Reflections why we play the game

He can go down swinging or looking at a strike and be made to appear the fool. Yet he has a bat in his hands. And if all goes well and he can accomplish that most difficult feat in sports by hitting a small, hard sphere traveling at over ninety miles per hour with a heavy rounded stick, well then, fate is thwarted for a moment and the power over life is his.

The question ought not to be, "Why do the greatest hitters connect successfully only a third of the time? Still, the youth and hope of the game constitute but one half of baseball, and thus one half of its meaning to us.

It is the second summer of the baseball season that reveals the game's complete nature. The second summer does not have the blithe optimism of the first half of the season.

Each year, from August to the World Series in October, a sense of mortality begins to lower over the game - a suspicion that will deepen by late September to a certain knowledge that something that was bright, lusty, and overflowing with possibility can come to an end.

The beauty of the game is that it traces the arc of American life, of American innocence eliding into experience. Until mid-August, baseball is a boy in shorts whooping it up on the fat grass, afterwards it becomes a leery veteran with a sun-baked neck, whose main concern is to protect the plate.

In its second summer, baseball is about fouling off death. Sadaharu Oh, the Babe Ruth of Japanese baseball, wrote an ode to his sport in which he praised the warmth of the sun and foresaw the approaching change to "the light of winter coming. Small wonder that baseball produces more fine literature than any other sport. The country's violation of its dreams lies here too.

Like America itself, baseball fought against integration until Jackie Robinson, the first Major League African American, stood up for all that the country wanted to believe. America, too, resisted its own self-proclaimed destiny to be the country of all the people and then, when it did strive to become the country of all the people - black, Asian, Latino, everyone - the place improved.

Baseball also improved. On mute display in baseball is the design of the U. Constitution itself. The basic text of the Constitution is the main building, a symmetrical 18th-century structure grounded in the Enlightenment's principles of reason, optimism, order, and a wariness of emotion and passion.

The Constitution's architects, all fundamentally British Enlightenment minds, sought to build a house that Americans could live in without toppling it by placing their impulses above their rationality. But the trouble with that original body of laws was that it was too stable, too rigid. Thus, the Founders came up with the Bill of Rights, which in baseball's terms may be seen as the encouragement of individual freedom within hard and fast laws.

Baseball is at once classic and romantic. So is America. And both the country and the sport survive by keeping the two impulses in balance. If baseball represents nearly all the country's qualities in equilibrium, football and basketball show where those qualities may be exaggerated, overemphasized, and frequently distorted.

Football and basketball are not beautifully made sports. They are more chaotic, more subject to wild moments. And yet, it should be noted that both are far more popular than baseball, which may suggest that Americans, having established the rules, are always straining to break them. Football, like baseball, is a game of individual progress within borders. But unlike baseball, individual progress is gained inch by inch, down and dirty.

Pain is involved. The individual fullback or halfback who carries the ball endures hit after hit as he moves forward, perhaps no more than a foot at a time. Often he is pushed back. Ten yards seems a short distance yet, as in a war, it often means victory or defeat. The ground game is operated by the infantry; the throwing game by the air force. Or one may see the game in the air as the function of the "officers" of the team - those who throw and catch - as opposed to the dog-faced linesmen in the trenches, those literally on the line.

These analogies to war are hardly a stretch. The spirit of the game, the terminology, the uniforms themselves, capped by protective masks and helmets, invoke military operations.

Injuries casualties are not exceptions in this sport; they are part of the game. And yet football reflects our conflicting attitudes toward war. Generally, Americans are extremely reluctant to get into a war, even when our leaders are not. We simply want to win and get out as soon as possible. By the war's end, we were number one, with second place nowhere in sight. But we only got in to crush gangsters and get it over with. Thus, football is war in its ideal state, war in a box.

It lasts four periods. A fifth may be added because of a tie, and ended in "sudden death. Not only do the players resemble warriors; the fans go dark with fury. American football fans may not be as lethal as European football soccer fans, yet every Sunday fans dress up like ancient Celtic warriors with painted faces and half-naked bodies in midwinter. Here is no sport for the upper classes. Football was only that in the Ivy League colleges of the s and s.

