Games

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GAMES

GAMES are analytically distinguished from other forms of contest by being framed as "play" and from other forms of play by their competitive format and the institutional—public, systematic, and jural—character of their rules. The American anthropologist Gregory Bateson (1972, pp. 177–193) has described the universal semantic process by which behaviors are framed as play. Conventionalized signals create a "metamessage" that instructs players not to take the behaviors they engage in as denoting what those behaviors would denote in other, nonplay, contexts. In this sense, game actions are "untrue." A nip is not a bite, a bullfight is not a hunt, a checkmate is not a regicide, a soccer match is not a war, a wrestling bout or footrace is not a cosmogony or theogony, regardless of overt similarities in the words, objects, gestures, emotional states, or social categories of persons involved. The framing of contests as play makes them self-referential in several ways, shifting attributed motivation to intrinsic enjoyment and sociability, turning means into ends in themselves, and understanding extrinsic outcomes as "mere" contingencies.

Yet, paradoxically, as Bateson and many other theorists of play have noted, the prior and consensual assertion of untruth, in the sense of disconnection from standard meanings, makes assertions of truthful correspondences between the worlds of nonplay and play possible, likely, and even predominant over a discourse of "set-apartness." Like other play forms, games are about boundaries and the boundaries between boundaries. Games create, in the phrases of the English psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott (1971), a world of "transitional objects," a realm of the "not-not-true." Freedom from denotation makes rich freedom for connotation, for human individuals and groups to re-represent their lives to themselves in "experimental" ways. Alternative or virtual realities, including those asserted by religion, can thus be tested against what the phenomenologist Alfred Schutz termed "the paramount realities of everyday life."

Play in Culture: The Religious Character of Games

Contest and representation are basic aspects of play, argued the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga in his manifesto Homo Ludens, and they may "unite in such a way that the game 'represents' a contest or else becomes a contest for the best representation of something" (1955, p. 13). The materials of games are drawn from the sociocultural world and at the same time stand in figurative relations—metaphoric, analogical, symbolic—with it. "The more profound, double sense of 'social game,'" said the German sociologist Georg Simmel, "is not only that the game is played in a society (as its external medium) but that, with its help, people actually 'play' 'society'," including the society of the gods (1950, p. 50). Particularly where enjoyment, competition, and gambling supply strong motivations to attend to the progress and outcome of games, this setting of the empirical world in juxtaposition with "another" world can lead to an interrogation of their relationship sufficient to involve ultimate epistemological questions and functional necessities of human existence. On this general ground, the appearance of game forms in the religious mythologies and cults of various peoples has been explained by writers and scholars, some of whom have gone on to find in the ludic process a mode of transcendence and, therefore, an essential aspect of the religious imagination itself.

Among Western humanists, Huizinga has perhaps been the boldest in this regard. In Homo Ludens, he argued for "the identity of play and ritual" and even claimed, on the authority of Plato, that the sacred can be comprised in the category of play (pp. 18–19). "God alone is worthy of supreme seriousness," so Huizinga translated Plato (Laws 7.803), "but man is made God's plaything, and that is the best part of him.… What then is the right way of living? Life must be lived as play, playing certain games, making sacrifices, singing and dancing, and then a man will be able to propitiate the gods, and defend himself against his enemies, and win the contest." Whether Plato really meant to identify "play and holiness" so thoroughly can be disputed. Moreover, as the final clause of Huizinga's reading of Plato suggests, classicists have found reason to doubt that the "for-their-own-sake" character Huizinga believed crucial to "true play and games" was really present or developed in classical Greek ideology.

From the famous stadium games to the isomorphic agonistic ethos and format in other cultural domains, elements that together comprise what historians and sociologists from Jakob Burckhardt (1898–1902) to Alvin W. Gouldner (1965) have styled the "Greek contest system," functional requirements, inextricably civic and religious, do not appear to have been culturally "bracketed off" as contingencies in the classical world, as they have been in that stream of European thought that Huizinga so well represented. In Greek mythology and theology, in notable contrast to Christianity, the gods themselves played games, chartered the games of human beings, and intervened in them as "co-players." In athletic games—as the poetry of Pindar makes evocatively plain—individual fate, the polity, and the divine world found a preferential idiom of communication in archaic and classical Greek culture, such that an axis mundi, in the sense discussed by Mircea Eliade, could be created in the person of the victorious athlete.

