Drawing together

Rick Hamrick sends us a cooperative drawing game of his invention. Actually, he sent it to me, and I asked if he'd mind sharing it with all you very deep funsters. I took the liberty of giving it a name. He took the time to give us the game:

The game is simple: start with a blank piece of paper on a flat surface and two people on opposite sides of the paper. Each is given a pen and instructed to start drawing a picture on the half of the page closest to them. Each person is to draw only on their side. The challenge is to adjust the image you are seeking to create so that it is complemented somehow by the image the other person is creating on the other half of the piece of paper.

So, of course, each player is seeking to incorporate the others art even as it is being created. A moving target!

Only one rule: no talking about the art in progress. Conversation is welcome, but it cannot be about the game or what each is drawing.

When one of the two players decides that the work is done, the other person has a brief time to complete the bit they are drawing, then the game concludes with each person describing their work. An added twist would be for each to guess what the other had in mind prior to the person describing it. Emphasis is on how they incorporated the other person's work into their own and telling a good story about it.

No winner or loser, only time spent in a cooperative task where cooperation is made a challenge because you cannot talk about it. And, the story-telling part at the end can be outrageous and laughter-inducing.

I see many implications. Many applications. Many variations. Three people? Online perhaps? O, the fun, the drawing together.


from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith

A new documentary on children's games

A recent article in the Contra Costa Times reports on a new documentary that was featured featured at the Alameda Film Festival last weekend. The documentary is the work of Dutch school teacher/film maker Jules Oosterwegel, who spent 15-year documenting children's street games from around the world. The entire project reportedly shows of over 300 children's games, including "Vietnamese variations of blind man's buff, a Bolivian stone-tossing game much like jacks without the ball, and a Dutch clapping game familiar to youngsters the world over."

Osterwegel explains about his project: "You try to find out the real idea of why children play and how they play, and every place it's different. You have a lot of games that are universal, but the way children from the northern countries play is very different from children in tropical countries."

There should be much more about this project on the Internet, but I could only find a disappointingly few references to what seems to be, according to my particular passions, a very significant contribution to global fun. Hopefully, I'll have more to report on it soon.

Here, from the article, are descriptions of some of the games in the documentary:

From Vietnam:

Cuop Co

Needed: Four or more players, a red scarf and a piece of chalk with which to draw a circle in the center of the playground.

How to play: The object is to snag the red scarf from the circle without getting tagged. At a signal, the first pair of kids dashes in and tries to fake each other out, lunging and feinting until someone can grab the scarf and sprint back to their team without being tagged. Every few minutes another pair joins them, until someone successfully grabs the scarf and gets away.

From the Netherlands:

Muurball

Needed: Four or more players, a bouncy ball and a wall.

How to play: In this variation on wall ball, everyone lines up behind each other, with feet placed slightly apart. The child closest to the wall sends a low throw so the ball shoots straight back toward the players, who must jump over it. If the ball hits you, you're out. If no one is hit, the second child in line moves to the front and starts the game again.

From Denmark

Tag Sat

Needed: Four players, an open field.

How to play: In this clever variation on tag, children play the role of target, tagger and bodyguards. The target and two bodyguards hold hands and spin around the field, as the tagger tries to capture his prey by running around them or reaching through their triangle.

From Zimbabwe:

Filling the Bottle

Needed: Two teams of three players, a soda bottle, a ball and a sandy play area.

How to play: The bottle is placed in the center of the play area and sand is heaped up around it to hold it steady. In this dodge ball-like game, one team races to fill the bottle with sand, while ducking and attempting to avoid -- or catch --the ball that is thrown at them. If a bottle-filler is hit, he's out, but if he catches it, he may throw it in any direction. The team wins a point each time the bottle is completely filled.

via Dr Toy

from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith

Of cooperation and excellence

One of the most influential books on the idea of "cooperative sports" is now available online, for free, thanks to the Google Books project. It's conveniently called "Cooperative Games and Sports."

The book was written by one of the most influential proponents of cooperation, Terry Orlick. If you click on his name, expecting to catch up on his most recent cooperative thoughts, you'd discover that for quite some time Terry has been following something that seems a very different path - the idea of excellence.

Excellence. Which makes me think of Tom Peters and Robert Waterman's landmark book In Search of Excellence. Which is a business book. And business, as we all know, has at least as much to do with competition as it does cooperation. And coincidentally(?) Orlick's most recent lliterary landmark, now in it's fourth edition, is a book called "In Pursuit of Excellence."

What's the connection? Why would a champion of cooperation turn his attention to what in many ways is a central focus of competition?

The more I think about it, the deeper the question, and the richer the connection seems. It led me to such a fascinating contemplation that I decided, rather than sharing my conclusions with you, I'd better serve our shared interests by giving you the opportunity, and encouragement, to draw conclusions for yourself.

And while you're at it - what about the "fun" connection? Is that still part of the cooperation-excellence equation?


from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith

Competition and Cooperation

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.

from Cooperation and Competition

from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith