Does that sound familiar?
That is the slogan of an organized group that ushered
in an completely new genre of games that were designed
to imbibe a new spirit of cooperation and inclusion
rather than the mentality of win first, ask questions
later. The genre of games was cleverly called
New Games.
The spirit in which these
games were intended to be played by was such an
important factor that in
fact, some documentation refers to the slogan as the
'Play Hard, Play Fair, Nobody Hurt Spirit'!!
or this:
"New Games Spirit: the positive experience of playing
together is more important than winning or losing; the
rules of the game are always flexible. What counts is
the enjoyment of playing" [7]
or check this quote:
"Ultimate Frisbee - one of the few sports organizations
to successfully embody the spirit of New Games"
[6]
For one to understand and
appreciate the origins of Ultimate Frisbee's ideology, it's
critical to place the game in context of the sociopolitical
milieu of the country (United States) at the time
to fully grasp philosophically what kind of thinking
went into the development of the rules.
In 1966, two full years
prior to the creation of Ultimate Frisbee,
Stewart Brand
(The Founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, The Well and
alumni of the Merry Pranksters) spearheaded a
movement against a backdrop of dramatic social and
economic change fueled by
the Vietnam War,
NASA Lunar Missions,
a looming energy crisis, environmental activism, civil rights, assassinations of MLK, JFK and RFK, feminism,
Richard Nixon, unhealthy widespread drug
abuse, free love and the Rock & Roll revolution.
(photo of record setting 309
people in The Lap Game, 1973)
In late 1966, as the
American commitment to the Vietnam War was ramping up,
the
War Resisters League at San Francisco State College
asked an itinerant multimedia
artist named Stewart Brand to stage a public event on
its behalf. Brand, who would
soon become famous as the founder of the Whole Earth
Catalog, gathered a hundred
or so pacifists into an open field and with their help,
inflated a 6-foot-diameter medicine
ball that had been painted with continents, waterscapes,
and clouds—an “Earthball.”
He then took up a
megaphone and announced,
There are two kinds of
people in the world: those who want to push the Earth
over the row
of flags at that end of the field, and those who want to
push it over the fence at the other
end. Go to it. (New Games Foundation & Fluegelman, 1976,
p. 9)
[1]
The crowd on the field
charged the ball from all sides. The ball began to roll
toward one
end of the field—yet as it did, members of the pushing
team defected, rushing around
to the other side of the ball and pushing it back the
way they had just driven it. When
they reached the other end of the field, they turned
around again.
Glimpsed from half a lifetime away, this hour-long
runaround may look like little
more than the most ephemeral of countercultural
happenings. Yet, over the next 10
years it gave rise to an entire New Games movement, with
publications, organizations,
and events held around the world. For the members of
this movement, as for the War
Resisters at San Francisco State, to play a new game
meant far more than to amuse
oneself. Pat Farrington, who would help organize the
first New Games Tournament in
1973, explained that “By reexamining the basic idea of
play, we could . . . [create] a
sense of community and personal expression. People could
center on the joy of playing,
cooperating, and trusting, rather than striving to win”
(New Games Foundation &
Fluegelman, 1976, p. 10).
Because the
competitive “win-at-allcosts” model was blamed for being
destructive to children’s development, the New Games
movement developed as an alternative to competitive
sports. As the New York Times (1973) reported,
“the occasion [New Games] may be to a change in sports
what the storming of the Bastille was to the French
Revolution”
(Fluegelman, 1976, p. 10).[2]
Like-minded
contemporaries R. Buckminster Fuller (World Game),
Robert Smithson (Spiral Jetty), and Christo and
Jean-Claude (Valley Curtain) responded in kind to these
environmental and sociopolitical quandaries with their
"earthworks." Stewart is widely credited with the
creation of a new class of socialistic games that were meant to be
friendlier and non-competitive.
The New Games Foundation
By the mid 70's, Brand,
along with the addition of George Leonard* and Pat
Farrington,
incorporated the movement's organization under the name
of The New Games Foundation. Workshops were given
coast to coast and around the world in an effort to
teach a new form of play that focused on togetherness, non-aggression
and non-competitiveness and by 1976 (three years before
the formation of the UPA), The New Games book was
released [1].
The turmoil that was
ripping the country apart at the time created a segment
of the population that would strive for a better way of
sustainable living, with an emphasis on cooperation,
community, inclusion and well being.
