Monday, February 6, 2012

Winning


He pulls a card from the stack.
Without looking at it he slides it into an envelope
seals it
puts it back.

They know the rules.
They play the game as well as they can
scoring as many points as possible
until time runs out.

He unseals the envelope
to reveal the criteria that will be used
to declare a winner.

It may be the points.
It may be who scored the most before time ran out.
Or it may be who had the lead for the greatest number of minutes
or plays
or who ran the most plays
or who had the ball the longest.
It may be any number of other things too.

Someone objects:
We should always use the same criteria for deciding who wins.
We could do that, he says,
but then we’d start to think we know
what winning is.