The Game Above the Game

After fifteen years of watching and guiding children through play, I have come to see it as one of the most sophisticated social tools we have, but only when the play goes deep. A child can learn to swim in three feet of water. But three feet of water asks very little of them. They can stand up whenever they get scared. The deep end is different. It requires trust, composure, and a willingness to stay with the feeling of not being completely in control.

Jiu jitsu begins much the same way as a body of water: shallow at first, then the drop. In our academy, some sort of live sparring is part of nearly every class. Two children, a mat, and an honest contest of bodies. I call this deep play: play that is fully absorbing, physical, and right at the edge of what a child can handle. Spend enough time watching, and you begin to notice something about the children we tend to call socially awkward.

They don’t know how to play.

When I say this, parents often look at me sideways: Coach Jei, my kid bounces off the walls from morning to night. If there's one thing that child knows how to do, it's play. I don't doubt it, and they aren't wrong, exactly. But energy is not what I mean. A hurricane has plenty of energy, and nobody invites it back. What I mean is something quieter and harder to see: the ability to play a game in such a way that the game can happen again.

Many of them know how to play the way a two-year-old plays, and they are no longer two. That is the whole trouble. A two-year-old can grab the toy and run, cry when they lose, wander off when they're bored, and the game carries on anyway, because the games of two-year-olds are forgiving. But games grow up. They gather rules, roles, turns, and unspoken agreements about how hard is too hard. A child who still plays like a two-year-old at seven or ten finds that the games have moved on without them, and so have the other children.

I'm not the first to notice this. Nearly a century ago, the psychologist Jean Piaget spent hours watching Swiss children play marbles. The youngest barely played with each other at all; they played side by side, each following their own private version of the rules. Only as they grew did the game become truly shared, with rules everyone agreed with, argued over, and eventually understands they could change together. The game, in other words, grows up alongside the child. The question is whether the child keeps up.

I see the same thing on the mats every week. The children who struggle most at jiu jitsu are the ones who make up their own rules and do jiu jitsu their way. There is nothing shared about it, because there is no consideration for the human on the other side. Piaget had a word for this: egocentrism, a young child's difficulty seeing the world from anyone else's point of view. They are still playing marbles alone, only now with a partner who never agreed to their rules. Many people find this cute, and for a moment it can be. In a four-year-old, it is a stage. In a ten-year-old, it is a problem. In an adult, it is someone nobody wants to play with.

You can see it start young. Elliot is four, and for a while he cried at the start of every class. His mother told me he would sometimes run and hide when it was time to come. It wasn't that he didn't want to play. He loved coming to class. You could tell by the coy smile he would try to conceal when something caught his interest. What he couldn't bear yet was the idea of being tagged in a game we call Jiu Jitsu Virus. In his version of the game, you run forever and nobody ever catches you.

I understand that. Being caught feels a lot like losing, and losing is a very big feeling when you're four. To Elliot, the game felt as deep as play could go, right at the edge of what he could handle and then some. But socially, tag is one of the first shared games children learn, and its whole bargain is simple: you chase, and you get chased. Most of his classmates had already made peace with that bargain and were running and laughing through it.

Elliot isn't doing anything wrong. But without realizing it, he is casting himself out. Every time he refuses to be caught, he steps a little further outside the game his friends are playing, and he is far too young to see where that road leads. A child who falls behind his same-age peers in play development is at risk of becoming a social outcast, often by his own hand and without ever meaning to. That is why, as coaches, we can't simply wait for children like Elliot to come around. Our job is to find ways to bring them back into the fold.

Elliot hadn't yet learned what every child who gets good at this eventually does: losing does not mean the game is over. In jiu jitsu, we practice that lesson every day through live training. My littlest students call these rounds "win games," which is honest of them, since winning is mostly what they have in mind. They are also, almost always, the part of class that younger kids don't like. That's because, in a child's mind, the win games become jiu jitsu. Everything else (the techniques, the drills, the laughing in between) fades into the background, and the whole art shrinks down to the moments of being tested. So when they say they don't like jiu jitsu, they don't mean the actual art. What they don't like is the exposure: a live game, another person trying just as hard as they are, and nowhere to hide from losing.

