Cooperation and competition

So, let's talk about games first.

The key to the whole games thing is challenge. Challenge, as Csikszentmihalyi points out so clearly, is central to the experience of flow, it is the invitation for us to engage, for us to develop and refine our abilities and master evermore complex tasks.

In cooperative games, the challenge has to be flexible, negotiable, and always changing for us to sustain the experience of play: let's see how long we can volley the ball back and forth across the net, let's see if it's more fun (challenging) if we raise the net, play further away. Maybe you should stand closer to the net and me further. Maybe I should use my non-dominant hand. The goal is to play together, to have fun, to engage each other.  If we're not having fun, we increase or decrease the challenge.  Cooperative games are difficult to sustain - the require creativity and sensitivity in order for players to arrive at the kind of challenge that will keep them all in play, regardless of how different their abilities might be.

In competitive games, the challenge is non-negotiable and if we want to have fun playing the game together, we have to be close in abilities. The closer, the greater the challenge.  In competitive games, If we're not having fun, we have to find other people to play with. This is everywhere evident in professional sports, from chess to football. In competitive games, we wind up playing with people who are like us in skill and capability.

In cooperative games, we are able to engage an entire community into play, regardless of differences in age and ability, and more often than not, it is these differences that prove to be the source of the challenge, the very thing that makes the game inviting and worth playing.

Cooperative games nurture diversity. Competitive games, uniformity.

In most societies, the young play games that have both cooperative and competitive elements. Tag, hide-and-seek, jump rope, cats cradle. These games are found to be the most sustainable - through them, children build community and develop social competencies. Later on, depending on the society, the range of games tends to narrow, and those that become national pastimes reflect the nature of that society. Thus, in one culture, like that of the Eskimo, it is games like “Blanket Toss” in which people are placed on a blanket and then everyone else throws them up in the air, that become integral to the culture, while in other cultures, it is games like football and hockey.

Contrary to the way in which most people tend to characterize it, the New Games movement presented games that were less like games of pure cooperation than they were like children’s games – blending elements of cooperation and competition. The New Games repertoire included games of pure cooperation (notably games like “The Lap Game” and “Infinite Volleyball”), mixed cooperative/competitive games like “Rock-Scissors-Paper Tag” and “Catch the Dragon’s Tail,” and games of pure competition, many of which were based on training games used in the military, like “Slaughter” and “Tweezly-Wop,” and martial arts exercises like "Stand Off" and "Dho-Dho-Dho." However, by virtue of the games being “New” (unofficial, untraditional), even the most purely competitive games were played within the clearly cooperative goal of keeping everyone safely in play, emphasized by the slogan “Play Fair, Play Hard, Nobody Hurt.” Rules, roles, goals were all subject to change, by the New Games “referees”, and by the players themselves.

Once games reach the status of “national pastime,” however, players, and even officials, have little or no access to the rules. Rules become official and inviolate, changeable only by committees of non-players. Thus, competitive games become almost purely competitive, standing completely outside of the players control. Conformity, uniformity becomes the rule. Uniformed players almost indistinguishable from one another.

OK. Now we can think about the connections between competition, cooperation and things like the Internet and the computer games industry, the military and the school system, government and religion....