A Spy’s Guide to Spy Movies: Skyfall
Skyfall (2012) stars Daniel Craig as James Bond and Judi Dench as M, the head of British Intelligence.
A hard drive is stolen. On it: the identities of undercover agents embedded in terrorist organizations. Then a hack blows up M’s headquarters.
British Intelligence thinks it’s a thief. A blackmailer. Someone who stole something valuable and wants to get paid for it.
Then the agents’ names start appearing on the internet. Five at a time. Free.
Nothing is demanded. Nothing is sold.
Which is confusing.
If the other side doesn’t want anything, what kind of game are they playing?
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Every interaction is a game. And there are three kinds.
A Zero-Sum Game is a conflict. One side wins what the other side loses. At the end, the gains and losses add up to zero.
A Positive-Sum Game is cooperation. Both sides are better off. It lasts as long as both sides keep gaining.
The third kind is rare. It’s a Negative-Sum Game, where both sides lose. Like the Battle of Verdun. Each hopes to lose less than the other. It ends when one side decides it’s losing too much.
Almost nobody plays a Negative-Sum Game for its own sake. You take losses now to be positioned for the game that follows. A battle bleeds both sides. But it’s played to win the war.
In strategy, the first question is which game the other side is playing. That’s Game-Type Identification.
Get it wrong, and you’ll never understand what the other side is doing.
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James Bond follows the trail to an island and finds Raoul Silva.
Silva was British Intelligence, once. He worked for M in Hong Kong. He hacked the Chinese without orders. So M traded him. She gave Silva to the Chinese and got six captured agents back. Plus a peaceful handover of Hong Kong.
Silva’s cyanide capsule failed and he lived, disfigured.
So British Intelligence decides it’s a personal Zero-Sum Game against one player: M.
Silva wants her defeated and dead.
On the island, Silva shows Bond a future. A freelance empire. Secret missions of his own choosing, sold to the highest bidder. And a place in it for Bond.
It’s a temptation scene. The tempter shows the favorite everything that could be his.
Maybe the offer is real. Maybe it’s one more way to wound M, by taking her best man. Either way, it presents Silva as a player with a game that follows.
But what Silva does shows otherwise.
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Bond captures Silva. Which Bond thinks is a win.
Except Silva wanted to be captured. In his cell, Silva is relaxed. Waiting. His laptop unlocks British Intelligence’s own network from the inside. He escapes on schedule, in time to walk into M’s public hearing with a gun.
He wants M’s disgrace, then her death. In public.
Even if it means his own death.
Which raises more questions about the game Silva is playing.
(This movie plus eleven more are in A Spy’s Guide to Spy Movies. It’s on Amazon here.)
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The way to identify the game someone wants to play with you is to reason backward from their Endgame. Start with what the other side wants to end up with.
The people, places and things they want at the end.
But Silva’s Endgame has nothing there.
No fortune.
No people.
No place.
And nothing after.
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After Bond stops Silva at the hearing, Bond draws Silva to Skyfall in Scotland.
After a battle, Silva finds M wounded in a chapel. He doesn’t shoot her. He presses his gun into her hand, puts his head against hers, in the path of the same shot: “Free us both. With the same bullet.”
Silva wants death for both sides.
It’s not the normal kind of Negative-Sum Game. The normal kind is played for position in the game that follows.
But past Silva’s death, there’s no game that follows. Nothing built. Nothing won.
For Silva, the Negative-Sum Game is the final game.
Which is why nothing deterred him. Deterrence works on players who still have something they want.
Silva is an archetypal devil. Someone with no future. Who can’t build. Who can only destroy.
Real life rarely produces a Silva. Almost everyone plays for a game that follows. Even a suicide bomber believes something comes next: a position in paradise, ahead of everyone else.
Which is why Silva’s strategy is so confusing.
It almost never happens in real life.
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Most games are normal games. The other side wants something at the end. People, places or things. Reason backward from their Endgame and their moves make sense. Even the ones that seem confusing at first. The litigant who spends $500,000 to win $50,000 isn’t confused. He’s playing for an Endgame. Vindication. Reputation. A punishment that makes the next lawsuit unnecessary.
Almost always, there’s a game that follows.
But sometimes, the Endgame has nothing. No fortune. No people. No place. Nothing after.
That’s the rare one.
And it has only one type of player:
A devil.
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Game-Type Identification is one of six frameworks on the Spy’s Guide frameworks page, and it’s from A Spy’s Guide to Strategy.
-John Braddock
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