for but haven’t played in about a year? Well what if you have a choice of all three. How do you decide? And how are you OK to keep the rest of them especially if you keep never pulling it off the shelf? This is where the opportunity cost of having three games kind of hurts. If you had just one game and you played it when you wanted to you would always have the same amount of happiness, but if you have two games and you pull one of them out you can ask yourself “but what if I would have had more fun with the other one?” In this case does it make sense to purge until you are down to just one game of each category with very little variety? Or maybe go slightly less extreme and maybe keep two or three games per category to make you feel more joy about picking a game that you enjoy less. Then again, maybe you get more joy from playing a game you have never played before, regardless of whether it is actually more fun than your other choices? Then does it make any sense to even buy games rather than finding a board game cafe that stocks all the new games, or using other peoples games at board game meetups? Or if you are particularly economically endowed just buying the game and then selling it used right afterwards. There’s no wrong answer but its definitely important to try to make sure that your collection, and it’s excess, or lack of it, brings you joy rather than stress or indecision.
The second choice that we can actually apply actual economic ideas to is what games should you seek out to purchase? If you have six farming related games from Uwe Rosenberg do you really need to go out and get the newest one? Will it bring you more joy to own it than the previous half dozen? How much value do you get from the game being on your shelf versus it actually getting played? For example for people who like having a big shelf of games to look at (whether those games are unplayed doesn’t matter), you may be able to get sixty dollars of value from a game just if it sits on your shelf. In fact it might not be a very good game, so if you end up playing it and it isn’t very good you may actually lose some of that value. So why risk even playing your games when you can just have it sitting in shrink on your shelf? That statement is partially facetious idea, because I don’t think a lot of people do this consciously, but I think if we as board gamers do some real soul searching we would find that we aren’t always the most logical humans when we come to dealing with our collections. Speaking personally, I have removed games from my collection before where every time there are games that I want to play but whenever I go to pull it I rather play a different game. Whenever I look at Irish Gauge, I always just think “I would rather play Wabash Cannonball” and if that’s the case why own Irish Gauge? I would much rather trade it away or sell it to someone who will enjoy it more than me.
As my collection continues to attempt to grow (through no fault of my own I swear….) I have to actively think about this more and more as I stare at my collection. I know that having games I don’t play at all brings me discomfort and stress in the long run so I have to make decisions and choices actively to make sure that I can maximize my happiness with opportunity cost. Removing games that I just don’t think would ever beat out others in my collection, or limiting my purchases of some of the new hotness and asking myself, do I just want to look at this on my shelf? Or will this actually get played and add to the joy I get out of board games? As we saw in all cases above, choices are generally good until there are too many choices and then they become bad. However, where that line is changes for each individual, and may even change due to their circumstances at any given time.
Wrapping it all up
So am I claiming to be the Marie Kondo of board game collections? Or the pure arbiter of how much AP is an “appropriate amount” of AP? Anyone who knows me will tell you, that no matter how much I preach this, I don’t always follow it (stares awkwardly at unplayed K:DM boxes) I guess I at least work to realize and correct some of these errors, I keep examining my collection and wonder if I really need to add things. I truly have embraced the “mistakes are fun, play faster” mindset in highly interactive games and the enjoyment has definitely increased. When I look to add games I try and answer what is the reason for this addition and does it do something different than my current collection? Some recent additions were Eternal Decks, which I legitimately believe my partner will enjoy and I really got it for that…and Cysmic….which I can’t really excuse but I think I am allowed to get myself a too big miniature fest once every five years or so.
So what am I even trying to say in this long ramble of a post? Why did I make this one post when it is clearly three posts together stitched up like a Frankenstein’s monster? The idea of opportunity cost is one that comes up in many ways in our lives, sometimes consciously and sometimes not. There are many choices that say that ultimately all of these choices and having to make decisions is ultimately a negative on our lives. Yet we as board gamers willingly choose to engage not only with the decisions forced upon us by daily life but additionally we choose to add more of these choices by selecting what board games to buy, what to play and then spend a good majority of the game making additional opportunity cost decisions within the game in our continual attempt to win. And we consider this fun. Or at least we should, and usually do. But, sometimes, it stops being fun and maybe this discussion could give you an insight into why a hobby that brings us so much joy can occasionally, and suddenly start to feel like a chore. I think we all want to prevent that and an important part of that is keep playing, keep having fun, keep avoiding analysis paralysis, and always look out for your mental health!