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New Games
In the earlier critique of Bernard DeKoven's ideas about the negative aspects of competition, we were not quite playing fair. It is true that DeKoven questions traditional forms of competitive play. It is also true that we do not agree with all of his ideas on the subject. But DeKoven's concepts have to be understood within the larger context of his important work on games. In his book The Well-Played Game, DeKoven argues for a new understanding of play, governed by a shift in emphasis away from competition. Instead, DeKoven is an advocate for more improvisational games in which players take on the role of game designers.
DeKoven was not alone in his ideas. He was one of the early members of the New Games Movement, a group of game designers and play advocates that had a tremendous impact on the culture of games. Founded by Stewart Brand (the same man who started The Whole Earth Catalog) in the late 1960s, the New Games Movement was an organization dedicated to the promotion of play and its positive impact on society. During the late 1960s and 1970s, the New Games Movement organized a number of large-scale public game "tournaments" in the San Francisco Bay Area and other parts of the world. Part art happening, part community action, and part playground carnival, New Games Movement Tournaments embodied a uniquely game-centric, community-based politics of a scale that has not been seen since.
The New Games Movement had a large impact on physical education and the integration of games and play into schools. If you grew up playing with a parachute or huge rubber "Earth Ball" in your elementary school gym class, it is probably due to the direct or indirect influence of the New Games Movement. The New Games Movement published two books (The New Games Book and More New Games) that cataloged their playful game designs. How does the New Games Movement fit into an understanding of games as systems of conflict? The New Games Movement confronted the idea of competition and cooperation head on, creating games and ways of thinking about game design that challenged conventional notions of games as conflict.
Many people think of New Games as non-competitive. Of course this isn't the case. Most of the games in this book involve competi-tion—it's what gives New Games its vitality. …The effort each player makes to overcome the resistance and achieve the goal is the heart of the game and what makes it enjoyable and gratifying. In most games, the resistance is supplied by your opponent trying to achieve her goal. Your opponent is therefore your partner in the game.The best games are those in which you can play your hardest and still count on our opponent to meet your effort—to compete with you.[3]
Although DeKoven may rail against competition in some of his writings, he also helped instill in New Games the more balanced notions of competition embodied in the quote above, taken from an essay he wrote for the New Games Book. DeKoven's main point is that in the context of a game, the struggle of players against each other is also a struggle with each other, as players meet the challenges that they provide for one another. In this way, New Games affirms the interdependent relationship between competition and cooperation, the systemic cooperation that is part of all games.
But the central focus of New Games wasn't game philosophy: it was the design and play of games themselves. The movement produced some extraordinary game designs. Take, for example, a game called Catch the Dragon's Tail:
You'll need a good-sized area for this event, clear of sudden pits and immovable oaks. About eight to ten people line up, one behind the other. Now, everyone puts their arms around the waist of the person in front of them. (You can't be ticklish around dragons.) The last person in line tucks a handkerchief in the back of his belt. To work up steam, the dragon might let out a few roars—fearsome enough, we wager, to put Hydra to shame.
At the signal, the dragon begins chasing its own tail, the object being for the person at the head of the line to snatch the handkerchief. The tricky part of this epic struggle is that the people at the front and the people at the back are clearly competing—but the folks in the middle aren't sure which way to go.When the head finally captures the tail, who's the defeated and who's the victor? Everyone! The head dons the handkerchief and becomes the new tail, while second from the front becomes the new head. [4]
Catch the Dragon's Tail purposefully blurs the lines between competition and cooperation. On the one hand, all of the players are cooperating to hold on to each other to become a single dragon. But at the same time, the front part of the dragon is chasing the rear part, with the people in the middle not given a clear role to play in the conflict. Catch the Dragon's Tail makes playfully explicit the ways that players must work together even as they compete within the limited space of a game. Catch the Dragon's Tail also embodies an important lesson for game design: all of our preconceptions about games can be questioned. Normally we might think that all players of a game must have a clearly defined goal, or that lines of competition must be sharply defined, or that a game with player cooperation cannot also have vigorous competition—but Catch the Dragon's Tail debunks all of these assumptions. If nothing else, game design is about playing with ideas, and even seemingly fundamental ideas about competition in games are subject to playful intervention.
[3]Andrew Fluegelman and Shoshana Tembeck, The New Games Book (New York: Doubleday, 1976), p. 87–88.
[4]Ibid. p. 47.
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