You Decide What It Means To Win

The 1 and 0 game is pretty simple in concept.

Everyone is split into groups of four. Each person is given a piece of paper with ten rounds marked on it. The rounds have strict rules about how you are allowed to communicate with your groupmates: sometimes you can talk normally, sometimes you’re not allowed to communicate at all. When the moderator says “Go,” each person marks either a 1 or a 0 on their paper. You cannot change your answer once it is written down.

If everyone in the group puts a 1, then everyone get 10 points. If everyone in the group puts down a 0, then everyone loses 10 points.

Sounds simple, right? Just put down a 1.

No.

If one person puts down a 1 and everyone else puts down a 0, then that person loses 20 points and everyone else gains 20. If one person puts down a 0 and everyone else puts down a 1, then that person gets 40 points and everyone else loses 40. Each.

I think you can see how this game might get pretty cutthroat.

There is one more rule, at the very end of the list: “You decide what it means to win.”

When I played this game in class, it started out pretty simple. We mostly put down 1s. But then, one person betrayed us and put down a 0. We also weren’t allowed to talk to each other, so no one could explain their reasoning or argue for a change in strategy.

It was over. No one trusted anyone else. There were 0s everywhere!

During the whole game, I just kept thinking about that last rule. What did it mean to win in this game? Did it meaning winning as a group, or as an individual?

This thought popped into my head: It had to be winning as a group, because our teacher would never have us play a game where the point was to hurt each other.

***

Life gets thrown at us. We are born without really knowing what’s going on. Often, we are taught conflicting things. You gotta make it in life! It’s a dog-eat-dog world! Survival of the fittest!

But also: Be kind. Say “Thank you” and “Please.” Give your seat to the old person or pregnant lady. You’re not a rock. You’re not an island. Each man’s death diminishes you.

It’s that old dilemma: “You decide what it means to win.” What does it mean to “win” in life? Is this an individual score? Or are we all in this together?

To complicate matters, there’s no easy answer about what constitutes a 1 and a 0. What might be considered a 1 to one person would be a 0 in someone else. What if we think we’re giving someone a 1, when they see it as a 0? And if someone gives us 0s all the time, does that mean they deserve 0s from us?

The questions are endless.

Is the point of life to hurt each other? Is that how we “win”?

***

In the end, our class scores were counted up as a group total, not individually. The highest score in our class was something like 900, if I remember correctly. My group’s score was in the negative hundreds. We had the lowest score in the class.

The feeling was terrible. It’s not like the class shamed us or anything, but we definitely felt ashamed. We had betrayed each other, and we had betrayed everything we learned in that class. Even if we did get to decide what it meant to win, it became obvious very quickly that we had chosen wrong.

I don’t know all the answers, but I believe we are in this together. It’s hard work, and giving a 1 can be really hard---especially if everyone else is giving you a 0. In the end, this is not an individual endeavor. This life is not a game where we have to hurt each other to survive.

Just remember: You decide what it means to win. But it never said what we decided would be the correct answer.

Photo by Samuel Zeller on Unsplash