The role of the opponent

When a person plays a game, solves a puzzle, or similar, a great deal of the fun comes from the challenge of finding the solution, or finding a better strategy, or what have you.  Artificial intelligence, heuristics, and randomness all make for interesting opponents at times, but some of the best challenges come from opposing another human mind.

A lot of people view this opposition as adversarial.  The opponent is the enemy.  In many sports, people shout taunts and insults at their opponent.  In private, they denigrate their opponent and talk about how awful or horrible they are.  The contest becomes a contest to determine superiority.  To win is to demonstrate one's superior intellect/strength/ability/etc.  To lose is to show weakness/inferiority.  Some will even break the rules of fairness, cheat, in the contest to achieve victory, just to be seen as superior by their peers, or to experience the thrill of victory.

I have never understood these patterns of thought.  For me, the delight in a game, a puzzle, a contest, etc. is all the same.  It is the experience of challenging myself.  Pushing myself to discover more about what I can do, what I can achieve.  Learning how to do even more than I've done before.

The adversarial view of the opponent strikes me as unpleasant.  When I play a game with someone, I do so to have fun.  They are my friend and ally, providing me with an opportunity to improve myself. To learn more about the rules of the contest and challenge me.  At no point do I take pleasure in winning or losing, but merely in the journey getting there.  The only "enemy" or "adversary" that I ever find in these contests is not my opponent, but myself.

I really like it when I find others of the same mind, because we both mess with the game, pouring over it to extract every bit of learning we can get to discover what we may have missed.  If someone wins, we simply undo the moves that lead there and try again, to see other possible paths we may have taken.  A single game might have half a dozen wins and losses in it for us, because we play to learn and grow, not to best each other.

It is a cooperative view of competition, instead of an adversarial view.  The opponent as friend and ally.  A fellow adventurer within the space of challenge and fascination.

But hey, this is just the way that I look at such things. :)