The Olympic games, the Delphic oracle, and Homeric poetry emerged together in the eighth century bce as pan-Hellenic institutions, just as the segmentary and rivalrous city-state was arising as the dominant form of social organization within the Greek world. Relations among these key institutions are apparent in the traditions of the ancient Olympic games. Homeric theology and hero cults came to inform the charter myths of the games at Olympia, and a famous oracle at Delphi (where crown games were also celebrated) "renewed" the sanction from Zeus, to whose worship the Olympic festival was devoted. The great games gave rise to practices seeking to distinguish Greek from non-Greek (barbaroi were not to compete at Olympia) and to mediate between Greek mythic and human time. Though its significance is much debated, the reckoning of dates according to the formula "in the second year of the Olympiad in which so-and-so won the stade " provided Greece with her main calendar of historical time beyond city-state and regional limitations.

One mythic tradition ascribes the foundation of the Olympic games to Idean Herakles, another to Pelops's victory over King Oenomaus in a chariot race for the latter's daughter Hippodamia ("horse woman"). Here, as in the related story of Atalanta in the Greek corpus and in other Indo-European contexts, comparative mythologists such as James G. Frazer, Georges Dumézil, Eliade, and Bernard Jeu have recognized a repeated pattern associating sacred marriage (hieros gamos ), an implicit theogony (often of newer gods over older ones), the acquisition of transforming technology (fire, the horse, metallurgy, the chariot), the domestication of invader kings ("Dorians" in the Greek case), and the athletic race that embodies, mediates, and "resolves" these generative contests between vigorous and dying god-kings, male and female, earth and heaven, nature and culture, cosmos and history.

Games transform ambiguous, perturbed, or disputed potentials and conditions into certain outcomes, and this is one reason for their widespread association, in myth or in practice, with such ritualized natural and social transitions as seasonal cycles, birth, initiation, marriage, funerals, and warfare. Furthermore, games necessarily incorporate a dialectic between hierarchy and equality, two central organizing principles of human social arrangements and cognitive functioning. From an (at least asserted or presumed) equality before the rules of the game results a ranked hierarchy of outcomes. Societies and theologies differ in the relative valuation placed on hierarchy and equality in human and divine affairs and, thus, differentially emphasize one or the other pole in games. Yet for all known social types, games appear, in the expression of the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, to be "good to think with" and, as the present-day Olympic games forcefully illustrate, may permit highly diverse and rivalrous social formations to compete cooperatively. If games have been seen as "the moral equivalent of war," it is because warfare and other means of political and ideological domination, including religion, have their moral dimensions.

Ingomar Weiler (1981) finds the "contest system" not limited to Greece but widespread in the ancient Mediterranean world, and scholars like Huizinga emphasize parallels to the Greek and Roman materials in non-Western warrior-states. In the Hindu Mahābhārata, the world is conceived as a game of dice between Śiva and his queen (8.2368, 8.2381), and a dice match for the kingdom sets off the conflict between the Kauravas and the Pāṇḍavas that organizes the epic. "I am the dicing of tricksters," says Kṛṣṇa in the Bhagavadgītā (10.36), and forms of līlā, or sacred play, are widely associated with this god and his worship. According to Marcel Granet (1930), the Chinese cosmic duality of yin and yang replayed important social dualisms; festal, magical competitions of many sorts were both the central agencies for regenerating life in the early "tribal" period and a means by which the later transformation to state institutions was accomplished. The Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset likewise argued for the "sportive origin of the state" out of primitive institutions of ritual contest involving both cosmological and social sanctions.

The ethnology of nonliterate "primitive" societies provided further rich material for such humanistic speculations. In his elaborate compendium Games of the North American Indians, Stewart Culin observed the common occurrence of game motifs in the origin myths of a wide variety of linguistically and culturally unrelated tribes. The complementarity in rivalry of the "divine twins"—associated with oppositions between night and day, winter and summer, east and west, morning and evening stars, consanguinal and affinal kin—or of a demiurgic First Man or First Woman with monsters, nature, or each other is a widespread motif. In folklore, culture-creating heroes—Coyote, Raven, or Spider—are frequently trickster beings whose fondness for games, as with other supernaturals, is both a source of their power and a means by which they can be manipulated for human moral or material purposes. As to adult human games, which he divided into those of "chance" and those of "dexterity," Culin concluded that "In general, [they] appear to be played ceremonially, as pleasing to the gods, with the object of securing fertility, causing rain, giving and prolonging life, expelling demons, or curing sickness" (Culin, 1975, p. 34).

