Game, [gām], NOUN
Knowingly or not, we are active players in two major games for the better part of our lives. We don’t usually think about education and work in this context, but thanks to sociologist Erving Goffman,1 we can use this framework to understand how our thinking and behavior are shaped. Games are unique sets of interactions or encounters in which players engage for a particular purpose. Games require:
1. A goal—what it means to win and score points
2. A boundary—a border to separate the game from the rest of world
3. Roles—what responsibilities players have
4. Resources—the equipment needed to play
5. Rules—how to execute the game, what’s allowed, and what’s not
6. Strategy—a set of plays to achieve the goal
When applied to organizational settings, we see what games are played and how they shape behavior in ways good and bad. Looking at organizational culture, for example, is about game construction, the context where a unique combination of rules, roles, and resources influence what it means to “win.”
Getting the Right Answer
Off they go with backpacks bigger than themselves. Mothers cry, children whimper. Teachers put on their best faces to greet kids running through the hallway expecting that one day—some 12 years in the future—these same students will walk across the stage, accept their diplomas, and pretty much react the way they are doing on this very day.
For roughly the first 18 years of their lives, kids walk onto a playing field where they practice, hone their skills, and play the game of Achieve and Advance, also known as Education. Different versions of the game employ a series of encounters to transform kids into students and students into graduates. Winning is determined by who behaves, learns, gets the right answers, achieves results, graduates, and moves on.
At its core, education is a game of achievement. It uses a system of external rewards to keep that motivation going. As players, students have knowledge-based responsibilities. Based on capability, a teacher can form smaller squads for reading and math, often named for different birds. At various points, performance is tested. Stars and stickers are awarded. Tests convert to grades. Students are rated. Grades turn into promotions. Grade Point Averages are calculated. Students are ranked. Success earns a player a ceremony of indeterminable length and a personal certificate of completion. If they are lucky, families hold parties for them. If not, they and their friends figure something out, guaranteed. Hopefully, there’s a check or gift card from a grandparent, loved one, and people that aren’t sure what to get them. Congratulations!
Inside the Game
Education is a game where the environment is hard at work to create and shape human behavior. Education is an achiever’s field of dreams. What achievers like about the process is the focus on task performance. They take ownership for when and how much they prepare, to ready themselves for performance. Give them the assignment, get out of their way, and let them get to work. They know what they must do. They like the fact that it’s a solo activity. Others just slow them down. Grades, comments, and teacher recognition are the type of feedback they crave. Playing the game means advancing to the next big thing. Learn more. Study harder. Do more. Solve that problem in five minutes or less. Quote that author. Beat your best test score. Winning means getting the right answers.
The Need to Achieve
Do you believe doing anything less than a great job makes you a slacker? Do you time your drive to work and try to beat it the next day? Do you believe that wasting time, like going to meetings, and inefficiencies are the devil’s work? Do you like having control over what you do? Would you rather run blindfolded across the interstate highway than do the same task repeatedly? Do you have high standards for yourself and other people, too, but haven’t told them? Do you think a good job should speak for itself, or that anyone who is self-promoter is really a suck-up? If these questions got your attention, you will appreciate the research of David McClelland.
McClelland, a social psychologist at Harvard, was a scholar with many interests—bridging psychology, economics, and sociology. While others at the time were researching working conditions, McClelland wanted to affirm the nature of human behavior, to discover if motivations were a set of universal intrinsic drives. Using empirical research collected on a worldwide basis, what he discovered is particularly important to the American belief system—what we know as the work ethic, the dream, and the value of hard work. McClelland’s contribution is the concept of achievement, a new character in the American narrative that ties entrepreneurism and individual accomplishment to the innate need to focus on task performance, to get results with efficiency and effectiveness.2
The Role of Failure
In the game of Achieve and Advance, failure is as big a deal as success. Enter Carol Dweck.3 A professor of psychology, Dweck describes two different mindsets for failure:
1. A fixed mindset pursues the answer. It represents a state of smartness, something you either have or you don’t. It means you’re always on the hook to prove yourself, judge yourself, and judge others. Right or wrong. There’s no wiggle room. If you don’t succeed, you fail. Failing makes you a failure.
2. A growth mindset pursues a “passion for learning” that embraces the thinking—you can’t learn if you don’t try, and if you fail, try again. In a growth mindset, questions are important. It’s the pursuit of answers, not the answer itself, that is important.
Consider how these two mindsets play out in the game of Achieve and Advance. Finding the right answer at all costs creates winners and losers. But when the pursuit of learning is emphasized over answers, players believe that they will move on to play another day. Embracing potential, trying out new things and ideas, and accepting failure as part of the process create an emotionally healthy, on-the-field environment that challenges and supports all students rather than slotting them into practice squads named for birds.
Motivation is not the problem. It’s how the game is played and how players accept defeat and deal with success and failure.
What We Are Doing to Our Kids?
I joke with my cousin all the time that her three-year-old grandchild is so cute and smart that it’s either Hollywood or Harvard, or both. But for many students, how they see themselves and how they think their parents see them is not a joke. A study conducted by Richard Weissbourd and his colleagues at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education asked 10,000 students to rank the importance of caring for others, achieving at a high level, or being a happy person.4Achieving at a high level was their top choice. Students also rated how they thought parents and friends would rate these. Achieving at a high level was the winner again. For toppers, students were three times as likely to agree with the statement, “My parents are prouder if I get good grades in my classes than if I’m a caring community member.”
