Dr. House and The Professor Who Played to Win
Tuesday, July 7, 2009 at 4:56PM Professor David Myers of Loyola University has been playing to win the last few years, and he's been doing it in an MMO of all places, so you can imagine how that went. The story of Myers and his character Twixt should make you laugh and also cry over the sorry state of humanity. What he encountered was entirely predictable, hilarious, and pathetic should any alien races ever see how we handle things.
Dr. House
But before we get to Twixt, I can't help but discuss the fictional doctor Gregory House. House is a genius when it comes to solving puzzles--the kind of medical puzzles needed to save people's lives. His "game" is to save the lives of as many of his own patients as possible. While some might quibble that his game is more to solve puzzles successfully than save lives, I think we can safely say that House does everything he possibly can to save lives, even when it's mean, cruel, abhorrent, distasteful, or illegal. It's just that if a patient dies, he wants to solve the puzzle anyway.
House is self-aware of his "game," and his entire staff and his supervisor (if she can be called that) is also fully aware. That is the very reason they are all there: to save patients' lives. The television show very often (as in multiple times per episode) creates a situation where social convention is opposed to winning this game. Maybe Dr. House must conceal some information from his boss in order to save the patient this time. He often breaks into the houses of the patients, looking for the obscure toxin that's killing them so he can formulate a cure. Sometimes causing physical pain to the patient is medically necessary to figure out the problem. Sometimes causing them emotional stress is necessary to solve the problem. Exposing their lies comes up often, too.
People don't like Dr. House. It's unfortunate that his character is so extreme, such a caricature at times, in that he's mean for no other purpose than to be mean. I think some people think *that* is why he is disliked. Others who can look past this might say that his ends-justify-the-means methods don't give him license to break the law by doing things like breaking into people's houses. (If it saves their lives, it seems worth it though, no?) So even if we disregarded all the times he goes against social convention for no reason other than meanness or spite, and even if we disregarded his (usually justified) illegal activities, he still has plenty of *purposeful* anti-social behavior left. That is, behavior that wins his game.
A common line on the show is when someone says that some plan of his is "impolite" (maybe exposing a lie between husband and wife because doing so is the only way to reveal the medical fact needed to save the life). House responds "would it be more polite to let them die?" It's not even that the person he's talking to has a win-win solution that allows for politeness AND saving the life. Usually, no one involved knows of any better plan than the impolite, life-saving one. Dr. House simply plays his game effectively and he's disliked for it, even though the people doing the disliking are all part of the same game and have the same objectives of saving lives. It's as if they forget the objective and care only for social convention. Or at least they momentarily forget, but usually reluctantly agree that breaking social convention is the right move. (And yeah, it doesn't help that House is unjustifiably mean all the time on top of things, but as I said, even if he weren't, he'd still be disliked.)
Twixt
Enter Twixt. He is a character, or rather set of characters on different servers in City of Heros/City of Villains, that Professor David Myers created to explore a certain playstyle: playing to win.
