I love games- the competition, the strategy, the collaboration; there's really nothing I don't like about games. This week for my "30 minutes of play", I played the game Catchphrase with our Bible study. Every Wednesday night we host a Bible study at our host through our church. This week was a "party" week because we just started back up for the semester. I desperately wanted to play a game, and after some persuasive arguments from myself, the group agreed. We chose Catchphrase because it's easy to play with a large group, and we had 15 people there.
I noticed a lot of interesting moments throughout the game. At one point, when the buzzer went off, two people were holding the game contraption (I have no idea what it's called). I immediately called out that the other team CLEARLY was in control at that point, and therefore our team should receive a point. However, this was met with some dissension from the other team (imagine that!) What was interesting though was that the majority of people felt that no one should get a point. Rather than trying to argue for their team's benefit, they would rather try to keep the peace. I find that fascinating- to me, the point of playing a game is to try to win. But clearly, for many in our group, the goal was not to win, but something else. Perhaps winning is a subgoal, but the main goal must be one of having fun, enjoyment, frivolity... who knows? Those are all of course subgoals for me, but the main goal, the reason I love games more than lots of other forms of play, is the competitive nature of it.
A similar situation happened another time. We had decided that you could only skip words a total of two times. After you skipped twice, you HAD to use the word you were on. However, at one point, a girl skipped many more times than twice. Since she was on my team, I said we should just keep going because what does it really matter? (I actually just didn't want to lose the round!) The majority of people though, again, said that the round should just be no points, and we could start over.
I'm interested in thinking about this more, and perhaps asking people from my group what they think the goal of a game is. My guess is that most would say to win, but clearly they are operating from some other belief. It's really fascinating! It makes me also wonder and think more deeply about what play is, and who/what defines and effects that definition/belief.
Intriguing, and I suspect the very competitive in our group -- Lina and Libba, for e.g., would say something very different than folks like myself who play games for 'fun' and to socialize. This is a wondeful discussion topic, and one of the chapters in Sutton-Smith gets at games and competition, so I suspect we'll actually get a chance to talk much more about this.
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