The Absurdity of Games Part II

Part I: Theabsurdity of Games

Part II: Potluck with the boys

I like playing games with kids that emphasize two main points. The first point is that if you do good, you will reap what you sow. Do what Jesus said: love your neighbor as yourself, know good and do it, serve others, etc. The second point I like to teach the kids is much more controversial. If the first point is that good behavior has good rewards, the second is that bad behavior has greater rewards.

Imagine your church has a potluck. Somebody brings brings homemade lasagna and another a cobb salad and anther a chocolate cake. You bring a dozen, prime, top choice steaks! I bring nothing. You spend a hundred of dollars on steaks and another hour preparing and grilling them. As you enter the line I am coming back to the front to grab another paper plate because mine is folding under the weight of you steak and the lasagna.

By the time you get through the line you get a plateful of tuna casserole, brownie crumbles, and a pat on the back from Reverend Lovejoy because you have learned that "Truly, better ye that giveth than receiveth."

Let's say now that our imaginary church potluck, and your steaks, were such a success that the Reverend decided to do the same thing the whole rest of the month. This time one person brings cocktail weenies, another brings fruit salad, and you bring mini-hamburgers. Two other people, seeing that I got through the line last time having not brought any food myself, decide to join me and become the freeloaders and bring absolutely nothing.

We fleece your fruit, burgle your ham, and polish off the polishes. You go through the line last and wind up with a scoop of smashed bananas and half of an Oscar Meyer. You sit down looking at your half-empty plate Reverend Lovejoy pulls up a chair next to you, pats you on the back and says, "Blessed be ye that hunger and thirstest for righteousness."

Imagine that by the third week of the potluckathon the other families have caught on to my secret and decide to bring nothing and only eat others' food. This time the only person that brings anything is you and your deviled eggs. Being a little wiser, you made extras and stashed them at home in the fridge so you wouldn't be completely without. Reverend Lovejoy, instead of patting you on the back, quietly nudges you and whispers, "Deviled eggs isn't exactly subtle, is it?"

For the last week of the church potluck, you are fed up with your freeloading brothers and sisters in Christ and decided to not bring anything. To no one's surprise, no food was brought at all and everybody goes home hungry. Reverend Lovejoy is booed out of the pulpit after reminding the congregation that man doesn't live on bread alone.

This imaginary potluck disaster is a parallel to a game I played with the kids called the Public Goods game. The game revolves much in the same way, except in our game everyone started with an imaginary amount of money to contribute to the common good. Much like people deciding what to bring to a potluck, each player is player is left with a decision to make on how much to contribute to the our money pool. The monies in the pool were then distributed equally among all the players.

Each player started with "100" dollars. They were told that we were playing five rounds and each kid was told to secretly write down his contribution on a scrap of paper and pass it to me. Most kids donated around 15-20 (that would be those that brought tuna casserole and lasagna), one donated half his money (you and your steaks), and I donated zero, just like in the potluck. The money was returned equally to all the players, and about half found they were left with less money than when they started. Those who gave abundantly to the pool fund (potluck) were left with little in return comparatively. Those who gave nothing (me) after the money was given back had the highest total of everybody.

The second round of the game, about half of the people, seeing that I had attained the most money by nature of not giving any away, decided to join me in being Scrooges. The rest of the people that gave contributed significantly less to the potluck, noting that most had less money to draw from after the first round. After monies were pooled and divided out amongst everybody, by this point everybody noticed that I still had the most money and—equally important for our observations—those who gave the most were left with the least in their proverbial pocket.

The third round of the game, only one person contributed to the potluck. Nobody gave anything. In his defense, the one player that gave, out of the ten boys I played with, was by far the youngest and a little slow to pick up the object. At this point, they noticed that by only one person donating to the communal fund, there was little left when divided among all the players. At the next round, number four, the game essentially ended as all the players refused to contribute.

The Public Goods game is very limited in its scope. It is meant to simulate a real world example of people contributing towards a public good (a community park, taxes to fund a municipal bus system, a public school levy, war bonds, etc). The contributions by everyone differ, but everyone receives the same compensation as the money is divided equally amongst all players. The game is extremely capitalist and anti-socialist in nature—this is true of most Western economic games because these games reduce complex economies down to singular principles, often with of absurd results.

As the game ended everyone looked at their balance sheet. Having started all with the same $100, some were now at 60, most were around 90 or 100, some a little higher, and I had the most by far having not contributed ever and only receiving the same equal portion. The ten boys I was playing with all cried foul and started saying how wrong it was that I should win with the most money when I never contributed a cent the whole game. I rigged the game and it wasn't fair.

What I found odd was that I never told them the object of the game was to have the most money...

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.