Now, the professional game belongs largely to the working class. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. To respond on your own website, enter the URL of your response which should contain a link to this post's permalink URL.

Your response will then appear possibly after moderation on this page. Want to update or remove your response? Update or delete your post and re-enter your post's URL again. Learn More. Skip to content. Estimated reading time: 4 minutes, 17 seconds. Like this: Like Loading Shame: Arabic writing and presentation skills! Playing, he says, constitutes cultural forms and modalities of meaning that facilitate the norms and codes of societal semiotics.

Furthermore, he argues that play is older than culture itself; that play is temporally and spatially confined, which means that the player is committed to the rules that govern play behaviour; and finally he emphasises that play sets the subject free to perform actions without material consequences.

Man, Play, and Games by the French philosopher and social scientist Roger Callois focuses on the typology of "jeux. Play is something one does ; but it is also the name of a thing. There are, he says, "agon" games which are based on competition or conflict, as in match- and racing games; "alea" games that are nested in chance or luck e.

Wheel of Fortune ; "mimicry," that has to do with simulation and make-believe, for instance by assuming a role in children's play; and "ilinx," which are games founded on dizziness, as in roller coasters.

Callois furthermore provides a theory of the structural complexity of games: "paidea" are freely i. When playing the Danish first-person-shooter Hitman: Codename 47 , one may say, following Callois, that we must first and foremost "get into character" by assuming a precise role - that of a hitman - before we can begin the action within the game itself.

Clearly, at this stage, we are in the domain of make-believe and pretence. A game thus requires a play- mood which is something different than the specific game in question. Once we are "in" the game and committed to its rules, world patterns and so on, Hitman obviously presents itself as an agon-based game that challenges senso-motoric capabilities and swift user reactions.

So, the "as if" is readily forgotten, though still preconditioned, once we start to murder by numbers. We should not fail to notice the temporal displacement here: There is mimicry, and then there is agon. I am a character and I play by the rules. Arriving at this dichotomy between what games require and what games contain, one may take comfort in the theories of Mihayl Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Bateson Whereas the former uses the term "flow" to grasp the sensation of oscillating between ecstasy which actually means to lose oneself and goal-orientation in play and other more or less extreme socio-cultural activities; the latter tells us the following important things: 1 Play is paradoxical because it is both within and outside our "normal" social semantic space.

The reason why play can still be culturally valuable is that it attaches a certain function of meaning to itself. As such, play can be shared and communicated with others by reference to a code. It is in the medium of play that the participants mutually create a "difference that makes a difference. One might speculate further and propose that play installs a shared facility among agents who enthusiastically acknowledge the inherent deviation of a play system.

This deviation implies that communication about play defines and is the result of the difference of the other of play; but it also brings forth the unity that assembles the province of play. Play and games are anchored in spatial and temporal settings, though, as we shall see, they do not operate on the same level of complexity. Play and games are embedded within the realm of cultural dynamics, and perhaps they are even older than culture itself.

Play and games rely on flow-forms that both balance and optimize experience. Play and games necessitate a certain mood, and hereby they seem to insist on complementary modes of analysis.

What is in a game, and how do we get there? Play and games are meta-communicative acts that frame patterns of behaviour in time. Moving from playing to gaming is all about transgressing boundaries and assuming demarcations. Whereas in playing one risks cessation through estrangement from the "real" world that one has already differentiated from the playing environment itself, gaming tends towards closure through a structural internalisation that is already dependent on a double strategy of difference.

It is a double strategy because one has to establish the limits of playing space, but in addition, one needs to restrict this territory with respect to rule-binding criteria for adaptation and interaction.

Adaptation means cognitively responding to and learning from chunks of game material, and interaction refers to the strategies employed by the gamer in order to combine and reflect upon game elements, thus pushing certain competences forward while leaving others unchallenged. Hence, in playing there is the inherent but fascinating danger of being "caught" in reality. Nothing is more disturbing for play than the aggressive intermission of reality which at all times jeopardizes play as play or simply threatens to terminate the privileges of play.

