Great post, funny enough, it is the other way around with my mom. She was the one always wanting to win, relentlessly, and I ‘shsped’ the game do she would be happy.
Completely agree with your ” the superficial sense of ‘winning’ is so easy to see, so easy to measure, it’s easy for us to slide into our habits and wash away the complexity that lives underneath”, and I never realised which complex interactions underlied the parent/child card games we had. Nice parallel.