I'm ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille

The rain here is pretty straightforward. It either rains or it doesn't. Sometimes there will be a very light mist in the mornings, but those are pretty much the only three options. There isn't much variety.

In Seattle, there is rain, drizzle, sprinkles, mist, showers, scattered showers, scattered thunderstorms, thunderstorms. The Eskimos have nine words for snow. Seattle has forty-six for rain. Sometimes they will forecast morning showers, turning into sprinkles later on, and scattered thunderstorms in evening with rain for everybody else. (And then you wake up the next day and it is completely sunny the whole time.)

Here, most of the time here the rain will come in the afternoon and usually there is about an hour or so of warning before it happens. The hour is about the time it takes for the clouds to appear on the horizon till they get to wherever you are. Often, because of the heat and humidity you just kind of know when it is going to rain.

Sometimes it takes you a little off guard though. If the rain comes after dark there isn't that sudden temperature drop and chill in the air that accompanies these tropical rains.

When the rain starts, it isn't always few drops here or there that progresses into a larger rainstorm. Often the very minute the rain starts it hits full power and is enough to drench you to the bone in a matter of seconds. Often because of the speed with which the rains move it comes in full force the moment it starts falling. Still, because of the daytime sky turning to night and the temperature dropping by up to ten degrees (or 6 centigrade) in a matter of minutes there is ample warning.

The other warning sign that the rain is coming is the roar that the falling rain makes at it is approaching.

The only time in my life I've felt like I was in a scene was when I was with my brothers and I was driving across North Dakota doing 110mph on the interstate in our grandma's Ford Taurus blasting heavy metal through the speakers. It felt if the Dukes of Hazard met a direct-to-DVD sequel of The Fast and The Furious.

That all changed this week, when I felt like I was in a movie for the second time in my life. You know that stereotypical scene where the character(s) stand around and all of a sudden through the silence they see or hear the impending danger. Realizing this danger results in the character(s) running for dear life. Some examples can be found in:

• The Lord of the Rings (with John Rhys-Davies) when they are in the Mines of Moria and realize the balrog (that big fiery creature) is down there with them and they have to run from it.
• Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (with John Rhys-Davies and directed by Steven Spielberg) when in the very beginning Indie hears the rumble of the giant stone rolling to crush him, turns around wide-eyed, and then sprints for his life.
• Saving Private Ryan (directed by Steven Spielberg starring Tom Hanks) when they stop to help a villager in the rain and then hear the rat-a-tat of machine gun fire, panic, and scramble to take cover.
• Apollo 13 (starring Tom Hanks and BOOM KEVIN BACON!!!) when the astronauts here the warning alarms before hurrying like there's no tomorrow to put out a fire that is consuming all their oxygen.

My own movie moment was more like Honey I Shrunk the Kids when the aforementioned kids get caught in a hail of death-sized water drops when the sprinkler turns on.

It was one evening when I was sitting around with a bunch of kids discussing who-knows-what (plasma physics, probably) when we heard a rumble in the distance. This was not the kind of rumble that comes from thunder, this was more of a sustained din. After looking at one another, there was a dramatic pause (isn't there always) and somebody screamed "RAAAAAAAAAAAAAIN!!!".

At that point, the rain started pounding on the roof of the cafeteria and everybody bolted as fast as they could to run for shelter. For the boys, they had about 10 yards to sprint till they were in their dorm. The girls, maybe about fifty yards to the front of their house. Me? A full 100 yards to make it to my house. I grabbed my courage, put my head down, and sprinted as if my life depended on it. Did it? Not in the slightest. Was my adrenalin pumping all the same? A week has gone by and I'm still amped up!

I made it to my house dry, slammed the door behind me (for dramatic effect) and collapsed out of breath onto my couch (they should have just given me an Oscar right there) as my ever stoic roommate Daniel glanced up from his book and asked, "Rain, huh?"

The Sniffles

Call me crazy, but it just takes a long time to heal in Mozambique. I got the sniffles a week ago. I still have the sniffles. I also had a fever and headaches sore throat and everything else in between, but it's been over a week.

This is all purely anecdotal but everybody I've talked to seems to confirm it. I've have scabs and scars on my hand from two months ago, the equivalent of road rash. It was two months ago. I still have them. They just won't go away. Everybody I know that gets a cut or a scrape, even a simple one, will have it for at least a month. They are the type of cuts that after a week in the US you wouldn't even know I had it.

Even simple little things that you would never notice are different. I would have never thought of it had someone else not mentioned it, but when I'm in the U.S., even for my brief visit last year, if I go two days or so without shaving people start giving me glances telling me to clean up. Here I could go for about a week without even looking like I've stopped caring. It just doesn't grow the same. The same go for healing from sickness or wounds.

