The More We Play Together, Together, Together…

But first, happy belated birthday, Juliana, and happy early birthday, Tory! And many more for both of you!

Item one: when I was a kid, we sometimes had a badminton net strung up at our cottage. For years, I was convinced that the point of badminton was to see how many times you and your partner could volley the birdie over the net. After all, that was how my uncle explained it to us. It took me several years to figure out that wasn’t the case. It took me even longer to realise that I liked it better the first way.

Item two: at my last “birthday”* party, my friend Kevin brought his copy of Shadows Over Camelot (thanks, Kevin!), a board game in which each player takes the role of a Knight of the Round Table, and everyone works together to try to defeat the evils the board throws at the kingdom. (You can also choose to have one of the players secretly be a traitor who tries to work against everyone else without getting caught, but since none of us had played before, we opted out.) It was reasonably challenging, and I enjoyed it a lot. Much more than other similarly complicated games like Settlers of Catan, Agricola, Munchkin… etc.

Finally, item three: I love my Nintendo Wii. Not so much because I play tons of games by myself, but because it’s so much fun when I have friends over. We try to read the minds of one hundred anonymous Americans with Family Feud, work together to fill a giant Tetris screen in co-op Tetris Party, pop more balloons than the computer racers in the battle mode of Mario Kart Wii, and team up to get all the star coins in New Super Mario Bros. Wii.

Furthermore, I complain a lot that I “can’t” finish Braid or Portal without my sister, since we started playing them together, but it’s more than that. I don’t really enjoy playing either of these two puzzle games by myself as much as I enjoy playing them with her**. And even though most games on other systems don’t tempt me very much, the ones that catch my interest are ones where players can work together with their friends toward a shared goal, like (drools) Portal 2 co-op mode.

Don’t get me wrong: occasionally, I play and enjoy head-to-head video games, like competitive Tetris or MarioKart races, the same way I  do enjoy regular badminton. And I play sports, like floor hockey, where the point is to win. But the more gaming I do, physical, board, and video, the more I realize that cooperative play is something I value more highly and enjoy much more than competitive play.

I have a vivid memory of elementary school in which we were playing multiplication train. Basically, two students stood side-by-side, and the teacher shouted out a multiplication-table problem (“5 times 7! 8 times 3!”). The first student to say the correct answer moved on to stand beside the next student in the class; the one who didn’t speak fast enough sat down. The goal was to keep moving around the class as long as possible.

I absolutely hated this game. I hated it because I was good at math and good at reacting quickly and therefore good at going quite a distance around the classroom. I hated it because, given my druthers, I would have been happy to let everyone else go on doing their multiplication tables with me just watching, but because both teacher and fellow students seemed to expect me to do well, I felt like I had to continue doing my best until I legitimately couldn’t get the right number out in time, while my reward for doing well was yet another high-stress situation where I faced humiliation if I lost (“I beat a smart kid!”) but got nothing if I won.

Don’t get me wrong here, either: I do sometimes enjoy competing at something I know I can do well. In high school, I was the captain of the trivia team, and I’m not going to pretend that I didn’t like playing trivia or earning the regional championship or (*sigh* fine) becoming national champions on the short-lived CBC show Smartask. Both playing the game and winning it were fun in their own rights. But as any of my high-school teammates can tell you, I quickly got bored after a morning of playing Reach for the Top. I never got bored of theatre or theatre sports, just too tired to keep playing.

All the games I like best — the aforementioned theatre sports, New Super Mario Bros. Wii, communication games like Charades/Got It/Party Quirks/Celebrities, even floor hockey, Such a Thing, and Cranium — focus on sharing an amusing experience with others and/or on learning to work together toward a common goal. Yes, feels better to win a hockey game than to lose it, but I confess that I find hockey least fun when my team plays poorly together and most when we click, whether or not we win.

I’m not sure I have a point here, but if I did, I think it’d be something like: cooperative games aren’t (always) for losers. True, we all have images of cooperative board games like Save the Princess or team-building exercises where nobody wins, and the games aren’t fun because of it. But for me, this is indicative of poor design, not anything wrong with the concept of cooperation itself. Similarly, although it’s true that sometimes people avoid competition because they’re unsure of their own skill, I can’t say this is (entirely, I suppose) why I don’t like it as much as the alternative.

Hmmm. Thinking about the difference between good cooperative games and boring cooperative games a little more, part of what makes good ones appeal to me is the ambiguity. Do I get a choice to work with or against my fellow players? In hockey, I do: I can focus entirely on taking the puck up myself and scoring as many goals as I possibly can or on making the pass. In Shadows Over Camelot, it’s easily within my power to screw over everyone else. And Nintendo is pretty awesome at making games in which each player gets to choose whether he or she wants to compete or collaborate — New Super Mario Bros. Wii, Mario Kart Wii, Family Feud Wii, and coop-Tetris all offer plenty of scope for players to mess up the best plans of their fellows.

(I know that when I design competitive/cooperative structures for my treasure hunts, I try to give teams motives to both help each other and hinder each other. For instance, I might build it into the clues that you need to trade information with other teams in order to reach the final destination. Or I might make it so that you get a little prize if a team on your “side” of the hunt wins, but a big one if your individual team wins the whole thing. < / shameless self promotion>)

Anyway, I guess, for me, cooperation is simply more challenging, and therefore more rewarding, than competition. I know I can do things by myself; I’m a writer, an academic, and a small business owner, for goodness’ sake. It’s doing things with other people that can be tough, as anyone who’s ever served on any sort of committee or council knows. I like the euphoria of scoring a goal, but I feel much prouder of myself when I make a great series of passes that lead to a goal, either by me or by someone else on the same line. Because it’s much more difficult, at least for me. Even better, when I play cooperative games with people, I feel like I’m actually playing with them to a greater degree than I do when we’re competing.

So… I will see all of you the next time I crack out Arkham Horror?

*My birthday falls over the winter holidays, so whether or not I want to have an actual birthday party, I tend to have a get-together to catch up with my Ottawa friends. Whatever I call it, it sort of ends up being a birthday-like event. What I’m saying is, I’m pretty sure I was born sometime in the past.

** Even if their nature does sometimes result in strange conversations: “Okay, but what if you go back in time and then slow time down?” “I was doing that!” “No, I mean go back in time green and then yellow, and then you have to jump.”