No Victor, So No Spoils

In these games, the idea is cooperation, not competition

"Vampire blob" is a tag game. Anyone tagged, with a mock bite on the neck, joins hands with the biter and becomes part of the monster. "The lap game" is even simpler: a crowd forms a huge ring, and everyone sits down simultaneously on the player behind. Though "blob" and "lap" may seem like innocent cavorting, they are serious business to San Francisco's New Games Foundation. An offshoot of a 1973 New Games Tournament, staged by Whole Earth Catalog Creator Stewart Brand, the foundation is now a growing national enterprise. Its goal is nothing less than to change the way Americans play, mainly by replacing competitive games with cooperative "no win" pastimes.

Psychologist John O'Connell, 29, codirector of the foundation, wants to see the nation playing less baseball and more blob. Says he: "In traditional team games like baseball, it usually becomes apparent halfway through the game who the winners and losers will be. Then the losers play badly and have a miserable time." But O'Connell and the foundation want to restructure these time-honored sports activities so that everyone plays and no one loses. In a version of "new volleyball," the aim is to keep the ball from hitting the ground rather than to score points by zinging it at the feet of opponents across the net. Says Jeff McKay, a San Francisco teacher and baseball coach who subscribes to the foundation's theory of no winners or losers: "If the game doesn't fit the players, we change the game, not the players."

Assistant Intramural Director Lou Fabian and Student Kathy Evans, of the University of Pittsburgh, have found an ingenious way to curb competitiveness in basketball. Last year they introduced an intramural program in which the scores of both teams were added together. Two opposing teams win a joint victory when their total score is higher than those in other games played at the same hour. The goal of the program is to eliminate scorekeeping altogether.

The foundation's philosophy owes something to the distaste for competitiveness that rose out of the 1960s counterculture. But the "new games" are catching on in the mainstream. The foundation, with an annual budget of about $400,000, conducts a hundred or more weekend workshops round the country for recreation specialists, educators and health care professionals; many of them are paid by their employers to learn the new nonwinning ways. Explains O'Connell: "The games are especially popular in the Midwest, where people still have lots of community picnics and family days. They're a lot more fun than spitting watermelon seeds at each other."

Another pundit of new games is Sports Psychologist Terry Orlick, 33, of the University of Ottawa. He thinks that the foundation has not gone far enough. He notes, for example, that the foundation's tug of war encourages players to switch sides to prevent a victory. Orlick, in his new Cooperative Sports & Games Book, promotes a "tug of peace," in which children are arrayed not in two teams pulling against each other at opposite ends of a single rope, but hauling at various ropes to form stars, triangles and other designs. Orlick has even invented a cooperative version of musical chairs and a tame version of the board game Monopoly, called Community. Says Orlick: "We've become fixated on numerical outcomes of games.

Losers feel rejected, not worthy. The point is to have fun interacting, not to put some one else down."

Agreeing with the foundation, Orlick wants to adapt traditional sports so that all players are equally involved in the action. In volleyball, for instance, he suggests that all six players on a team hit the ball before it goes over the net; and in basketball he encourages more balanced scoring by subtracting the points made by the highest and lowest scorers of each team. Other popular games are manipulated so the final score is a tie.

Such ideas would make a shambles of most American sports pro grams, geared as they are to encouraging youngsters to test themselves and develop skills through competition. Not to worry, says Orlick: "Those kinds of games will always be around. It's just that we've gone overboard on competitiveness, aggressiveness and the 'me' ethic."

Orlick has a point. Little League fathers who abuse their kids for striking out are surely grotesque. So are football coaches who risk crippling a youngster to win a game. But some athletic supervisors see no reason to go overboard in the opposite direction. Says Roswell Merrick, executive secretary of the National Association for Sport and Physical Education in Washington, D.C.: "I can't go the Orlick route. That's extreme. You want to continue to challenge kids. Sure you want to cooperate and have fun, but you never want to not keep score." With proper supervision, he says, competitive games are not damaging to children above the age of 7 or 8. Walter Cooper, head of the health and physical education school at the University of Southern Mississippi, has attended a New Games Foundation workshop and liked its emphasis on involving people of all ages in physical activity. "But," he adds, "the new games are only a leisure pastime and have no relationship to competitive sports." Says Morgan Wootten, a successful basketball coach and athletic director at De Matha High School in Hyattsville, Md.: "We live in a competitive society. You don't have to win every time, but you have to care about winning. If we don't care, we can become a society of people who don't strive for excellence."

In fact, the "laid back" counterculture opposition to striving seems central to no-win sports. The foundation's John O'Connell insists that the aim is not to win but to catch "the flow." And what is the flow? "Being so involved you lose track of time," he says. "Feeling light, as if in love." Which, as everybody knows, is usually a no-win game.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.