Playing for laughs

I’ve always played to win. I’m from a competitive family. No game was too trivial to be taken seriously. Rules were there for a reason. And there was no such thing as a friendly.

My mum was the exception. Maybe it was a survival tactic, but she’s always taken the view that if somebody else wants to win that much, then just let them. Okay, so it wouldn’t work for Team GB, but it’s a sound approach for the home.

Improv, like my mum, has a healthy attitude to ‘losing’. That’s why it’s good for me. For a start it’s a collaboration, not a competition. It teaches us to make our scene partners look good, rather than ourselves, and we soon learn that the best thing we can do for the sake of a good scene may be to ‘lose’. In one class I teach, students are paired up for a mimed tug of war. The first time they do it, veins bulge, cheeks puff, faces redden, and nobody gives way. This is because a) it’s great fun and b) we are hard-wired to win, even when it’s make believe. In the next round, the students are invited to look into each other’s eyes, determine who wants to win the most and let them. My mum would love it.

Now I just have to bring some of that improv sense to my daily life. Take the swing ball game I played with my sister at a recent family sports day. Neither of us were prepared to give an inch, both risking aggravation of neck, back and shoulder problems as we bashed a tennis ball on a string around a whirligig. With no end in sight, my sister’s Sharapova squeals reduced us to helpless laughter. I don’t remember who won.

I lost a lot when I was growing up, mainly by virtue of having an older brother with even greater competitive instincts than my own. Every game we played – Subbuteo, chess, snooker, Monopoly, tennis, Cluedo, The Business Game (which could last for days), even snail-racing – was tainted by the need to win and a strict adherence to ‘the rules’.

You’d think all those years of losing would have made me better at it. But no, I continued to be a sore loser right into my twenties and thirties. It wasn’t pretty. I remember, to my shame, not allowing my niece to change the rules of a game she was losing. I guess I thought it would teach her a valuable lesson. Rules are to be followed. Life is hard. Whereas all it taught her was not to play games with her uptight auntie.

At least, nowadays, I mostly manage to be gracious in defeat. I let a 7-year old think he’d beaten me at pool at the family day. It was worth it for the grin on his face. But I’m not saying I’ve kicked my shameful habit. The competitive flame still burns brightly when I play Scrabble with my parents or cards with J. And there’s still a part of me that wants to throw my toys out of the pram when I lose, especially when my brother is involved.

So even if I never wholly overcome my desire to win, I’m trying to take games less seriously and find new ways to play – playing for laughs, rather than victory. At least some of the time.