I’m thinking keeping score takes the fun out of most games and sports.
Take golf. It’s fun to walk around the course, it’s really neat that you can make the ball go so far, sometimes it lands where you want, sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s simply a fun activity.
Until you keep score. You might have a streak of good holes, and then you get a bad one, and your score is ruined and your day is ruined.
I like doing crosswords. They have them online. And when you do them online, they time you. It becomes a race. The whole fun of crosswords is the word play, sussing out what the creator was thinking. But with the clock ticking? And then being told at the end how long it took?
The score doesn’t measure the enjoyment of the activity, yet it becomes how the activity is rated. How’d you do at golf today? What was your score, like that tells it all. And for some, it does.
Did you enjoy that crossword online? Well judging by your time, apparently not. But if it took longer it would have been more challenging, more fun. But if you’re timing them, you want them easy so you can get a low time.
I’m discouraged by the reports about the women’s soccer team. They are “winners.” It’s all about winning. It’s all about having a score higher than the other teams. And if it’s not higher? Well then it’s a disaster, the joy is taken out of it.
The competition, the play means nothing. Just the final score.
Winning is everything? I used to race bicycles in the Boston area back in the mid 1970s when the sport was really small. We had a weekly race I really enjoyed. I consistently finished in the top five, but never won.
What a pleasure to race against the better riders in the area.
One weekend there was a big race in Canada and all the good riders, as it turned out, all the riders better than me, went. I didn’t, so in the local race, I was the best rider. I went off the front by myself. I won easily. It was boring.
In the Olympics, did you get a medal? Was it gold? If not, what was the point?
So You Think You Can Dance. Is it about the joy of movement? No, it’s about what the judges think. If they like you, it was a great experience, if not, well a disaster. Yet the dance, the moves are the same in either case.
And I guess this is the complaint about standardized testing is school. Did the kids learning anything? Did they enjoy the experience of learning? Doesn’t matter, what was the score?
I’m really hoping I get a lot of likes on this one…
