The absurdity of Games: Part I

Part 1: The absurdity of Games

I like to play games with the kids. I also play games on the kids, but those are mostly harmless and aimed at getting Jose and Jordao to remember to water the salt and chicken bones they planted in the garden. The games I play with the kids are not just soccer and cards and board games and house (yes, I play house). I like using games that are designed to reinforce certain behaviors and/or to illustrate and elucidate others. For example, if you remember playing heads-up-seven-up in grade school, it wasn't so much as a way to spend recess when it was raining. It was a way for your teacher to figure out who the cheaters were. Bet you didn't know that, did you?

Most of the games I play with the kids are derived from economics. Economics might be the dismal science, but economic games are great at illustrating principles like altruism and trust. Altruism isn't a naïve, touchy-feely, hippy term. I've touched on this before, and it's more akin to selfishness. I like defining it better by Galatians 6:10, "So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone." That's kind of a scary thought if you think about it. How many of you would have your lives turned upside-down if you followed that verse? But enough preaching...

Economic games are not like Monopoly or Shop Till You Drop, or where you have to name the right price for detergent on The Price Is Right. Most economic games are even simpler than that.

One game I played was rock paper scissors. Rock paper scissors is not an economics game, it is a children's game. That is why we played it with a twist. Everybody played against me twenty times and I only threw rock. With everyone watching, and seeing plainly that I only threw rock, the game is aimed at gauging if a person will jump in and trust that I will always throw rock, or if they will doubt me that I will play something else.

Almost half of the kids will, the first time, throw something other than paper (because paper beats my rock). Almost ALL of the kids except for three threw something other then paper within the first five turns, fearing all the while in the back of their minds that I would change my pick of rock and cut their paper with my scissors.

This game is simple and not to be taken as gospel. I'm sure if I played the game with a group of nuns there would be those that would mistrust and throw in a scissors every now and then. The fun part of the game becomes when I can single out the kid that lost to me—yes, in a game of rock-paper-scissors where I openly said I would only throw rock there was a kid that decided to throw scissors enough times to actually lose the majority of 20 matches—and ask him why he was doubting. The game becomes a microcosm for teaching other things.

The reason I like these games is that they reduce a principle I am trying to teach the kids down to an absurd level. Not absurd in the vulgar sense, like somebody eating a peanut butter and sardine sandwich, but absurd in the classical sense. If you have one beer and feel good, then two beers and feel better so you then absurdly reason that if one beer is good and two is better, then fifteen must be great. Pretty soon your liver is screaming in agony and you realize that while your logic was sound, your premise (beer=feeling good) was, at it's core, absurd.

This is how kids reason. Jose and Jordao see people put seeds in the garden and then bigger versions of those seeds sprout. This leads Jose and his brother to put chicken bones in the ground hoping that, like Ezekiel in the valley of the dry bones, his chicken thigh would grown tendons and muscles and skin and feathers and grow into a chicken. His logic was sound—water it and it will grow. What was flawed was his premise—anything I put in the ground will grow.

And I'm all about breaking down the kids' absurd premises.