Win-Win Mentality
- Games are powerful tools for developing social perspectives. Traditional games teach players that one side can win only if the other side loses. EnTeam Games provide a mental shift: everybody wins together, or everybody loses together — depending on whether they can improve their combined scores. Everyone wins only if their combined scores improve.
You can see a chart comparing win-lose contests with win-win or lose-lose contests. Following the chart are several questions you can use to classify games as they impact mental models of competition and cooperation.
EnTeam teaches players the value of cooperation and working together regardless of your differences. In the octopus story, EnTeam Board Member Cindy Marston shares her experience watching this mental shift when students from Muslim, Jewish, and Christian schools played together:
Kids and balloons are naturally a good mix, so when I assisted at an Operation Cooperation event where 3rd graders from four different schools were meeting for the second time, I was enjoying their enthusiastic playing of the EnTeam game called Uplift.
Divided into teams of 6 (using the same teams as their last visit so they knew each other a little bit), the students were given the EnTeam Uplift playing instructions. They would play three matches and the goal was to get as few points as possible – like golf. All they had to do was hold hands and keep a single balloon in the air for a full minute. If the balloon touched the floor, their team got a point, and if anyone on the team broke hands, their team also got a point. So, hold hands, bounce the balloon so it doesn’t ever touch the floor and get zero points. Easy, right? Not for enthusiastic and energetic third graders!
During the first round, the balloon was sailing high in the air, bouncing on the ground, and the students were dropping their friend’s hand and reaching for it – points galore! After the first round of racking up and reporting their points and doing some strategizing, I watched one group calmly and quietly set the balloon in the middle of their crossed hands and gently bounce it. No way was that balloon going anywhere. And the students were happy, knowing that their team would get zero points.
As I approached, I heard them talking and learned that they actually named their strategy – they called it the “octopus.” My best guess is that perhaps they felt like an octopus when they had their hands and arms all crossed and linked together. I congratulated them on such a clever strategy and asked who would like to share it in the next strategizing session. One boy immediately piped up. “We don’t want anyone else to know about the octopus because then they might use it.” His friend gave him a gentle shove and said, “But if we do tell them, then everyone gets a better score, and we all win. That’s the point, remember?” “Oh yeah,” the first one said, “I’ll tell them.” And he did.
I realized I had just witnessed the mindset shift that EnTeam Games teach – the shift from keeping useful information from others to sharing it because it helps make us all better, from competing to cooperating. I told one of the teachers what I had seen, and she smiled delightedly and exclaimed, “Wow! You have no idea how significant that is for that young boy to think about the success of others.”
Because EnTeam Games score cooperation, it makes winning together easy to see, experience, and enjoy. Even 3rd graders get it.
Want to encourage youth to think cooperatively? Check out EnTeam’s Services!