Losing to Win

So how about that Olympic Badminton scandal, eh? Not having ever played in a tournament where it's advantageous to lose, the whole thing made no sense to me when I first heard about it.

Luckily someone out there (game designer David Sirlin) explains how this goes down.

It's an embarrassing time for Olympic badminton. But not because some players lost on purpose—because someone created horrificly bad tournament rules and then tried to blame the competitors for playing to win.

I also thought the explanations of kingmakers and lame-ducks was particularly interesting.