Cooperative Games: A New Set of Rules
By Martin Hattersley
Christmas for me this year became an educational experience when my children introduced me to "cooperative games".
Games, for me, have never been cooperative events. It's completely contrary to my upbringing. They are there for one side to beat the other. They are a preparation for life, which is a struggle, red in tooth and claw. I enjoy the fight for positions and prizes. Was not the battle of Waterloo won on the playing fields of Eton? Just imagine what it would look like if, in the middle of a N.H.L. hockey game, the Oilers came up to the Flames and said "May we assist you in placing the puck in our net?" It's just not cricket.
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.
I recall the fiendish intensity with which, in my pre-teen years, I honed my entrepreneurial skills (and unknowingly educated myself in economics and monetary theory), in game after game of "Monopoly". Day after day, in the Spartan atmosphere of our boarding-school, we boys spent our time crushing each other, or being crushed, in an economic free for all that represented all too well the business climate of the depression years. What joy would a young boy have had if, instead of relieving the frustrations of his life by economically pummelling opponents into the ground, the rules had been revised so as to make its objective the maximization of wealth through cooperation, and the distribution of a reasonable standard of living to all? Adam Smith would turn in his grave!
Just the same, there's a thought here. When the economic world outside looks far too much like a game of Monopoly that Canada is losing - when the buzzword of the business community is to "meet international competition" - the question does arise: are we playing with the optimum set of rules? Organize the world on a competitive basis, and there is one winner, and a very large number of losers. This may give emotional satisfaction to the winners, but gives neither satisfaction nor bread on the table for the losers - and those losers are beginning to look a lot like us. Rewrite the rules so as to encourage all the desirable things - respect for the environment, basic economic security for all, minimum waste of human and physical resources, opportunities for freedom, education, culture and leisure - and the world as a whole would be a much happier and more contented place.
In the world we live in, I don't see it happening. But maybe in a generation, after today's children brought up on cooperative games have reached maturity, some genius may suggest a new set of rules for the modern day rat-race, and the world will say "Of course! That's what we've been looking for all the time!" It won't be a moment too soon.