Take Carter, another boy in my class. Last week he lost a win game, and afterward he sat with me for five tearful minutes, certain that he would never be good enough to win because he isn't strong enough. My heart went out to him. Every one of us has felt that at some point. If he tells his parents before his next class that he doesn't want to go to jiu jitsu anymore, I'll understand why. But I don't think it will be jiu jitsu he's avoiding. It will be that feeling he had after the game.

Parents, if you hear something like this at home, listen closely to what's really being said. Sometimes the first step toward social isolation is not rejection by other children, but learning to avoid the games in which rejection, losing, embarrassment, and disappointment might happen.

Here is what I wish I could make Carter see in that moment: strength isn't what makes kids good at this. Time on the mat is. The children who improve are rarely the strongest, and rarely the ones who care only about winning. They are the ones who keep coming back to the game after they lose, and who play in a way that makes their partners glad to go another round. Each round teaches them a little more, and losing becomes part of the learning instead of the end of it. That, I've come to believe, is how a child actually arrives at winning: by staying in the game long enough to grow into it.

Andre, a boy in one of my older classes, shows what this looks like. He loses more than he wins, but he keeps going back out there, round after round, and showing up, day after day. Some of the other kids have noticed, and they see him as an easy win, so they want to go with him all the time. You might expect that to wear him down. Instead, it is precisely why he improves quickly. He gets to play more than anyone. I find this fascinating. Whatever the other kids think they're getting, the way he plays is an invitation. He makes the game feel open and safe to step into, so they keep accepting, and every acceptance is another round for him. Without knowing it, Andre is playing the meta game. He is getting better at jiu jitsu, yes, but he is also getting better at areas of life he hasn't even stepped into yet.

Being desirable to play with creates opportunities. Opportunities create repetition, and repetition creates competence. Now extrapolate that out to adulthood, where the person others want to work with, train with, and be around gets more chances than everyone else. I would say that means Andre has a competitive advantage.

We have a name for this. We call it being a good sport. It is a hard thing to explain to a six-year-old, and I have tried many explanations, but the one that works best is also the simplest: so other kids want to play with you next time. There is the game, and then there is the meta game: the game above the game. Somewhere between the two, a child's character is being quietly formed.

Most parents who bring their child to jiu jitsu are looking for this character development. What they don't always know is how it actually happens. It happens in the reaching beyond the game and into the meta game. They are not buying armbars. What they want is transfer. They want the child who learns to lose gracefully here to handle disappointment better elsewhere. The child who learns to regulate force here to regulate anger elsewhere. The child who learns to stay in a difficult round here to stay in a difficult conversation years from now.

For that transfer to happen, it helps to notice that a child at play can be serving one of three masters. They can be trying to win the game. They can be trying to play the game. Or they can be practicing a way of playing that will let them succeed in many games, in many situations, with many people.

The child focused solely on winning the game has a narrow strategy. Sometimes it produces the immediate outcome they want. But it can produce terrible secondary outcomes: nobody wants to play with them, partners avoid them, they get fewer repetitions, fewer relationships, fewer invitations. Conversely, much of the same happens to the child who is afraid to play at all. Avoiding the game protects them from losing, embarrassment, and discomfort in the moment, but it also costs them the very experiences that teach them how to handle those things. One child pushes others out of the game. The other removes themselves from it. Either way, the result is the same: fewer chances to play, and therefore fewer chances to grow.

Put that way, the answer seems obvious: the third is best, not because it sounds more moral, but because it has a greater reach. It produces more possibilities. In a Piagetian sense, it is simply the more adaptive way of meeting the world: it works across more situations, with more people, under more conditions. Winning solves the problem directly in front of you. Learning how to play solves a whole case of problems.

But what is obvious to a grown-up on a quiet evening is not obvious to a child in the middle of a scramble. If I'm honest, it isn't always obvious to grown-ups either. And there's a reason for that. The third way takes a great deal of maturity, because it means playing the game honestly, with real effort and real intention: no coasting, no quitting halfway, no pretending something hurts to get out of a bad spot. It means sticking your neck out, knowing you might lose in front of someone. That is exactly the exposure so many children run from.