It seems every time I get sick it just never goes away. There is a difference between a scratchy throat that hangs on for a week and spending three days with a splitting headache and a fever. The latter is what I did. Luckily for me, I maintain my unquenchable foolishness optimism in the face of adversity. A group of kids came to visit me one day when I was pretty much out of it. I don't remember them coming to see me. When asked how my fever was I apparently replied, "It's not so bad. In fact, I'm thinking of asking it out on a second date."

I shut myself in for three days just trying to avoid moving any part of my body, bright sunlight (is there any other kind) and getting anybody else sick along with me. So how did I pass my time? The same way I always pass my time when I'm sick: Watching Star Wars. All of them. In french. That last part is kind of new thing because the copy of Star Wars I got my hands on is only in French. "Louis, je suis ton père," needs no translation.

Now I'm pretty much left with a dripping nose and a sore throat. The only advantage is that I'm able to sing along with all my Johnny Cash records now. Even the bottom register of "I Walk The Line".

Spare Change

Getting your money from into a form that is actually usable is often a challenge here, as I talked about last time. From the bank to the bairro, it is adventure to get a denomination that you can actually use. The exchange rate with the US dollar is about 30-to-1 (with the Euro I think it is around 40-to-1). So when you get your 500mt note from the ATM, you're not even getting $20.

But because of the scale that people charge for things here, your money goes further than you think. Want a mango, that'll be 1mt. An avocado, 5mt. Hot, fresh roasted corn-on-the-cob, 10mt.

On the other end, things that aren't food are often priced and packaged for you to buy only exactly what you need with as little money as possible. Need laundry detergent, for example? You will never have enough money sitting around to buy the family-super-saver jumbo size of laundry detergent that will last for six months. If you do, you'll be left with no money for food. You will buy an individual packet of laundry soap for 3mt that will wash maybe four or five day's worth of clothes (for a guy). Or you will buy a bar of laundry soap for 10mt and that will get your family through a week.

While twenty is the smallest bank note here, the coins in Mozambique are in the ten, five, two, one, and fifty-cent denominations. Fifty-cents because there are actually a lot of things that will cost 1.5 or 2.5 or 7.5. Past ten everything for sale is in whole numbers, and often really round, nice numbers. Nothing is going to cost 17. Or even 199. Just 200. There are no price wars here.

The fight for most people is to get their money from large bills down to these small coins. But thanks to a new law, once you get your money into coins, not all of it is usable.

When Mozambique devalued its currency nine years ago, things were a thousand times more expensive. After years of hyperinflation people were paying 500mt for a loaf of bread. The government decided to overhaul it's practices, stop printing money, and lop off a whole bunch of zeroes. That same bread that was 5000mt became five. With the changes came all new currency, notes, coins, and all. The coins they were minting at 500mt became 50 cents. 1000Mt became 1mt, and so on.

The notes were taken out of circulation but people were allowed to keep using the old coins, which were the same size and color and design as the new coins. The only difference was they were written 5mt instead of five-thousand and were about half as heavy because they were made from aluminum.

Most vendors in the market have piles of these coins after doing a full day of business selling rolls (2mt) or donuts and cookies(1mt). They were mixed in with the newer minted coins and everybody knows that even though the coin said 1000 that it really means 1.

Things were fine until last week when the government announced that after 9 years it was tired seeing the old coins in circulation and decreed that they were no longer valid legal tender. The next day people were bemoaning the fact that their piles of change would no longer be recognized as currency—bemoaning that is until they got wise and realized that they can use whatever they want to as currency.

The kids know that I hoard the old currency. I used them as souvenirs to give to people when I was back in the states. The only reason is I think foreign currencies are cool and it was funny handing people a coin marked as five thousand and telling its worth about 18 cents. They kids were laughing at me because my accumulated wealth of maybe 30mts (=$1) was now useless.

This prompted a mini lecture on the history of money, saying that anything you ascribe value to can be used as payment, be it coins, salt, shiny pots and smallpox blankets, gold, tulips, oil, land, or whatever.

The next day I set out to prove them wrong and headed to the market to buy donut holes. (Donut holes is really the best equivalent description I can think of. They're small, fried, and coated in sugar glaze and that's just about what they are. And they're on sale EVERYWHERE.)

As usual, there are a line of about five ladies with donut holes all in a row and all competing for your money. I started at one end and went to buy a single donut hole with the old money. The lady looked at it and then pronounced "This money is old," which meant I couldn't use it. I just kind of held the money in my hand as the gal next to her said, "I'll take it then," grabbed my money and gave me a donut.

It seems as if the old money was still working just as good. I went the third lady in the line, handed her the old money and asked for a donut. She also said that it wasn't valid. But that didn't stop the fourth lady from saying that the money is just as good to her. She took it and gave me a donut.

I returned to the orphanage with donuts in hand and the kids all applauded me.