meaningless competition
When I was a kid, a teacher played the following game with my class:
Pair up. Arm wrestle your partner, if you win the arm wrestling competition, you get a skittle. You can wrestle again, as many times as you like.
I didn’t really like skittles, so I just let me partner win, over and over again. I apologized to my teacher that I wasn’t playing in the right way, but she told me that I was playing exactly correctly. The best way to play is to just lose, repeatedly, and split half the skittles with your partner. We’re so preoccupied with winning a meaningless competition that we ignore the best way to get all the skittles we want.
I saw a game recently in the Ithrive Game Design Studio Toolkit that gave me that same feeling. Everyone gets a tissue that hangs out of their pocket. Tell everyone that the tissue represents life, and if your tissue is removed, you’re out of the game.
Everyone will likely start grabbing each other’s tissues left and right. Ask them why. Is their winning predicated on everyone else losing?