So how does a child come to see it? In my experience, it starts in the body. Jiu jitsu requires rough and tumble play, and here is something I didn't expect to learn: you can tell, almost from the first class, which children have had it. They are a small minority. Perhaps that is part of why parents bring them to me. They sense, without quite being able to say it, that something has been missing. I've come to suspect that missing this kind of play contributes to some forms of social awkwardness.

Many of the socially awkward kids I meet simply lack practice. They haven't accumulated enough reps in the physical-social negotiations children learn through play: reciprocity, use of force, turn-taking, reading discomfort, repairing mistakes, telling an accident from aggression, adjusting themselves to another person. Every one of those lessons is learned through the body before it is ever understood in words.

Physical education, done this way, is social education.

I learned this long before I ever coached a class. I grew up in the inner city, in a neighborhood where most kids didn't know how to play. Games ended in fights. Play ran too rough, and rough play invited retaliation. Plenty of kids were simply afraid to join in, and I can't say I blame them.

I remember a game of tag after church one Sunday. An older boy picked up a large rock and, in his anger, threw it at me like a major league pitcher. It struck me in the back, inches from my head. I have thought about that boy many times since. As the years went on, life was very hard for him, and I don't believe that's a coincidence. A child who answers a game of tag with a rock has missed something essential about the game: how to remain inside it without destroying it. And so much of life is played there.

A job is a game. So is a marriage, a friendship, a conversation, a competition, citizenship. Not because they are frivolous, but because they involve rules, reciprocity, roles, constraints, consequences, other people, and future rounds. The person who can only win by destroying the possibility of another round eventually runs out of people willing to play with them.

Back on my mats, the children who haven't had enough rough and tumble play, or in some cases have had too much of the wrong kind, tend to land at one of two ends. At one end is the child who is easily frightened. They often are strangers in their own bodies: hesitant in movement, surprised by contact, tripping and colliding with other children because they haven’t yet learned how bodies move together.

At the other end is the child with no gauge for how much is too much. They go at their partners far too hard, and yet when the same force comes back to them, it feels mean, deliberate, unfair, and they cry. One child needs to learn, I can handle more than I think. The other needs to learn, other people can handle less than I assume. Neither child is bad. They simply haven’t put it together yet. But I won't pretend: nobody lines up to train with them and if they have to, they don’t enjoy it.

And then, in the same class, at the same age, there are children who seem to be playing a different game. They ease off when their partner is struggling. They comfort a kid who is having a hard day. They lose with a smile, even though their pride might be hurt too. These are the children everyone wants to play with, and when I watch them I see those three masters again. Some children are still serving the lowest one. Others seem to pick up the unwritten rules of whatever culture they step into, reading the room the moment their feet touch the mat. I see it all the time. A child crosses the line once and never crosses it again. Another adjusts their intensity to the person in front of them, easing off with a newer partner and turning it up with a more skilled one. Often, no one has told them to. That is a remarkably sophisticated kind of social awareness. It is the third master at work: not merely learning how to play the game, but developing a way of playing that travels.

Researchers have a name for this: self-handicapping. And it turns out to be very old. In Jaak Panksepp's studies of play-wrestling rats, the dominant rat in a pair won most of the time, but not every time. That work was later developed further by researchers such as Sergio and Vivien Pellis, who studied the reciprocity and role reversal that make play possible.

During play, unlike in serious fighting, an animal with the advantage may put itself in positions that made it easier for its partner to turn the tables. Play requires a degree of reciprocity. Rats will reverse roles, and an animal with the advantage may sometimes give it up, allowing its partner to become the attacker. When one rat repeatedly dominates without reciprocating, the other becomes less willing to play.

Researchers studying children’s rough and tumble play see the same thing: role reversal, self-handicapping, self-control, and the ability to regulate one’s behavior in response to another person.

It is no accident that these children usually improve fastest, faster even than the ones who care only about winning. They understand, in their bones if not in words, that a game played well has to stay fun, and not just for them. Once that clicks, the rules stop feeling like restrictions. The rules are what keep you in the game longer, and the longer you stay in the game, the more incentive you have to improve. You can't muscle your way through a hundred rounds with a hundred different partners. You have to learn how things actually work. Self-handicapping takes this even further. When you hold back your strength or your speed, you are forced to lean on understanding instead, and your grasp of the game deepens in a way that winning alone never gives you.

