Winning vs. Loosing

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Alejandra Sanchez
02-28-13
English 105
Professor Taylor
Winning vs. Losing It’s been said that in a game there is always a loser. Alfie Kohn, the Author of the reading in the book the Remix, No Contest: Play, Fun, and Competition argues the commonly accepted assumption that competitions makes us better but in his view, rather than building character in game play, competitions damage self-esteem and inhibit our social relationships. According to Kohn the word play to him is intrinsically gratifying, it an end in itself. Play must be chosen voluntarily, and it is chosen because it is pleasing. He states how play represents a “process orientation,” a concern for what one is doing itself, as opposed to a “product orientation,” in which ones activity is justified by what it contributes to some other goal. I agree with Kohns point of view because a game is just a game, you can also have fun if the game is non-competitive. We don’t always have to have an individual winner to have fun. It sometimes may seem that everything revolving us is competition; Family members, friends, and coworkers, and even classmates, someone doing something better at something. Kohn identifies each of the common defenses people use for encouraging sports; Exercise, teamwork, pushing oneself, strategy, total involvement, thrill of victory. Cooperation recreation is competitive games that create something very like an addiction so that recreation without possibility if victory becomes less exciting. By virtue of this fact, sports never really qualified as play in the first place. “First, competition is
Sanchez 2 always highly rule-governed. Second, competition often is motivated by a search for approval, which is an extrinsic motivator and thus relevant to play. Third, and most important, competition is goal-orientated striving par excellence” (279). Winning isn’t everything, being a part of something you worked hard for is what I call winning.
“We strive to be number one… But win or lose, it is the competition which gives us pleasure” college football coach Joe Paterno says (281-282). He who plays does not ask for the score because it doesn’t matter who won or who loses it’s the fact that you have fun and have enjoyed it. In my opinion a game does not have to be competitive to be fun because when I experienced all those fun noncompetitive games our class performed I realized that noncompetitive games can also be fun. It looked like the whole class had fun from my point of view. We all helped each other as a team and try to beat the clock or we attempted to figure out one word using four pictures, as a class. Working together as a team was what made it fun. “Play is to be played exactly because it isn’t serious; it frees us from seriousness” (279). I agree because playing a game is fun no matter what. Competitive games teach children that someone always has to win. Competitive games are fun but many people end up getting hurt in the end, emotionally and mentally. In noncompetitive games people work as a team and try to beat the clock or try and figure out a phrase, but they are all in this together. For example, my team and I made a noncompetitive game for our class to play and the results came out as planned, we had five minutes, ten subjects and we had to name something that went under that subject, for instance color; we all had to name a color, we couldn’t repeat that color. We had to do those ten subjects in less than five
Sanchez 3 minutes. We sure did! We beat the clock at around four minutes and thirty seconds. My experience to this noncompetitive game was really great and fun we worked as a team and we won as a team.
Competitive and noncompetitive, in the end you did your best, you worked hard, and you got far. That’s all that matters. The biggest challenge our group faced in creating a noncompetitive game was who are we going against? We couldn’t really answer that question, I have never played a non competitive game until that day when we were told to create one, and at first I thought it was impossible. Beating the clock as a team was a great way for a noncompetitive game. It was not competitive because we weren’t competing against anyone we were just trying to play a game under a certain amount of time.
Therefore, I wasn’t really in the mood to play noncompetitive games at first because I thought they weren’t going to be any fun. When the first team presented their game, I got in the mood because we had to stack at least seventy-five cups and destroy the stack with rubber bands within 3-4 min, the length of the song “red solo cup” by Toby Keith Ends. As soon as everyone got up to stack the cups, there wasn’t any room for the other half of the class to stack. Someone then said something and the other half of the class got up and started stacking. I ended up stacking when I thought I wasn’t. As a team we stack at least seventy-five cups. The atmosphere that the class was in was pretty good. We all seemed to play the noncompetitive game as a team. We took turns when we shot the cups to make them fall with the rubber bands. As well as with the other games, we all contributed as a team even though we weren’t competing against each other. All the noncompetitive games were fun, or at least I had fun.
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According to Johns reading, play is just play. I’ve learned that in order to have fun you don’t have to compete. Winning and losing are two things I like to call success. No matter what it gets you somewhere.

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Work Cited
Catherine G. Latterell, Remix, copyright by Bedford /St. Martin’s 2010

Cited: Catherine G. Latterell, Remix, copyright by Bedford /St. Martin’s 2010