Play vs. Competition

A "cooperative game" is different. It does not have winners or losers—or rather, we all win or lose together. For instance, suppose a board game where the task is to scale an imaginary mountain. In a competitive game, each player would try and get to the top first, and the one who did would be the winner. In a cooperative game, the task is for the players to unite in a team to get to the top and return before their supplies run out. Unless we help each other, we perish together in the attempt.

Martin Hattersley

When we place more importance on rules than on people, we are in bondage to competition, and lose sight of our common human bonds.

From the book Playfair by Matt Weinstein and Joel Goodman

It is said that our leisure activities no longer give us a break from the alienating qualities of the work we do; instead, they have come to resemble that work.

The chief reason our recreation is like our work is that it has become more competitive. Sports, for example, have always been competitive and never really qualified as play in the first place. Although it's not generally acknowledged, most definitions of play do seem to exclude competitive activities.

In an experiment with five-and six-year olds, Janice Nelson and her associates found that "success as well as failure in competition produced consistent increases in aggression, as compared with the effects of noncompetitive play," although failure made the children more aggressive. Another study discovered that boys who won a subsequent competition were more aggressive than those who failed. Even winning is not enough to eradicate the frustrating elements of competition. The hostile act of competition, on the playing field and in other contexts, for both participants and spectators, leads us to become more aggressive.

Any activity whose goal is victory cannot be play, if you are trying to win, you are not engaged in true play.

Adapted from No Contest: The Case Against Competition by Alfie Kohn

Play is to be played exactly because it isn't serious; it frees us from seriousness.

Novak

When a group of people get together to play, no matter how well-intentioned they may be at the start, they're probably going to wind up playing together the way that they've always been taught to play together, competitively and unsupportively, with a strong focus on individual heroics.

We believe that is not the natural way to play. It's just the way that everybody has been taught to play.

Most games, as they are played today, at best ignore the development of self-confidence, and at worst destroy self-confidence.

The noncompetitive approach to playing can "detoxify" some of these negative aspects of competitive group play. We want to help people feel good about themselves as they actively participate in their own recreation.

Adapted from the book Playfair by Matt Weinstein and Joel Goodman

Clearly competition and play tug in two different directions. If you are trying to win, you are not engaged in true play.

Adapted from No Contest: The Case Against Competition by Alfie Kohn