Higher Education: Getting Ready for the Rest of Your Life, Sort of
With some 12 years of Achieve and Advance experience under your belt, you know this game well. The higher education version can be played on a variety of fields located on busy city streets, wide open spaces in the middle of nowhere, or virtual organizations with tons of bandwidth and modern-day technology to stream education to your kitchen table. Among the many variations are technical schools, community colleges, certificate programs, four-year colleges, and universities. Some have satellite tracking devices for predicting the weather, others with on-campus stores that sell homemade ice cream, and if you’re at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, both.
Many of the components of the college game are like the primary and secondary versions—courses, assignments, projects, tests, and grades. You learn the ropes. You discover that college credits are the currency for success. So are majors and grades. Professors have office hours so you can plead your case.
And then, there’s the price tag. Whatever method you use to determine costs—tuition, room, board, textbooks, Ubers, pizza, and an occasional beer—the average cost of a four-year college degree reported in 2021 is $122,000.5 If (a) you had to save up this amount in advance by mowing lawns, shoveling driveways, walking dogs, babysitting, waiting tables, and if (b) you made $100/week, then (c) you’d need to work for 23 years, which means you would have violated child labor laws somewhere along the line. I think you get the picture. More likely, you didn’t start working for a $100/week job as a toddler, and you and your family experience the impact of accumulated debt firsthand.
The Hottest Debate in Town
Postsecondary education creates a hotly debated topic among parents, employers, colleges, and students: What is the purpose of a college degree? Is it to broaden knowledge, or to get a job? Is it wide and theoretical, or focused and practical? Do you major in liberal arts or a vocational specialty? Should you plan to be a generalist or specialist? Humanist or expert? Do you see college as a long-term investment, or are you looking for an immediate return?
Enter the Big Gorilla
As businesses scramble to compete in a chaotic and interconnected world economy, they turn to colleges and other postsecondary schools for a pipeline of qualified candidates. How does this impact the value of a college degree? If you follow the money, the debate skews toward vocational preparation. Which student is more likely to be wooed by multiple offers, healthy salaries, and lots of perks—someone with a BS in Information Technology or a BA in English Literature? There’s no argument that pulling down a decent paycheck after two to four years or more of almost broke is a bad thing.
Vocational preparation looks like the win-win proposition. Students earn a degree and are deemed certified, qualified, and ready to join the ranks of the employed. Colleges collect their $122,000/student. Students get jobs. Businesses get employees. Parents get their lives back. Lending institutions get principal plus interest.
The Race to the Bank
Who earns more money—vocational-related or liberal arts majors? Fair question, and you may be surprised by the answer. Research by the National Center for Career Statistics reports that when it comes to salaries, it’s not where you start out, it’s where you finish:
The advantage possessed by career-oriented majors may be shortlived. Once in a career path, the more general skills of communication, organization, and judgment become highly valued. As a result, liberal arts graduates frequently catch or surpass graduates with career-oriented majors in both job quality and compensation. A longitudinal study conducted several years ago by the National Center for Educational Statistics found that the wage differentials that existed between career-oriented majors and academically oriented majors were all but eliminated within 10 years after graduation.6
What’s Next?
Postsecondary education—done. Now it’s off to the workplace after 16-plus years of playing Achieve and Advance. What’s next is a different game, as Emma knows firsthand.
Food for Thought
1. Education is a game to acquire knowledge, solve problems, and find answers. But what happened to the other experiences that are engineered out as children become students? Is something the matter here, or is it just me?
2. Did you major in a vocational-related field, liberal arts, or learn a trade? What was the rationale for your choice?
3. How do you think about failure? If you have school-aged children, how do they think of failure? This could make for a good dinnertime conversation.
4. Do you think of yourself as a high achiever? What does that look like for you? What do you expect from yourself? From others?
5. What did you “learn” in your college or other postsecondary experience that you think was the most valuable?
6. It’s one thing to do your best. It’s another to be the best. Or is it?
7. Some think of themselves as good students, while others say they were bad students. What makes a student good or bad?
8. What if you as a parent took the test for rating what was most important for your child: (1) caring for others, (2) achieving at a high level, or (3) being a happy person? How would you answer, and why?
The Cost of Perfectionism
While the search for getting the right answer is reason enough to put a high achiever into overdrive, the need for perfectionism is in a different league. This is a fixed mindset—it’s either perfect or wrong. Perfectionists are often devoid of off switches and unaware of the emotional energy consumed to go from 90 to a 100 percent right.
Perfectionists wake up in the middle of the night to change one small, nagging detail of little consequence on a set of drawings. For them, there’s nothing small about it. Perfectionists suffer from self-inflicted pressure, and they think (1) others expect them to be perfect, and (2) they expect others to be perfect. Perfectionism is taking a big toll.Researchers have seen higher levels of depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts especially among millennials than there were a decade ago. Then, there’s the story of an eighth grader who quit the swimming team he loved. He wasn’t winning every time, and he thought he should be an Olympic caliber athlete: “I’m not Michael Phelps at swimming, so why am I even on the team?”7 How sad.
The Game of Ladder Climbing
If you define your success by money, titles, and material things alone, you’ll end up stuck on the path of proving yourself and never feeling good enough.