This isn't only true for kids. Not long ago, an adult student told me he didn't much like rolling with less experienced partners, because he didn't learn as much from them. I suggested he handicap himself, to make the round more interesting and give himself a greater challenge. His partner gets a better round, he gets a harder problem to solve, and the game not only keeps going for both of them—it expands the number of people he can meaningfully train with over time. This is an incredibly high degree of leverage..

The children everyone wants to play with aren't born; they're made, one round at a time. What we do at the gym, as best I can describe it, is take children as deep into play as they can go, and then a little further, just past the edge of what they can handle. Sometimes there are tears. Then we reel them back. We do this slowly, over months and years, with endless small corrections to technique, pace, intensity, and control.

For the child, it is a kind of exploration. What are bodies like? What can you get away with doing to them? And, more subtly: what can you do that won't get you in trouble and end the game? There is only one way to find out. You have to gradually accommodate yourself to the game, its rules, and the other people in it. If you understand those things well enough, you can act in a way that gives you more opportunities to play.

This is skill.

But if you insist that the game conform to you, eventually you won’t have anyone left to play with. And without people willing to play with you, your opportunities to develop skill begin to disappear.

Consider what the art continually asks of children. They hit the ground hard. They get squished. They end up face down. Their limbs are stretched a little past where they'd like them to go. They are squeezed until the air leaves them. And, just as importantly, they are allowed to do many of the same things to someone else. What they slowly learn is that all of this can happen to a body and it's all right, because this is the game, and there is a safe way to play it. That, to me, is the real invitation.

This is where confidence comes from, and I don't mean the loud kind. A child learns what they can withstand physically. Given enough time under the discipline, that knowledge seeps inward and becomes mental, then emotional, perhaps even spiritual. They learn the difference between pain and discomfort, between fear and mere surprise, between a real threat and something that only looks like one. It is a far more sophisticated education than "self-defense," and I suspect it is the real reason children, given half a chance, fall in love with this art.

Not every child gets that half chance. Some arrive with almost no experience of rough play at all. They are afraid of their own shadow, uneasy in their skin, and often already passed over by their peers. They can look inattentive, socially clueless, and a little lost, but I have learned to read much of that as fear: fear of the unknown. Sometimes it's the unknown win game Coach has planned for that day. Sometimes it's the unknown person they might become if they really try.

Their partners, often leagues ahead, grow frustrated as the game stops again and again, because every time it stops, they lose their chance to play too. And that is how the gap can widen. One child avoids the game because they are afraid of it, while the other children gradually stop inviting them in.

Not knowing how to play wears many masks. In some children it looks like aggression, a need to dominate. In others it looks like defiance. In others it is the fear of losing face, which keeps them from ever fully committing. And very often, beneath all the masks, it is plain terror. None of this is really playing, because they don't yet know how. These are the children I sometimes work with for months before they can participate in even the most basic of games without trying to escape, control, or derail it.

And too often, these are exactly the children who get pulled out of jiu jitsu and of every other sport, because their parents conclude they're uninterested, unmotivated, just not passionate about it, and finally that nothing is for them. But I know these kids. Deep down, they want to be able to play. Pulled out too soon, they drift to the edges of their peer group and stay there.

I understand the impulse. But these are precisely the children we cannot afford to lose patience with. I've watched enough of these children come around to believe it is a mistake. Jiu jitsu can be for them, mainly because of the meta game. The techniques matter less than what happens around them: learning to play in a way that keeps the game going for everyone. That is exactly what these children are missing, and exactly what we practice every day. It will simply take longer to coax them out of their shell.

And it doesn't all have to happen on my mats. Roughhouse with your kids at home: wrestle on the living room floor, play chase, let them climb on you and knock you over. And don’t forget to let them win, a little.

Because once a child learns how to play — how to enter a game, survive it, care about the person across from them, lose without disappearing, win without destroying the invitation, and leave both people willing to play again — the lesson is no longer about jiu jitsu. They have learned something about living with other human beings. And from there, almost any game is open to them.