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?

Pausing in a culture of conflict

In President Obama's memorial address yesterday in Tucson, the most memorable and telling line for me was:

"At a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do - it's important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds."

Why did the President appeal for a mere "pause"? Is that the best we can do?

Why not make our healing permanent and speak and listen with civility, even humility, so that we are truly "one nation indivisible."

Our nasty little secret, and the President knows it, is that we are an adversarial society that thrives on a culture of conflict.

Our economy and political system are rooted in competition built on our baser instincts and emotional appeals. Our legal system is all about winning. Justice is often a lucky happenstance. We place far more value on individuals and their rights (often at the expense of others) than on community and harmony. Our media and our cultural stories describe and explore conflict in detail, often bloody detail. So few of our stories are about cooperation and compassion (though the President poignantly amplified a few in his speech.)

One commentator, the late George Gerbner, described mass media as creating a "Mean World Syndrome." He pointed out that a society steeped in a brutally harsh fiction has a way of transforming that fiction into fact.

The media's millionaire political hate-mongers would be paupers if they suddenly became "healers" instead of slash-and-burn rhetorical "wounders." We are not conditioned to watch a world at peace.

In his media moment yesterday, the President played his role as healer and truth-teller. Sadly, it was only a pause — flicker of light in our darkness.

We need a strong and steady beacon. Where will it come from? What will it be?