When we think about it carefully, we can see that our opponent is chosen for us non-professionals far more often than Mitchell suggests, which means that game-playing is not as far removed from a court case as he claims. But Mitchell makes one final distinction between games and situations that require justice, not merely fairness. In the vast majority of cases, Mitchell says,

... games are designed to have winners and losers. That, in fact, is the point of games. While our motivation for playing a game may be to relax, or have fun, or to develop or challenge our abilities, our motivation while playing a game is to win.

The same is not true of society. Take the example of criminal trials. Although the trial produces winners and losers, the ideal of the system, however flawed, is to accomplish justice, or, at a minimum, to resolve the dispute in a fair manner.

I fail to see the distinction he’s trying to make. Aren't games designed to "resolve the dispute in a fair manner," not merely produce a winner and a loser?

I agree that the ideal of the trial system "is to accomplish justice," but I would argue that, in some meaningful way, that is also one goal of games. Isn’t that precisely what we mean when we say "May the best man [or better team] win."?

We want "justice" to prevail on a court of tennis or basketball exactly as we want it to prevail in a court of law. (Perhaps the use of the word "court" in this context in not a coincidence.) That is, we really want the game to allow us to find out which player or team is "better" at this contest (whatever that may mean). We don’t want games to be decided by "lucky" bounces or bad refereeing. For this reason, I believe, tennis players at all levels apologize (usually by holding up a hand or saying "sorry") when the ball hits the net and drops over. It doesn’t seem to be right or fair or "just" to win a point in that way.

Besides, there is little evidence that games, in general, are designed to produce winners and losers. As I point out in "Down with Ties!" (The Life of Games, April 2000), almost all familiar games, especially the most popular in our culture, include the possibility of nobody winning or losing.

Chess and checkers can end in a draw or a stalemate, Scrabble and Othello players can be tied when the game is over, sprinters and horse races can finish in a dead heat, Monopoly and poker players can continue indefinitely without a winner, and so on.

In some professional sports, including regular-season football, hockey, and soccer, ties are even figured in the team’s record. In other sports, like baseball or volleyball or tennis (even with the "tie-break"), it is at least theoretically possible for a game to go on forever.

Ironically, the preliminary ritual of many games involves a clear "winner" and "loser," so it’s not as if our culture doesn’t know how to make a no-tie activity. When the ref tosses a coin, the team that calls "heads" or "tails" is going to be clearly right or clearly wrong. No tie is possible.

Similarly, when tennis players spin their racquet to see who will serve, or when two players play "odd or even" to determine who pays for drinks, there is always a clear winner and a clear loser. Yet the games themselves are not nearly as neat. They can end without a resolution.
 

One possible solution

As I suggest in "Down with Ties!" (see page 19, Issue #2), there are fairly simple ways to eliminate ties in all the major team sports. For example, you could say that the team that got to a score first had "rights" to it and the other team would have to surpass that score to win.

Or you could give the visiting team ½ point at the beginning of the game (or double all scores and give them one point).

So far, no organization that regulates a professional, college, or high school athletic league has ever instituted any such practice, even though it would eliminate the need for extra innings, overtime periods, or shootouts, and could lead to some very exciting contests.

Michael Keller informs me that Alan Parr has offered a similar suggestion in his gamezine Hopscotch:  a shoot-out could be held before the start of regulation play and the shoot-out winner would get a half-point advantage!

I would love to see such a system instituted, at least on an experimental basis. Why hasn’t anyone tried any such system? What are the objections? Do Westerners feel there’s something inherently unfair in giving one team the win when the score is tied (even though one team "got there first") or in awarding one team an "unearned" half-point under any conditions?

If so, are we more interested in keeping the game "fair" than in determining a winner and loser? Would we, contrary to Mitchell’s claim, rather have ties than an "unbalanced" contest?

Ironically, it makes more sense to argue that it is trials, not games, that must produce winners and losers. After all, games that end in a tie, draw, or stalemate can stand as complete, at least during the regular season, but whenever there is a mistrial, the case has to be "replayed."

In many seemingly unresolved court cases, an ostensible "tie" (e.g., a hung jury) is really a win for the accused, so those trials do not have to be rescheduled.

But even if games and legal cases were as different as Mitchell claims and the analogy is in fact a bad one, I believe that any child who plays tic-tac-toe or Monopoly or baseball has to develop at least some concept of fairness in the process and tends to use those concepts throughout life in judging real-world situations.

For that reason, I believe, we need to explore competitive play to find out what fairness means to most of us in that abstract world and then determine, first, if those notions are coherent; second, to what extent they are universal; and, third, to what extent they are transferable to legal, moral, political, and social situations.

All three are very complex and challenging questions. In the next issue of The Life of Games, to get this process started, I will tackle a fundamental question: What do we mean by "an unfair advantage"? In other words, why are some advantages (e.g., height in basketball) acceptable to us as a culture, while others (such as weight in boxing or wrestling) are not?

We’d love to hear from you on this topic. If you have insights, ideas, or information related to this key question or any of the others raised in this essay, please let us know what you're thinking. This is the kind of issue that is not going to be solved by a single person. It requires many minds working (you should excuse the expression) overtime. Send me your comments.

Continued in next issue.