$O$ TEXT: 682-2-HELP-ME Menu
Competition vs. Cooperation

Posted by Tug Brice on 29 Sep. 2020

Share on social media

It’s been a while since I’ve written one of these. Life has been… chaotic, to say the least. Alan and I both have had our attention focused elsewhere and $O$ has been put on the back burner. Both of us have had to see to our personal lives during the pandemic that we are living within. But that doesn’t mean that we have stopped thinking about $O$.

I was reminded of this blog recently when Alan passed on a compliment. Apparently, someone he met at one of his many and varied meetings remarked that they found these entries quite insightful, something I found both flattering and disconcerting, considering the last one was months ago. So I resolved that when I had some time, I would sit down and write another one.

There is much that could be written about. The situation in the world in general and the US, in particular, is such that there is quite a lot to say, but as this is not my own personal soapbox and instead an official company publication, I will refrain.

Instead, let me talk about one of my other passions: game design. Two entries ago I talked about the laws of thermodynamics. The entry before this one, about the writings of Terry Pratchett. So let me complete the random topic hat trick by talking about something else ostensibly completely unrelated to what we do that turns out to be incredibly relevant.

I got my Master’s degree from NYU in a program called Games for Learning. It taught exactly what it said on the tin: how to design games that taught things. We studied everything from game design to educational theory to cognitive psychology. It was a Master’s of Science program, so even the blow-off classes were a degree of magnitude harder than even my hardest undergrad courses. But they were also incredibly rewarding and educational.

Games can be divided into many categories of course, but the most useful one for today’s conversation divides them by how the players interact with each other. That is competitive versus cooperative. Most of the games that the average person is familiar with are competitive: poker, Candyland, tag, etc. Each individual plays for themselves, and they win at the expense of everyone else. In game theory (which is related to math and not game design), games like this are generally referred to as zero-sum games, meaning that for there to be a winner, there HAS to be a loser.

But, there is a different type of game. In recent years, it has become more fashionable to make cooperative games. One of the best (and most topically relevant) examples is a board game called Pandemic. A game that might be more familiar to most people and is both competitive AND cooperative is Bridge. Each person plays with a partner against another set of partners. It is still a zero-sum game, but it is won and lost as a partnership. No individual can win without their partner.

Why is this relevant now, some of you may be asking? Because life does not define the rules of the game. The world is not inherently competitive or cooperative. There is no giant referee in the sky that will stop you if you don’t play it a certain way. If you believe in an afterlife, you may have to stand before a judge at that time, but in the here-and-now, there are no such barriers. You can choose to compete with others or cooperate with them.

How people choose to play the game of life is not always easy to tell. However (and as it turns out, I lied. I am going to do a bit of personal soap-boxing here, but it’s for the public good), these days there is, in fact, a very EASY way to see whether someone is a competitive or cooperative player. Just look at their face. If you are in public and you can see their mouth and/or nose, they aren’t a cooperative player.

Wearing a mask during a pandemic is a public good. It is not about protecting YOURSELF. A face mask does not do much to stop you from catching COVID. What it does is prevent the spread of the disease to others. And to those who say “Well, I don’t have the virus, why do I have to wear a mask?”, the answer is “Because you don’t know FOR CERTAIN.”

Think of your mouth and nose like a gun. While the phrasing may vary, the first rule of safe firearm usage is that you treat all guns as if they are loaded. Unless the magazine is out and you can see that the chamber is empty, you don’t know FOR SURE that weapon isn’t loaded.

Likewise, with a disease like COVID where the test takes time to process, the only time you know for sure that you are clean is when you have been in full quarantine since the test was taken and comes back clean, and you are only sure until the moment you break quarantine. Because the moment that door opens, or the moment that chamber closes, you could be carrying a deadly weapon. If you aren’t wearing a mask, you are waving a possibly loaded gun all over the place. The difference is that the gun only kills the person you accidentally shoot, not that person, and the 40 other people they have time to infect before they die.

It’s easy to think only of yourself. It’s easy to be cruel. It’s easy to play the game of life competitively, getting what you can and not worrying about anyone else, but that is not a winning strategy. Nobody can do everything alone. The people who say that they can or have are lying. To you, themselves, or both. We all exist in an interconnected web of relationships and need. When someone tries to deny that, to act only for themselves, the web is broken and people suffer. I try to limit myself to one analogy an entry, but think of this web as a series of roads. When someone decides to close off their street because they want to play the game selfishly, traffic gets backed up and has to reroute. People are late, they get angry and cranky, and everyone’s day is worse.

Don’t be a loaded gun. Don’t be a closed street. Be kind. Be selfless. Take others into account. Wear a mask. Try to bring some light and compassion into this dark time.

Back to posts
$0$

Sign up for the $O$ newsletter and get news and updates delivered to your inbox.