Playing Alone Together

A concept I picked up from reading Jean Piaget is "playing alone together." The idea comes from child development, that at some point in their play, kids start playing together. They want to socialize. Early on, however, they still are making up their own rules, don't really get the idea of other people making rules, and so are playing alone. Piaget observed kids moving near each other to play together, but each still very clearly playing his or her own game, without including the other. Hence, playing alone, together.

Luta and I tease each other about this some times. There was one video game in particular that we would both play, at the same time, in the same room, but not together. Kind of like two people playing solitaire on their own computer, and talking to each other about it while doing it, but not playing the same game.

I've been going to a game store in Lexington that has open board game play on Saturdays. The last two games I've tried, Glen More and Trajan, have used concepts that were somewhat new to me. Both games involve collecting tiles, in various ways, to score points. Points are scored throughout game play and at the end of scoring rounds, and at the end of the game the player with the most points wins. Both games were fun. Both games at first sounded fairly complicated, then turned out to be fairly easy to pick up, and then I realized that the strategy of them would take some time to figure out (though I didn't come in last!).

And both games seem to be versions of "playing alone, together." My goal was to build up points. There were numerous ways to do this. And for the most part, other players only casually interfered with that. In Trajan especially I could almost not notice the other players were there, except cards would vanish from play limiting my choices. It reminded me more of a race than a directly competitive sport. In swimming, I'm mostly just trying to be fastest, and the other swimmers have little impact on me. Sure, there's some drag in the pool, and motivation seeing them nearby, but they don't reach over and grab at me to try and slow me down. On the other hand, in tennis I am directly competing with another opponent. Everything they do directly impacts me, and vice versa, and the only way to win is to "conquer" them, so to speak. These new games seem to be more of the "swimming" variety: I could beat my own time, even without other people there. The fact that other players are playing the game almost seems like a casual fact, and could easily be forgotten.

While the games were both fun, and I want to play them again, my initial reaction is that I would prefer to play a directly strategic game. Of course if one finds themselves being overly competitive and mean, perhaps this sort of game is better at keeping the emotions in check.