In which Our Hero collaborates.
My family has recently taken to playing cooperative games. Growing up, we played mainly competitive games. Sometimes team games, but more often individual competitive games.
My partner recently posed the question: What if a person grew up playing mainly cooperative games?
An interesting question.
For one, most sports are competitive. (Sure, some are team-based, but those are still generally against other people rather than a challenge against nature or circumstance.)
For two, most contrived games (as distinct from natural games like science or business) are competitive.
For three, most good contrived games are competitive. Taking board games as a field I know quite well: only over the last ~20 years have cooperative board games taken off, and still they are much less popular and less created than competitive ones.
Bad games are generally not worth playing. They’re unfun and teach poor / useless skills.
Good games are, well, good.
I learned to count and perform basic mental math through the card game cribbage. I’m not aware of a cooperative equivalent that’s as engaging and strategic (and building one’s strategic muscle is worthwhile in itself).
Cooperative games teach communication, team coordination, collective strategy, leading and following, ebbs and flows.
I used to ghostwrite for the founder of the video streaming platform Twitch. He and his brother both sold companies for ~$1B, and they credit their parents’ chore system with teaching them to collaborate and strategize. The chores had to be completed, but the how and the who were up to the children’s choices. (For more, search the word “chore” in this article or this article.)
Collaborative games are excellent. And in the grand scheme of things, many competitive games are really about collaboration on the meta level anyway. Tennis is about (i.e. funded by) encouraging people to play tennis, which is generally good for physical health. Individual competitive sports like running are about setting a new record, thereby pushing human physical ability to new heights.
Perhaps it’s true: Even when we’re competing, we’re collaborating.
Julian Wise 