Rather, reality is the horizon that is transgressed in order to play, and it therefore becomes "the other" of play. However, importantly, this otherness also has to abide within play, as it is the latter's indication of what separates it from non-play.

Therefore, the other is simultaneously, as difference, and viewed from the inside of play, the unity of play. Both non-play and play are "realities," because they are products of a distinction, a difference that makes a difference. Similarly, in gaming there is always the danger of being "caught" in a level that obstructs further action. Games tend to irritate the agent involved whenever he or she is imprisoned within a certain vicinity of the game world.

Take a canonical adventure game like Riven as an example of this custody. Above all, the game seems to dwell intensively on a story that is transparent with a number of scenarios which again are open to incessant exploration. However, what we look for when we play the game — and presumably travel around a world — is far more an underlying structure of that world. In fact, Riven seems to be obsessed with highly complex puzzle- and level design, and as a result the user tries to follow the nodal transitions of this design in the attempt to locate the map of the world within the world.

They much rather want to understand the structure so as to move forward revealing new game areas or climb upwards in the hierarchy of levels. This is really a question of logic. If certain activities of differentiation, including play and games, presuppose transgression for an internal unity to be constructed on the basis of distinction, then they inevitably invite contingency and alienation.

Other choices could have been made, and structural frameworks always risk exposing their built-in differences, in which case they alienate the established unity from its precondition. Moving into the sphere of psychology, the sensation of alienation and the fragility by which distinctions reveal contingency become even more obvious.

Children often mourn the loss of play-time. Suddenly they are thrown out into the other of play. Afterwards, they carry this recollection of transgression into the very confines of play. One is likely to be interrupted while playing, so this manoeuvre of implying the negativity of the other into the sameness of the system is simply an innate feature of play.

The basic structure of play lies in its ability to create contingent resorts based on distinctions which are open to meaning. The basic structure of a game adopts this praxis of distinction, but its central "law" is furthermore its unique ability to reduce the complexity of play by way of a set of well-defined, non-negotiable rules. One discusses tactics in chess, not rules. According to the mathematician George Spencer-Brown and his Laws of Form , a universe comes into being when a space is separated, that is, when a distinction is made Spencer-Brown, Thus, a form is the distinction including both its marked and unmarked sides.

Spencer-Brown further states that a distinction is effectuated if and only if one draws a line that includes disparate sides, so that one point on one side of the line cannot be reached without crossing the border. But this "something" can only be accounted for or reflected upon in the very act of observation , not while one is actually making drawing the distinction Baecker, Therefore, there has to be a primordial action at stake, namely the distinction between operation and observation.

In the domain of play and games, the importance lies in the possibility of asserting the difference between the fact that there are play and games, and that one can observe that one is playing or gaming. Let us look more closely at interdependent boundaries and constraints. We will begin by examining the logico-formalistic matter of play.

In the beginning, one makes a distinction. This is done in order to play. The ontological certainty of a common world or subsystem is supplemented by the information attained by drawing a new distinction. Thus, a playing world is established.

Its basic characteristic is precisely that it is not the world itself - the playground may have separate laws - and, at the same time, it inhabits this very world which it is not. Instead of talking about "worlds," and, hence, embarking upon concepts of truth and semantics, it would be more correct and in line with Spencer-Brown simply to announce that, something - i.

The traditional difference between whole and part is thereby replaced by the distinction between system and environment, a distinction that can be repeated endlessly by system differentiation, in which the whole system uses itself in forming its own subsystems Qvortrup, in press. I will refer to this initial stroke of distinction as the first transgression of play.

As illustrated in the figure above, play involves a second-order complexity. Not only is there a complexity of the object in question, but furthermore we must account for the complexity that is inscribed in the very observation of play. A complex observer observes the complexity of his observations. These observations produce, in turn, new possibilities for inscribing the form of the distinction within the form itself.

Let us now move on to gaming. Here, the distinctions that guide the form of play are not enough.