Game Change: from competition to cooperation

I’m beginning to think that on the day they find my dead body, they will have to pry my cold, dead hands from my computer’s keyboard.

It will be a kind of Charlton Heston-NRA death, except it will be benign. My fingers will not be wrapped around a rifle.

But I likely will have been playing “Words with Friends” (WWF) a relatively harmless on-line Scrabble-like game. No one dies in this little vocabulary showdown.

Indeed I recommend it to those looking for non-violent computer games for youth or for the mentally unstable.

But it is competitive, often fiercely so.

So it was that the other day that one of my formidable competitors, a fellow Quaker, suggested that rather than compete, we cooperate and use our combined scores as the  measure of our success. That way no one would have to lose and we might just win together. (Note: she had lost our previous game rather badly.)

I welcomed the suggestion but I did posit that we might run up a higher total score if rather than cooperate we simply competed. Nevertheless, we decided to cooperate. We set each other up and revealed which tiles we had on our rack. If one of us had a “Q” but no “U,” for instance, the other, holding a “U” might strategically place it for the other to use.

We’ve played this cooperative version of WWF a couple of times. In the first game we held out an initial “target” goal of a total score of more than 1000. We quickly discovered that it was unrealistic, so we ratcheted back to 800.

The first time we played we scored 786 points. Clearly we needed to talk strategy. We did, and in our second game, which is about to end, we are going to score something like 865.

Not bad, but then I reviewed past competitive scores. None was more than 865, but some have come quite close. One, for instance, was 839 and another was 836.

Recently, I’ve been reading a few books about how the brain works and it seems to me that comparing scores produced from cooperation with those resulting from competition speaks to the nature of human behavior. Is a competitive world or society more productive than a cooperative one, or vice versa?

I’m not ready to draw any conclusions, but it seems some answers reside in the approach one takes to playing "Words with Friends."

What will it be: Cooperation or Competition?

Confessions of an art student

I’m taking a watercolor class this term at the local arts center. It’s a low-key studio class without grades and with plenty of encouragement.

At the first of eight sessions, I found myself an outsider in the group, which has been taking and re-taking this class seemingly for years. Perhaps that is why this is called an "intermediate" class. I'm "in the middle" of a lot. Everyone is on a first-name basis (Barbara, Marilyn, Jeanne, Tricia, Meg etc.). All but two, Jack and me, are women.There’s talk about relatives, recent vacations and getting over the flu or worse. The one thing we share is time; all are on the retiring side of middle age.

If we weren’t painting, we might be knitting or sewing — or playing golf.

The main idea seems to be making sure everyone paints for at least three hours once a week. Without the class, we’d all be doing something else in our retirement.

Each week, at the start of the class, there’s a time to display our previous week’s painting for comments. The paintings are stunningly diverse, both in content, execution and technique.

I’ve tried to capture the amiable mood of the class above because it has so little to do with my thoughts about being “in class” again.

In the back of my head I hold on to the dark thought that there must be a grading curve, that my fellow classmates — gentle souls — are really dogged competitors. My work will be judged by the teacher and by the others and found to be either wonderful or sadly wanting. Who knows? I might even flunk.

I’ve been surprised that along with my brushes, paints and paper tablet I arrive with such guarded, defensive, almost aggressive feelings — that I still harbor a deep angst left over from years of schooling.

I think the problem resides in the word “class.” I know that some of the course descriptions at the art center use the word “workshop,” perhaps to avoid associations students have with “class.” But to me, “workshop” always conjures up Santa and his non-union elves. Not far away is the term “sweatshop.”

What goes on between 9:30 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. in our art center watercolor room is something else. But what? A meditation? A respite? An exploration? Discoveries? A gathering of congenial muses? A painting circle?

It’s all of these and whatever else we want it to be. The one thing I don’t want is a “class.”