Behavior: No Victor, So No Spoils

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In these games, the idea is cooperation, not competition

"Vampire blob" is a tag game. Anyone tagged, with a mock bite on the neck, joins hands with the biter and becomes part of the monster. "The lap game" is even simpler: a crowd forms a huge ring, and everyone sits down simultaneously on the player behind. Though "blob" and "lap" may seem like innocent cavorting, they are serious business to San Francisco's New Games Foundation. An offshoot of a 1973 New Games Tournament, staged by Whole Earth Catalog Creator Stewart Brand, the foundation is now a growing national enterprise. Its goal is nothing less than to change the way Americans play, mainly by replacing competitive games with cooperative "no win" pastimes.

Psychologist John O'Connell, 29, codirector of the foundation, wants to see the nation playing less baseball and more blob. Says he: "In traditional team games like baseball, it usually becomes apparent halfway through the game who the winners and losers will be. Then the losers play badly and have a miserable time." But O'Connell and the foundation want to restructure these time-honored sports activities so that everyone plays and no one loses. In a version of "new volleyball," the aim is to keep the ball from hitting the ground rather than to score points by zinging it at the feet of opponents across the net. Says Jeff McKay, a San Francisco teacher and baseball coach who subscribes to the foundation's theory of no winners or losers: "If the game doesn't fit the players, we change the game, not the players."

Assistant Intramural Director Lou Fabian and Student Kathy Evans, of the University of Pittsburgh, have found an ingenious way to curb competitiveness in basketball. Last year they introduced an intramural program in which the scores of both teams were added together. Two opposing teams win a joint victory when their total score is higher than those in other games played at the same hour. The goal of the program is to eliminate scorekeeping altogether.

The foundation's philosophy owes something to the distaste for competitiveness that rose out of the 1960s counterculture. But the "new games" are catching on in the mainstream. The foundation, with an annual budget of about $400,000, conducts a hundred or more weekend workshops round the country for recreation specialists, educators and health care professionals; many of them are paid by their employers to learn the new nonwinning ways. Explains O'Connell: "The games are especially popular in the Midwest, where people still have lots of community picnics and family days. They're a lot more fun than spitting watermelon seeds at each other."