Playing to Win - Quick Overview

Tomorrow I'm giving away a copy of Playing to Win by David Sirlin. For those who haven't entered yet, I'd like to give you a few reasons why you want to read this book.
In a nutshell. Sirlin is a highly successful, pro-level competitor. His game genre of choice is fighting games like Street Fighter, but the book is universal. The book boils to a few basic points:

• If you're playing competitively, the rules of the game are the only things that matter. Nothing is "cheap" in a fair game.
• If you're playing to win, it's like fighting a war. During the game, you don't have civil obligations (within reason). There's a good amount of analyzing Sun Tzu in terms of gaming.
• Analyzing player types, strengths, weakness, etc. Knowing yourself and your enemy are key to victory.
• If you want to be a champion, you have to tirelessly work for it.

Some of these are extremes, and only apply to people who want to be the best player in the world. But if you understand the level of competition you want to be at (which I didn't figure out until I started reading), it's very easy to apply everything in the book to yourself. 

I won't lie, the book will upset many people. It upset me at first too. Being given the green light to use "cheap" tactics blew my mind, but he makes a very strong argument for why it's allowed in competitive play, and why "cheap" tactics often won't work against other competitive players. Also, the notion that I was imposing my own unwritten rules in to my games blew my mind. I've always tried to play with honor (and always will), but I had also been using "honor" as an excuse to lose without having to blame myself for it. I always try to be honest with myself about who I am, but this book showed me something about how I view winning and losing that I'd probably never have seen otherwise.

This book is good stuff. It's not best-seller quality, but the ideas in the book make it a must-read for anyone who wants to be a better player, even in a "casual" environment. I have no illusions about doing more than playing with my friends, and this book did a lot to make me look at myself as a gamer and evaluate how I wanted to play (competitively), and how I could go about doing that.

So make sure you click the link at the beginning of this post. In the coming weeks I plan on doing a deeper discussion, perhaps chapter by chapter, and you guys can follow along with the free web version of his book. But I recommend this book so much that I really want to give someone a physical copy, or something they can store on their e-reader.

See you tomorrow for the giveaway!