A New Kind of Game
Dave Pollard writes about the pleasure we find in watching other people's misfortune. He ends with the following plea.
Someone, please, stop telling me how many died, and instead tell me why?
A great question. Just listening to the news this morning, there has been a flood in California, the tidal wave disaster continues in the Indian Ocean, and there was something else which I have forgotten now. Through it all, the main theme was about how nature was doing these dreadful things, forcing people to move, destroying people's homes, etc... While I can not even fathom the suffering that must be going on in Asia, and at the risk of sounding like an uncaring bastish, I began to wonder the old question about why we stopped building our society in a way that fits with the system that makes life possible, rather than trying to oppose, beat, and defeat it, feeling devastated when we realize that we can not. The people in California will rebuild, and this time they will undoubtedly rebuild in a way that they hope will defeat nature's evil plot in the future, so that when the next flood or earthquake comes, their house will triumph. But... what prevents us from building a lifestyle that can benefit from a flood, instead of one that trys to withstand it?
As for our fascination with other people's suffering, I have to admit that the moment I walked in the door and the first thing someone excitedly told me was that there was a huge tidal wave in Thailand, I ran to the TV to see the footage. In this case it may be because my greatest irrational fear is actually waves and the ocean (after being swept out to sea while swimming a few years ago). I have been watching the news the last few days waiting to see video footage of a three story killer wave. No other disasters or bad news stories have taken as much of my time as this one has. Of course, I think a big part of the reason may also be that at my own home I do not have a TV, but I have been staying at my family's house for the holidays where the TV is on all the time.
It is also interesting that dave brings up the point about winning being fun because there is a loser. I have been thinking a lot these past few weeks about how an enjoyable game could be made where the goal is collaboration, where winning means that everyone wins. Mostly, this is because while I would enjoy playing games for fun, other peoples competitiveness ruins it sometimes. If I am on a team with people who really want to win, I destroy their fun with my "it doesn't matter as long as it is fun" attitude. If the people who really want to win are on the other team they are upset because I am "not trying hard enough to win".
I brought up my idea for a collaboration based game this weekend as we were playing my sister-in-law's new trivial pursuit game (which I am totally ashamed to say that I did quite well at --how can I have so much useless information in my head?). Although I was not suggesting we play anything collaboration based at that moment, it met with some resistance. The idea that it would not meet the needs of people who like to compete was mentioned. This is true, but I am not suggesting that ALL games be changed to collaboration based games, just wondering why none exist, and what it would look like if it did. Perhaps the most interesting reaction was one player who kept helping the other team to answer the questions in order to (jokingly) show how collaboration would not work. While I didn't see how helping the other team hurt the game we were playing, it also seemed to illustrate how inconceivable such an idea is in our society. I never suggested that all games should be collaboration based, nor that collaboration would work well in games that were explicitly designed to have winners and losers. I was simply wondering what a game would look like that was explicitly designed to have only winners. Unfortunately, this seems too foreign of an idea... the very word "game" implies winners and losers, to think of it any other way may be too hard for some people.
So what would a game based on collaboration look like? How can it be fun, based on achievement and challenge, but not on competition and a goal to make someone else loose? What if instead of a high-school debate club, we had high-school agreement clubs, where the goal was to reach an equitable agreement with the other team. Maybe a game where the goal is to empathize as much as possible with the other view point... Of course, being a product of the society I live in, it is hard for me to picture just how such a game would work, but it must be possible. Any ideas?