A Little Imagination, Please!

So, the wife and I are big board game fans (some say nerds). Not only do we love to crush the opposition in a good nerd game (i.e. Dominion, Settlers of Catan, Puerto Rico, or Agricola) but we also really enjoy teaching our friends and family to play these games as well. I've noticed the way we teach games is drastically different based upon the number of times we ourselves have played the game.

The First Time We Play/Teach a Game
The very first time we play a game, we usually have to teach ourselves and our friends who are with us. This always take a long time, but leads to good interaction as questions are asked, preliminary strategies are developed, and rules are clarified. As the game progresses, we learn together what we are doing right/wrong and can all make adjustments accordingly. At the end of the game we will all usually debrief, talk about the winning strategy, and consider what me might do differently the next time. Even though it is a bit slow, this process of discovering, experimenting, and learning leads us all to play the game better in the future and to appreciate the shared experience of learning. It is a journey of discovery that develops our aptitudes and skills and strategic planning.

Teaching The Game After We Have Already Played
If we teach a game after we have played it (especially if we have played it a lot) we always tend to not only teach the rules, but to teach our understanding of the strategy involved in the game. At first, I thought we were being generous in sharing our insights, ideas, and learning. As I look back, though, I have to wonder if we haven't really been limiting the development of our friends' strategy, imagination, and creativity. Instead of letting them discover how they are best suited to play the game, we impose upon them our preferred patterns of thinking and playing. This basically creates mini-models of our strategy, preference, and creativity.

While creating replicas of ourselves in game playing is not bad in and of itself, I have been wondering lately if it is limiting. Didn't we enjoy the process of learning the game and building a strategy off our own understanding of the rules, belief about how to succeed, and observation of what seemed to work or not work in other's strategies? If we so much enjoyed the journey of discovery and if we were able to develop our strategic imagination solely by gathering around the rule book with the other players, would this not perhaps be a better way to inspire strategic imagination in those we teach how to play a given game?

Our Recent Attempts to Teach
Just in the last week, Andrea and I taught our good friends Rick and Melanie two games new to them, but not to us - Agricola and St. Petersburg (two of my favorites). We tried our hardest not to give any strategic advice. While I cannot say we were 100% effective in avoiding advice, we did pretty well. At the end of the game of Agricola, I won, Andrea came in 2nd by a few points, and Melanie and Rick were a distant 3rd and 4th respectively. The results were not surprising - we never expect newbies to win a game the first time out and are quite offended if they do!

The next Sunday at church I asked Melanie what she thought about the new game. Knowing she had been kind of frustrated during game play due to the inability to correct glaring strategic deficiencies she put into place early in the game, I was not at all surprised to hear she had thought about it all weekend - wondering what she could have done differently, how her next game might go, etc. Not only did she think about the game, she and Rick were eager to play again and were even considering adding it to upcoming gift lists.

Game two (on Sunday, just a few days after game one) ended with the mostly the same results. I won again, by a landslide actually, by benefiting from something Melanie missed. Her miss allowed me to get way ahead, never to be caught. Andrea and Melanie tied for 2nd, with Melanie scoring much better than the first time. Rick did miserably, scoring lower than the first time he played (which also happened to me in my first two games). Here are the respective moods of everyone after the game:
*Scott* - excited because he did very well, glad Rick and Melanie picked up the game play, if not the strategy too.
*Andrea* - mad as heck because I crushed her. I love my competitive wife.
*Melanie* - proud of her new high score, somewhat determined never to again make the same mistake that allowed me to win by so much.
*Rick* - ticked and in his words, "miserable." Beneath the sour feeling of playing so poorly, all at the table knew he would play again if it weren't to late in the evening. The failure just inspired more determination and new imagination at what might work.

The Sameness of Shared Strategy
A few remarks to close. If Andrea and I shared our strategies with Rick and Melanie and if they had followed them, we would have all ended up with similar results. In a game, this is simply unacceptable. You do not play a game for two hours to simply have a 4-way tie! Not only would our results have been the same, but our experiences would have been the same as well. Also, we would have frustrated each other to know end as we all tried to use limited resources in the same way, effectually blocking others from fully realizing their strategy. In the end, when we share our strategies in games, everything looks the same. Instead of being given the diverse experience of people from different levels of knowledge bringing themselves to the table to play, evaluate, and react, we get a bunch of robots all trying to do the same thing and only the person who is lucky enough to be in the right position wins - detracting from their joy of victory and frustrating the others to no end.

From The Strategy of Games to Imagination in the Church
In the interest of keeping blogs short, I'll end this post here. In the near future I will apply these reflections to how the church has bought into sharing strategies and the sameness that squeezes out God-given imagination. For now, I'll leave you to imagine how this might apply to living out the Christian life in a faith community.