must mean something

I made up this climbing game for the team I coach where I write out most of the climbs in the gym and if a kid does a climb they go to the board and they get their initials placed by that climb. The initials stay there until another kid does that climb and then their initials are replaced. You keep going for some amount of time and whoever has the most initials on the board at the end is the winner. 

Inevitably, some amount of kids are not motivated by this game. My guess is they feel like it's overwhelming and they can't make any progress no matter how hard they try. Which is an interesting psychological thing because eventually someone has to win and often the winner of the game is not the strongest climber but the person who is most comfortable with doing nonstop climbs regardless of how many times that climb gets taken away from them. It's not surprising that I would invent a climbing game that is similar to distance running in that no one step seems to get you any closer to your goal but if you persist at a seemingly hopeless task for an hour or 90 minutes or 2 hours or however long, you will eventually get there. 

But the interesting twist to the game that was played today was that I was trying to motivate these girls who weren't into the game at all and I said, "well if you want you can just play the spoiler and figure out who is currently winning and make them not be winning anymore." And they really liked this idea. And the added their own twist to it where when they did a climb they would erase the previous initials but then they wouldn't add their own initials to it. It would just be blank. And then this really caught on and about four kids were really motivated, the most motivated of anyone playing, to just erase other kids initials (while still otherwise staying within the rules of the game). And so at the end the board was mostly empty and the winner had done like 2 climbs. 

It's an interesting way of creating agency. It's like saying, my own efforts can't amount to anything lasting and substantial but they can tear down whatever the most powerful thing is and in doing that there is a feeling of powerful. David Foster Wallace describes post-modernism that way. That irony and sarcasm and satire can challenge power and the entrenched ways of doing and looking at things. The kids yearn for post-modernism. The problem Wallace has with it that is also reflected in the game is that it can't create anything. It's empty but at the same time it does feel like something has been accomplished. 

It's for sure banned in all future games but it was a fun experiment. 

The girl who initially got really excited about it liked that she could take away a climb but nothing could be taken away from her because she didn't stake a claim in a climb. She disliked the feeling of losing a climb more than she liked the feeling of gaining one. But her reaction to that was just to embody loss and destruction. Villain origin story.