I’ve been thinking about games that are not explicitly competitive but in which each player has their own victory metric. In other words, games that are not zero-sum but in which victory is not necessarily shared.

I was thinking about this in particular most recently in the context of Dungeons & Dragons and other TTRPGs that are typically cooperative, in which the party agrees upon a common goal. That’s typical, but is neither mandated nor universal. Many groups like having a player who is (probably secretly) playing a villain, or more commonly one player character’s goals may come to directly conflict with the goals of another, which can even lead to characters fighting one another.

I’ve always discouraged player versus player conflict in my games. So while D&D could be a game that is not victory-sharing, these are not the kinds of D&D games I want to be in. One reason is that D&D’s rules were written with the assumption that players are fighting creatures controlled by the Dungeon Master, who has no victory condition and whose creatures follow whatever rules and constraints the DM chooses. When players turn their character’s abilities toward other players, the balance of the system, already imperfect, quickly goes sideways.

More than the shortcomings of the system, I have discouraged it because I want D&D to be cooperative, and I don’t want players spending all their time trying to suss out each other’s willingness to throw each other under the bus in order to achieve their own goals. That sort of interaction feels gross unless the rules of the game are explicitly calling for that, I think because it blurs the boundaries of the magic circle.

Quick primer: The magic circle, roughly speaking, is the shared understanding that who you are in a game is not who you are outside a game. It allows you to play cutthroat strategies without damaging your relationships with the people you’re playing with, because they understand that it isn’t personal. At it’s most basic, it’s why you don’t get angry at your opponent for beating you in a game of chess, even though it meant that you lost.

Games that are neither zero-sum nor victory-sharing will often lead to scenarios where one player’s minor success can come at the cost of another player’s major failure in some regard. In fact, this is nearly inevitable, because the total resources available in any game must in some way be finite, even if it’s just in the basic limitation of the time spent playing the game. In games that are primarily cooperative, like D&D, that dynamic erodes trust between players. It’s also particularly hard to navigate in D&D where there is no quantifying the value of a given success. What’s more important: my character rescuing her brother from the mind flayers or the party’s objective to recover the MacGuffin? How you value these things against each other and your willingness to achieve a “better” victory at the cost of someone else’s starts to speak to your values as a person who plays games, not the values prescribed by the game to you as a player in the game.

To put a fine point on it: Games prescribe temporary values by prescribing victory conditions and the rules to achieve them. This is the foundation of the magic circle. Letting players choose their own victory conditions means personal values come into play, and the magic circle starts quickly to break down. This is also why D&D and other TTRPGs are fairly unique as a form of creative expression in addition to being a game, because the players decide what is important to them and their characters.

We might consider a game though where it is explicitly understood that while the game is not zero-sum, every player is expected to maximize their own victory with complete disregard for the other players’ victories, even though getting a better victory than other players is not a goal of the game. I can’t think of any such game except maybe one (which I’ll get to in a moment), although it does sound a lot like how much of life works, especially when people excuse the harm they may cause because it’s “just business.”

In such a game, the next hurdle would be the penalty of playing with someone who is good at that game. In competitive games, there is always a penalty for playing against a skilled opponent: you are more likely to lose. But if we want this game to be non-competitive, someone else’s skill shouldn’t hurt my victory; that is inherently competitive. Instead, we would need the game not to punish players because someone else joined in, no matter how skillfully or cutthroat they play to disregard the victories of the other players.

The one game I can think of that is like this in all regards but one, which may also be a demonstration of why there aren’t more, is blackjack. Every player is competing independently against the dealer—whom I don’t consider a player, since they have no agency beside the decision to start and run the game—and it would seem apparent that another player’s presence at the table even helps because it reveals one more card from the deck at a time, giving a better idea of the odds of getting what you want from the next draw. The only way in which players are in conflict (assuming the dealer isn’t in danger of running out of money) is in the time it takes for each player to play out their hand. More time waiting for other players means fewer hands played before your cocktail runs out.

And blackjack is maybe a good exception that proves the rule, because I for one don’t really think of blackjack as a game that I’m playing with other people, more like alongside them. I might as well be playing solitaire.

I’m on the lookout for a game (besides D&D at some tables) that contains and encourages more interaction between players without being zero-sum nor victory-sharing. Maybe one exists, or maybe there’s an inherent contradiction in these conditions. Maybe a good one has yet to be made.