At a buddy’s house recently, I played a cooperative board game. In Vanguard of War, each player controls a character defending a church from an army of demons. Many games of this ilk have been produced recently – Pandemic and Ghost Stories are among the most popular.
But my impression is that these games are best with a single player. You’re attempting to solve a (typically randomized) puzzle created by the designer. Maybe you’re the sort of person who enjoyed doing math homework with friends – if so, this type of game would probably be fun to play with a team.
Perhaps it’s a failure of my own education that I rarely worked through chemistry or physics problems in groups. After all, few really big puzzles are solved alone. To the best of my knowledge, no tech company of one is going to stop climate change or start a colony on Mars.
But something I look for in games – in any group project, really – is for the identity of the participants to matter. There’s an increasing awareness that people from different backgrounds will often come up with different approaches to even highly technical problems. A world in which only white males hold management positions at tech companies doesn’t just produce economic and social inequality – it also makes crappier technologies.
Some cooperative games have an element of this. I played The Mind recently, in which players are dealt random cards from a numbered deck of a hundred, and without communicating (other than wait times) are supposed to dole out their cards in ascending order. Any set of players should converge toward the game’s simple solution (waiting a constant duration per card number before tossing down your next), but it was still fun to play. I imagine that a kid could enjoy ten or more games, especially with different teammates. Will you reach a rhythm soon enough?
But in many of other cooperative games, the identities of the actual humans sitting around the table don’t matter. If you’re talking through decisions with your teammates, each player’s personality is subsumed by the game. In something like Vanguard of War, where each player is the primary controller of a single character, that game character’s personality matters more than your own.
And let’s say you play a game several times: with many cooperative board games, the way to maintain an interesting challenge as you improve is for your teammates to play worse. Otherwise the game becomes easier precisely when you need it to be more difficult. When a game is a pre-set puzzle, you and your friends can’t keep having fun by growing in experience together.
This is unfortunate, because I’d wanted to introduce cooperative games to my kids. Isn’t that what all parents want? For their kids to get along, to be the sort of friendly, helpful ally that people are happy to work with later on in life?
But then I realized that the best thing for me to do is simply change how I think about playing games. A two-player “competitive” game like Go or chess (or Hive, a recent household favorite) doesn’t need to seem adversarial.
In chess, each person is given an objective, and, yes, those objectives are mutually exclusive. But completing the objective isn’t really the point. The purpose of the game is to have fun solving puzzles, and the person you’re playing with creates the puzzles for you. The players in chess actually are cooperating, because they’re both setting aside reality in favor of an arbitrary set of rules that both follow for the duration of the game – and the game is only interesting if both players work together to create it. If anyone doesn’t follow the expected rules, it wrecks the puzzle.
Part of what makes “competitive” games interesting is that both players are striving to win – to capture the king, control the most territory, what have you. A human consciousness is manipulating the puzzle that you’re trying to solve in real time. Of course, this works best when both players have a fair chance of completing their objectives, which is a reason why I like Go better than chess. There’s a built-in mechanism to accommodate less-experienced players. And until the players have “solved” the game (like knowing the exact best strategy in tic-tac-toe or checkers), they’ll continue to have a fun challenge as they grow in experience together.
So I shouldn’t have been worried about introducing competitive games to my children. I just needed to change the way I think about them. If only I’d paid more attention to ecologist Mark Bekoff!
Bekoff has studied play for years. In The Emotional Lives of Animals, he writes:
I was surprised to learn that [dogs’] bows are used not only right at the beginning of play to tell another dog “I want to play with you,” but also right before biting, accompanied by rapid side-to-side head shaking, as if to say, “I’m going to bite you hard but it’s still in play.” Bows are also used right after vigorous biting, as if to say, “I’m sorry I just bit you so hard, but it was play.” Bows serve as punctuation, an exclamation point, to call attention to what the dog wants.
Infant dogs and their wild relatives learn how to play fairly using play markers such as the bow, and their response to play bows seems to be innate. Pigs use play markers such as bouncy running and head twisting to communicate their intentions to play. Jessica Flack and her colleagues discovered that juvenile chimpanzees will increase the use of signals to prevent the termination of play by the mothers of their younger play partners. Researchers who study the activity always note that play is highly cooperative. I can’t stress enough how important it is that play is carefully negotiated, that it is fine-tuned on the run so that the play mood is maintained. There are social rules that must be followed.
Just the other day, my kid asked if we could play a game of “chest.” I momentarily demurred. But now that I’ve had time to reflect, I know – I don’t want to play against her, but I will happily play many games of chess with her.
Frank Brown Cloud 