Theories Regarding the "Desacralization" of Games

This stress on the religious character of games in the cultures of exotic or prestigiously ancestral "others" was generated by and contributed to those broader evolutionist trends of European thought variously styled "rationalization," "modernization," and "secularization." Huizinga and other philosophers of history, while seeking to show the essential unity of humankind in play, nevertheless saw games as becoming progressively "secularized" through "universal cultural history." British classicists, most notably Jane E. Harrison, proposed the view that games—like such other forms of cultural expression as theater, dance, music, and poetry—had separated from an original religious ritual matrix in the primitive and ancient worlds. Where games were seen to retain magical or religious elements, such as peasant Shrovetide football matches in the "folk cultures" of early modern France and England or the grand sumō tournaments of Shintō Japan or the various martial arts competitions in monastic communities of the Near and Far East, these were interpreted as backward "survivals" of an archaic past in "fossil" social structures still partially attuned in cult to cosmological and agricultural rhythms. Such views fit well with the nineteenth-century development of Western social science, centered around a purported evolutionary passage—"of potentially universal significance," as Max Weber put it—from "traditional" to "modern" societies under the impact of the industrial revolution and modern science. From important means by which communities represented their ultimate concerns to themselves and engaged in imitative worship, games became associated, in such Western eyes, with the sphere of secular leisure, recreation, mass entertainment: "mere games" of undoubted commercial or social value but of little sacred or spiritual significance.

While still very influential, the "modernization" point of view has been criticized as Eurocentric and imperialist. Moreover, social history has shown that in the West itself religion has not regularly and inevitably declined and that the cultural history of forms like games has not followed any simple unilinear pattern. As symbolized by the emperor Theodosius's suppression of the Olympic games as a "pagan rite," early Christianity did indeed oppose itself to Greek (and certainly Roman) traditions of public games, save in the appropriation of athletics as an ascetic metaphor by canonical writers like the apostle Paul. A centuries-long tradition culminating in continental and English "puritanism" did seek to suppress games, gambling, and other forms of folk amusement as "works of the devil" that turned the Christian away from sober religious duty, the social predominance of the churches, and disciplined labor. Through much of the twentieth century, religious leaders and sociologists alike have attributed declining church attendance, where it has occurred, in part to the increasing popularity of sports events and other kinds of mass recreation on the Sabbath.

Yet contrary trends are everywhere in evidence. In the Middle Ages, the church may have turned against the cult of the body in athletic games, but it attached itself to the medieval tournament. In the contemporary palio horse race of Siena, Italy, which dates back to the eleventh century, the cult of the Virgin Mary and priestly blessings of the rival contrade are central features of the ritual contest. In nineteenth-century England, devout Anglican schoolmasters and Christian socialists, like Thomas Hughes and Charles Kingsley, played the central role in elaborating the ideology of "muscular Christianity," that combination of athletic games, virility, fair play, courage, and defense of the weak associated with a new imitatio Christi, on the one side, and with English colonialism, on the other. Many contemporary English soccer clubs are descended from church organizations, and missionaries in the British Empire sought not only to suppress the indigenous games of conquered peoples, particularly those with overt sexual and magical content, but to replace them with cricket, soccer, hockey, and running as "schools of Christian character." Upon decolonization in "new nations"—as East African long-distance running, Trobriand and Caribbean cricket, and Indian field hockey indicate—these game forms have often been retained, but transformed to reaccommodate indigenous cultural values or to serve "civil" or "national" religion, whether in the form of an explicit cult of the state or a more diffuse "functional equivalent" of traditional religious institutions. In dialectical concert with enduring ludic forms bent to "nativist" purposes—West African wrestling, Native American running (see Nabokov, 1981), central Asian buzkashi, Japanese sumō, or the Balinese cockfight made famous by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1972)—such transformations of imposed forms illustrate the inadequacies of any unilineal or evolutionary theory of world history and the place of games within it. Again in the Judeo-Christian context, home of such theories, present-day developments—from a skiing pope, decorated with the Olympic Order, to the incipient interlock between the directorates of the World Council of Churches and the International Olympic Committee, to the widespread activity of Christian athletes in domestic and foreign missionizing—further illustrate the labile relations between religion and games. Nor are such relations limited to practical and institutional exigencies. The recent "theology of play" movement in Christian religious circles (see Moltmann, 1972), with its rebellious attempt to reshape the image of the deity and its arguments that in the freedom and joy of games and festivity humans achieve a foretaste of the kingdom of heaven, suggests how the potentials for transcendence in play must ever draw religion into a dialogue with ludic form and experience. Even religions whose orthodox or mainstream versions may find less explicit place for play in their theophanies, cults, and ethics—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, perhaps in contrast to Hinduism, Buddhism, and many tribal religions—must preoccupy themselves with what comparative religionist David L. Miller (1970, p. 14) calls "the game game," that effort to discover, articulate, and conform to an "ultimate reality" that sets a limit to divine and human manipulation.