"Everyone can play New Games
regardless of age, ability, size, or gender. They
require little or no equipment and are presented and
played in a safe manner that encourages participation,
creativity, and personal expression. New Games offers a
new direction for traditional sports, physical
education, and recreation. Ultimately, by cooperating in
play, we learn to live together better." [3]
And read this:
"Anyone who has played
"New Games" knows that the games aren't really new.
What is new is the spirit in which they
are played -- a spirit in which it is clear that fun is
more important than winning, the players are more
important than the game. Though many New Games can
be seen as "cooperative", the truth is that
just as many
of them involve competition -- a competition that is
held in check by the Spirit of New Games
and the overriding mandate for universal fun.
These competitive New
Games (like Dho-Dho-Dho, Smaug's Jewels, Tweezly Whop,
Slaughter, Dragon's Tail, Hug Tag, Lemonade and
Ultimate Frisbee) were selected because they
were not only fun, but also funny. They included
silly names, silly rituals, silly noises, silly
performances, because, as long as they were seen as
funny, players would not take them too seriously, and
hence be able to keep the competition in check and in
appropriate perspective" [4]
Sound familiar?
Silly team names, hat tournaments, ro sham bo for conflict resolution,
guys wearing skirts (ultimate in the 80's), energy
circles (most of you probably don't even know what those
are). The New Games Movement provided the original
"dogma" that was then directly or indirectly
indoctrinated into the very fabric of Ultimate.
The Author
of Ultimate's Spirit Of The Game
Dan "Stork" Roddick
(pictured below in this photo he sent me of him fouling
the crap out of some player--nice spirit there Stork) is the original author of
the Spirit of the Game clause in Ultimate. Dan was
familiar with the New Games movement in as early as 1975,
is good friends with
Bernie DeKoven, a key figure in the movement and
Ultimate Frisbee was a mainstay in the New Game
Movement's tournaments throughout the 70s.
While Ultimate Frisbee
was not directly one of the New Games Foundation's
creations, it was germinated out of the very same
sociopolitical soil, is listed on some New Games
websites and is very commonly referenced in research
papers and studies regarding the basic premise of the
creation of games that are focused on fair play for ALL
participants in a friendly, cooperative,
non-competitive, non-aggressive atmosphere.
The Spirit of the Game in
Ultimate is only an adopted child of the Spirit of New Games and
if you do even the slightest bit of research and
evaluate the documentation, the evidence is astounding
and jaw dropping. It is incontrovertible.
"In New Games, there
are no rigid rules; rather players are encouraged to
make up their own rules [an apt description of the
UPA], to create their own games. The object of New
Games is not rigid adherence to a prescribed set of
regulations, but imaginative play in an atmosphere of
spontaneity and fun. The emphasis in New Games is the
cooperation and participation of all players, regardless
of age, sex, or ability.
While there is an
emphasis on cooperation, New Games does not deny the
need to compete or the need to release hostility;
however, the player's competitiveness is usually
directed against his own limitations and his hostility
is released without harm to others. In New Frisbee, for
example, the player concentrates on perfecting his own
skills, not on defeating his partner. While New Frisbee
looks very much like Old Frisbee, it is philosophically
quite different. The player gets no points if he catches
a good throw; on the other hand, if he catches or even
misses but makes an all-out attempt for a difficult
throw, he gains a point. Since the catcher calls his own
points, each player is competing against the limitations
of not only personal skill but personal integrity."[5]
The idea behind New Games
was that through an atmosphere of playfulness, fairness
and cooperation, participants could develop
interpersonal and social skills through having fun on a
leveled playing surface. Games were specifically
designed to be fair irrespective of age, race, gender,
build (fat or thin, tall or short), athleticism,
intelligence and handicaps.
Think long and hard about
this. Is this what you signed up for when you
began playing Ultimate Frisbee?
At long last, I finally
have an answer to the question "Why is Double Teaming
illegal?"!!! Double teaming is illegal because it's
not universally fair. Picks are illegal
because they are not universally fair. Out
of bounds isn't really out of bounds because it's not
universally fair. No penalty for excessive
fouling or traveling is because it wouldn't be fair.
George Leonard*, one of the early pioneers of the
movement had this to say:
"The New Games
Movement was less about the design of individual games
and more about the development of an ethos intended to
alter the way people interacted with one another. Its
goal was to transform culture by creating opportunities
for people to play collaboratively.
Play hard. Play fair.
Nobody hurt. These three core principles order
the design (and play) of any New Games game. The
movement organized festival-like 'Tournaments' that
brought people together to play cooperatively, erasing
(if only for a brief time) barriers of race, age, sex,
size, ability, socioeconomic background, and creed.
