Discovering How Much Fun Competition Isn’t

[This essay is adapted from the Foreword to Cooperative Games in Education by Suzanne Lyons (Teachers College Press, 2022)]

The reassuring bromide that “there’s no such thing as a stupid question” can be easily refuted by spending a few minutes with a standardized test. But even if it were true, there is certainly such a thing as a depressing question. Over the course of my career, two stand out. The first was from a student after a talk I gave at his overachieving high school. “You’re telling us not to just get in a race for the traditional rewards,” he said. “But what else is there?”

The second question, which I’ve been asked more than once, was posed in each case after I made an off-hand reference to cooperative games as a welcome alternative to the usual competitive kind. My questioner frowns, genuinely confused: “But how could it be a game if there aren’t winners and losers?”

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