Games and Social Life

Dissatisfaction with evolutionist or modernization perspectives has led to closer attention by theorists to the types and internal properties of games. The French sociologist of religion Roger Caillois suggested in Man, Play, and Games (1961) that games can be usefully placed along a continuum from paidia (relatively unstructured, spontaneous, labile forms typified by many children's games) to those of ludus (more conventionalized, jural, and elaborated forms). All true games, however, minimally involve specification of a goal for action, delimitations of space and time, selection of some subset of possibilities in a total action field as relevant and permissible (the "moves" of the game), rules for the initial apportioning of resources and roles and their reapportioning in the course of play, and criteria for evaluating the outcomes (success or failure, winning or losing). By selectively emphasizing features of this core structure of games, a number of classification schemes have been generated to reveal dominant metaphysical assumptions and to model theoretically how individuals and groups "play society."

Like most continental game theorists, Caillois focused on the experiential aspects of game types. Seeking not merely a sociology of games but a "sociology derived from games," Caillois subsumed all games under four categories: agon (competition), alea (chance), mimicry (simulation), and ilinx (vertigo). This scheme is helpful in parsing the religious functions associated with types of games: cosmological, eschatological, moral contests; divination; imitative magic and ceremonial; altered states of consciousness. But it has generated little insight of a truly comparative nature. Actual games contain combinations of these aspects—all games are in some sense competitive, for example—and all religions accommodate these functions. The insights of psychoanalysis, which sees in play and games the disguised representation of unconscious conflicts and a compulsion to repeat "primitive" traumas so as to master them, have been limited by inattention to cultural context and to the complexity and variety of game forms. Continental structuralism of the psychological sort associated with Piaget finds an important place for children's games in characterizing mental development, and the anthropological sort associated with Lévi-Strauss (1966, pp. 30–33) has revealed much of the symbolic "logic of the concrete" that connects games to myth, ritual, and kinship. Yet in the search for universal structures of mind these theories also overlook social and historical context, and their contributions have been largely methodological.

British and North American social scientists, on the other hand, have largely focused on the strategic and role-playing aspects of games, exploring them from the functional standpoint of social integration, decision making, and value transmission. "Game theory" in the social and information sciences has produced taxonomies of rational calculation and strategic choice among individual actors seeking to maximize their payoffs in the face of uncertainty and limited resources. Critics, however, have found "game theory" to be a fundamental misnomer, since play, under its aspects of intrinsic motivation and Batesonian framing, is missing or unaccounted for in such understandings of social action. "Game theory" has contributed little to the analysis of specifically religious institutions.

Social psychologists have focused on the role playing and socialization features of games to construct fundamental questions about the organization of the self itself. George Herbert Mead pointed to the youngster's ability to play a single position in a baseball game while articulating that role with all of the others on the field as a sign of and a means toward development of a "reflexive self," incorporating the expectations of others in the context of the "generalized other" represented by the total game. Erving Goffman (1967, 1974) still further stressed the aspects of role-playing, mimicry, dissimulation, and the "rules for breaking the rules" in building an explicit theory from the now popular metaphorical utterance, "social life is a game." The human self is seen by Goffman to be endlessly preoccupied with "the arts of impression management," ludic yet ever-watchful to define situations so as to prevent embarrassment to oneself and others. Like formal "game theory," social psychologies built from the model of games have contributed less to the understanding of social institutions per se, including religious ones, than they have to understanding individual and small-group processes of negotiation. At the same time, such theories do implicitly challenge authoritative ontologies and conventional understandings of divine affairs in Western cultures.