Values of freedom and the creation of community through
game play were woven into a utopian rhetoric that
advocated new forms of player empowerment.
If you played with
a parachute in your elementary school gym class, you can
thank the New Games Movement, which helped transform the
traditionally sports-based curriculum of phys ed into a
more play-centric, cooperative learning experience. Much
of the success of the New Games Movement emerged because
of its relationships with other forms of counterculture.
New Games 'Tournaments,' for example, mixed the
communality of a peace protest with the cultural
nihilism of an art happening.
There is no doubt that
in many ways the New Games Movement and its game designs
emerged out of a particular cultural milieu. But the
uniquely transformative agenda of the movement is truly
inspiring. Playing with the codes and conventions of
gaming and social interaction, the New Games Movement
sought to create positive social change through play. It
did so not by creating games with explicit political
content, but by designing play experiences that
intrinsically embodied its utopian ideals." [1]
When the emphasis of a
game is placed strictly on maximizing fun for the
majority of participants, the end result will be a
framework that lacks the requisite foundation for true
competition to occur and without true competition, true
innovation can also not occur.
The Underlying
Beliefs of The New Games Doctrine (are you a believer?)
The New Games
Movement originators based their theories on
the premise that competition in sports is inherently a
bad thing.
When Abner Doubleday or James Nesmith
invented baseball and basketball, those sports were fine
as competitive recreational activities.
Competition helped evolve those sports to the point that
within a few decades, they were filling up large
stadiums.
That sports in America
evolved into a win-at-all-cost commercial and
materialistic obsession was more of indictment about
modern society than it is about competition itself.
The exclusionary aspect intrinsic in sports is exactly
what propels athletes to perform at their very best.
Competition is as natural
and evolutionary element to human existence as is
natural selection. Competition in sports is
survival of the fittest at its very finest. At the core of the nervous
system, the hypothalamus and cerebellum work together to
sharpen man's reflexes and abilities to help him adapt
to environmental dynamics. Without this inherent
drive at our core, mankind would have never evolved out
of the caves. While the win at all costs mentality
is the ugly side of modern sports culture, competition
is a good thing and the element in games that drive
innovations and excellence.
The Books
"Tweezly Whop Techniques and Tactics", the classic
hard cover coffee table photo book "Earthball,
The First Four Decades" or "Hug
Tag, The Greatest Sport Ever Invented by Man" were
never supposed to happen and neither were their Ultimate
Frisbee counter parts. Ironically, any book on the
History Of
Ultimate is absolutely incomplete without the
inclusion of any findings on the New Games Doctrine as part of the
pedigree of the sport.
Can you imagine
what kind of person went about creating a genre of games that
leveled the playing field so that a physically superior
person would lose some of their God given advantage?
I'll give
you a hint, he wasn't the quarterback for your high
school football team.
You can't
have it both ways. Either you have a game that is
fun and fair for all or you have a sport that is
designed for excellence at the highest levels.
The
original New Gamers are long gone and
yet their legacy lives on in perpetuity by a Frisbee playing
constituency who neither understands their heritage nor cares about it.
I'm not
against "New Games" and the notion that playfulness is
an extremely important quality and even a virtue but you
can't have a competitive sport based on the kind of
ideology that creates a level playing field for the
weakest player to have a fair shot at winning.
That's
CRAZY.
References
[1]Andrew Faunergate
New Games, 1976
More New Games, 1981
"The New Games Book and its
companion, the More New Games book, were
resources developed for the "New Games" movement to
encourage people to play non-competitive or friendlier
games. Many of the "New Games" may now be seen played,
in their modern variants, by church youth groups, summer
campers, and even [in some cases] gym students."
[2]
Why Study New Games? (an
excellent Stanford research paper on New Games)
[3]
The New Game
Foundation
[4]
Junkyard Games
[5]
1976 Article about New Games
[6]
Deep Fun
[7]
Spirit of New Games
Others References:
*The
Ultimate Athlete Ironically named book written by
George Leonard
Best New Games (even listed under a web-site called
'training-wheels.com')
Dho-Dho-Dho, Smaug's Jewels, Slaughter, etc.
Humanistic Critic of Sports (choice topical lecture
from Wisconsin university sociology class on New Games that includes Ultimate Frisbee)
Junkyard Sports (another good read regarding the
ideology of putting participation above competition)
Weinstein, Matt & Goodman, Joel
Playfair: Everybody’s
Guide to Noncompetitive Play Impact Publishers
ISBN: 0-915166-50-X.
Rethinking Youth Sports (decent article about
alternative thinking to sports)
