Cooperative / Collaborative Games

Our society has an overwhelming love affair with competition. Arguably, without competition we wouldn't have the impetus to improve, but putting ourselves in high risk situations actually shuts off the reasoning parts of our brain and makes us less good at clever problem solving. Babies don't learn to walk to be better walkers than each other. Our drives are there to empower us, and so are our relationships with others. As a society we grow strong when we know our own strengths and weaknesses, when we can build relationships with others, and we know our contributions are valued and we will get help if we ask for it. We don't need to strive for independence, or co-dependence, but rather, healthy interdependence. We are social creatures.

So here I am trying to get my children to play together. On the days when it is working they have an amazing synergy. The main thing they do together is playing with props - mainly Lego and toy cars. They create worlds together, most commonly recreating and combining different stories they have heard, from movies, videogames, YouTube casts, books, and personal experience. At times my eldest sounds like a cartoon super villain. They have teams of ninja battling zombies, and cars, rescuing princes and princesses, dragons, Pat and Jen, Hiccup and Camicazi... they get to be the characters and feel what being them is like, and wonder what if...?

As they get older I might get them into real "roleplaying games". For decades now people (well, nerds) have played games with paper and dice, and rules that standardise the beasts, powers, tools and threats, and the physical and magic laws of fantasy worlds in which they co-create stories together. Whether that's Dungeons and Dragons, or Vampire: The Masquerade, or pop culture spin offs like Buffy The Vampire Slayer, grown ups often need these rule systems because.. they are basically competitive. You can't have a struggle without something to fight against, whether that's quests, or your co-story makers, or the world officiated by your Game Master. Conflict is the essence of  drama.

For Christmas we got the family a copy of the game King of Tokyo. It's a relatively simple strategy game (that isn't completely random) aimed at 8+ age group. It's a cool game. With parents helping, my 7 and nearly 5 year old really love to play it, but they really need the assistance of a mediator. One of the things about my kids is that they are very close to the now. If playing short multiplayer video games like Pikmin 3 Bingo Battle has taught us anything, it's that, retrying a game over and over may give us the chance to win every now and then, but at the moment losing is huge. Losing against a game is one thing, but losing to a person is a tragedy, especially if the small person in question becomes a gloating maniac in their supreme domination of their competitors. As a child I hated competitive games, because I hated hurting other people's feelings when I won and they lost, and I hated losing, probably more than most people could understand.

I was lamenting on social media, the screaming rage of siblings desperate to play boardgames but unable to cope with it, and a friend of mine suggested getting board games that were collaborative rather than competitive ones. She sent me a couple, which was utterly awesome! Again, community is all about supporting each other like this, and as I have made friends on the internet over the years one of the bests things has been "paying it forward" and sending gifts to people. It's also lovely to receive.

I showed the games to my two older children and I noticed a few things happened.  The boys were only interested in playing Kakapo Rescue, because it was familiar subject matter to them. They knew what a Kakapo was, and the idea of the game was pretty easy to get across. They were really engaged with it and excited. They liked handling all the little pieces. They came up with strategies, and they were happy to follow my lead. They wanted to go again once the game was finished.

Unfortunately, for all the early enthusiasm, the game got boring quickly. When it got boring my older child decided to try making up variant rules to see how that would change the gameplay. This got me really excited. This guy is normally reactive to things rather than an instigator, so it's cool to see him pushing to play with new ideas and try new things. It has taken us years of working together to get to the point where he is prepared to take risks.

But since then they haven't got the game out again. It seems that there is just not enough appeal. I think their collaboration works better when there is an intrinsic reward, such as the excitement of a good story, understanding new ideas, solving problems or making good food. I wonder if they have already learned that board games are a competitive context and having a board game be non-competitive is weird. Or maybe, it would have caught their attention more if they were trying to survive a dragon attack or the zombie apocalypse....