While games undoubtedly serve to reproduce or to rebel against dominant social structures and ideologies, they have been seen by recent anthropologists as speculative enterprises as well, means by which human communities discover their dominant values in the first place and formulate alternatives to them. Victor Turner—who like Huizinga saw cultural life as a process of passage from institutional structure to ludic, "antistructural" recombination, to the incrustations of structure once again—extended analysis of religious ritual to understand play forms in this way (1974). Clifford Geertz (1972), who sees the interpretation of experiences as in and of itself a human necessity, argues that the Balinese cockfight is a form of "social metacommentary," a "story the Balinese tell about themselves," a function likewise ascribed to religious ritual. Other anthropologists (Don Handelman and I, for example) find it important to stress the differences between games and ritual as collective hermeneutics. On the Batesonian level of metacommunication, ritual does seem to be framed differently from play. Ritual asserts a priori that all statements within it are true and not untrue and creates a world of "let us believe" rather than of "let us make believe."

Such distinctions make it possible to recognize complex performance types that incorporate both rite and game, like the palio or the Olympics, and depend for their power on moving actors and audiences back and forth from frame to frame. Then too, activities are reframed through the course of a people's history. Alexander Lesser (1978) has shown how the Pawnee hand game passed from a form of amusement to a religious salvation ritual and back again between 1865 and 1930, a process reminiscent of athletics in nineteenth-century England. What is discovered as possible (or impossible) in play and given organized display in games may be asserted by ritual as undeniable. Whether this is the essential relation between games and religion we will not know until greater conceptual clarity and theoretical sophistication are brought to bear on the vast new findings in the ethnology and social history of games, such that a ludic equivalent to Max Weber's comparative "economic ethics of the world religions" is achieved.

Bibliography

The charter discussion of the Greek "agonistic" system is found in Jakob Burckhardt's Griechische Kulturgeschichte, 4 vols. (Berlin, 1898–1902), translated by Palmer Hilty in abridged form as History of Greek Culture (New York, 1963). On the classical world, see also Alvin W. Gouldner's Enter Plato (New York, 1965). In the soundest scholarly guide to athletic games in the ancient Mediterranean world, Sport bei den Völkern der alten Welt (Darmstadt, 1981), Ingomar Weiler argues against the uniqueness of Greece in this area, a position taken by Johan Huizinga as well. Huizinga's Homo Ludens (Boston, 1955) remains the essential manifesto on the role of play in culture, including relationships between games and religion. Victor Turner extends his discussion of religious ritual to include the role of play in culture in "Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow and Ritual," Rice University Studies 60 (Summer 1974): 53–92.

Roger Caillois presents a taxonomy of games, intended both to refine Huizinga's insights and to organize cross-cultural material in more useful fashion, in Man, Play, and Games (New York, 1961). Among ethnological compendia on games in "primitive" societies, Stewart Culin's Games of the North American Indians (1907; Washington, D.C., 1975) has been the most widely cited. On running as practiced by Native Americans, see Peter Nabokov's Indian Running (Santa Barbara, Calif., 1981). Anthropological case studies of special value include Alexander Lesser's The Pawnee Ghost Dance Hand Game (Madison, Wis., 1978) and Clifford Geertz's "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cock Fight," Daedalus 101 (1972): 1–38. On China, see Marcel Granet's Chinese Civilization (London, 1930).

David L. Miller's Gods and Games (New York, 1970) is indicative of the Christian "theology of play" movement and contains valuable discussions of the role of games in contemporary existential, linguistic, and mathematical philosophy. Also see Jürgen Moltmann's Theology of Play (New York, 1972).

Gregory Bateson's fundamental contribution to understanding play and games as forms of metacommunication is contained in "A Theory of Play and Fantasy," in his Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York, 1972). Erving Goffman develops the view of social life as a game in several works, including Interaction Ritual (Garden City, N.Y., 1967) and Frame Analysis (New York, 1974). Also see Georg Simmel's discussion on social reality as play in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, translated and edited by Kurt H. Wolff (Glencoe, Ill., 1950). On the role of play in human development, see D. W. Winnicott's Playing and Reality (London, 1971). Claude Lévi-Strauss's discussion of the different logics of games and rituals is found in his The Savage Mind (Chicago, 1966). Don Handelman considers related problems in his "Play and Ritual: Complementary Forms of Metacommunication" in It's a Funny Thing, Humour, edited by A. J. Chapman and H. Foot (London, 1977), pp. 135–192. Complex performance forms joining games and rites are the subject of my "Olympic Games and the Theory of Spectacle in Modern Societies," in Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle (Philadelphia, 1984), pp. 241–280.