Maybe you’ve heard of it. You kneel in a circle and look down. One person counts to three & everyone looks up, focusing on one person’s face. If that person is looking at someone other than you, you’re safe and still in the game; however, if they’re looking right back at ya then you’re out. You can’t do this without yelling at that person. It’s really funny. I’m sure anyone in any culture would laugh, too. And they don’t even have to speak the same language. =o)

This is what makes Chutes & Ladders the worse game ever. I covered this on my blog last year (don’t try to find it, I haven’t recovered from a server crash last month), but the kids wanted to play it, so I wrote a little PHP script that simulated the game. Because the game is entirely based on chance, all you need is an electronic version of the board and a random number generator. Instead of taking fifteen minutes (plus having to keep the kids on-task), I just enter the number of players, click a button, and - BAM! It tells me who won.

In writing the simulator I realized that the game is completely backwards from its intent.

See, Chutes & Ladders is supposed the be a game about morality: If you do good things you advance, if you do bad things, you move back. The problem is that the players are not agents, but subject to the spinning wheel of fate. If the wheel dictates you must the cat by the tail, you do it and suffer the consequences.

Is that the message we’re trying to teach our children?

What about the losers? What about those who hit a slide and are returned to the bottom? Are they bad people? No, but they may not become the first achievers.

My life started over at age 22, while a junior at BYU. After a semester in a coma, I had to relearn basic function to return to the academic, and professional world, as a broken man.

Have I lost the game? At times, it certainly seems I have. Have I lost the approval of God? By all means, no. What is the valued destination in your mind? Making it through life without meeting unfortunate circumstances? If so, I am a failure in your eyes. I beg to differ.

There are a lot of things in life which are beyond our control - and “winning” the “real” game of life is probably a lot more a matter of how we respond to life’s events (and who we become through them) than how we compare with others (with things we can acquire like wealth, status, fame, etc). But there are not a lot of games I can think of that help emphasize that.

Most games are competitive - and you “win” by beating others (you can only win if they lose, and vice versa). The ones I am working on right now, you can “win” to a certain degree that way - but as you keep playing, you realize that you “win” to a much greater degree when you work cooperatively with others.

My goal is to make it tangible where you see that more innovation and insights and success can come from working with the other players instead of against them. That each player has strengths which add to the whole. I also hope that the game gives some experience in recognizing and overcoming ethnocentrism, and some practice in trying to learn from others deeper things than the initial appearance or stereotypes indicate.