THE ARTS OF CONTEST

1. Games as cultural artefacts

It may or may not be true what they say about the devil having all the best tunes, but there can be no doubt that the peoples of Asia have all the best games. What's more, they seem to have had them longer than anyone else, and undoubtedly invented a great many of them.

Who in the west has not been introduced to board games through Parcheesi, or its British equivalent Ludo, and duly passed it on to their own children? And how many are aware that it is a simplified version of a traditional Indian game of skill for two teams of adults? How many know that the game transmitted to the western family home as Chutes and Ladders (aka Snakes and Ladders) derives directly from one devised by Indian sages to teach children the moral value of patience in character-building? Nor is the gaming legacy of India confined to children: the battlefield of modern international Chess remains to this day occupied by forces reflecting the constitution of the classical Indian army of the 6th century CE from which they derive. That piece in the corner that looks like a castle is still called a rook, which is an Indian word for chariot, and the knight now represented by a horse was once in more majestic command of an elephant.

Who doesn't play cards? Thanks to the Chinese, then, for inventing the paper from which they are made, the idea of cards themselves, and the paper money which may have been the inspiration behind them. Other Asian cultures have added to their contribution. Playing-cards reached us through the natural route of India, Persia, and Arabia, and first entered Europe some time after 1350 from the Mameluk dynasty of Egypt. Interestingly, one of the four suits of the Mameluk deck was designated polo-sticks, making a nice reference to the equestrian sport originating in Central Asia and played across southern Asia from Arabia to Japan well before 1000 CE, but unknown to 14th century Europeans. (Which is why the earliest western card-makers converted them into the batons to be found to this day on traditional Italian cards, and the clubs of Spanish ones.)

Or again, take dominoes. They closely resemble playing-cards, being blank on one side and numbered on the other, and in China the two sets of equipment are made of the same material and played in much the same way. A further extension of cards and dominoes resulted in tile games. The most famous of these, Mah-jong, having taken America by storm in the 1920s, reminds us that the contribution of traditional Asian games to the recreational repertoire of the west has not ceased with the passage of time. The last half of the 20th century saw an increasingly global interest in the Japanese game of Go, another invention of the Chinese and known to them as Wei-qi. Wei-qi is probably the oldest ever board-game still current, dating back to at least the sixth century BCE. A Confucian disciple of the second century BCE speaks even then of the game's antiquity and of the existence of masters and disciples in its practice and philosophy. [1]

So far we have mentioned only games of known oriental priority, but others may be suspected, for of many families of historic games played in both Europe and Asia it is impossible to demonstrate that any originated in Europe and then travelled east. The black-and-white chequered board may be a European invention, and the game of Checkers or Draughts played on such a board has spread to the east and there undergone further development, but the mechanics of the game itself, with its distinctive diagonal moves and leaping captures, derive from the Arabic version (called Alquerque) of a game still played throughout the Orient in a variety of obviously related forms. The western game of Fox & Geese is matched by comparable Indian games involving cattle and tigers, and by Chinese games of generals and mercenaries. Games of the Backgammon type are known from both European and Asian antiquity. Games of alignment, such as Nine Men's Morris and its pencil-and-paper equivalent, Noughts and Crosses (Tic-tac-toe), are common to Europe, Asia, Africa and the Pacific islands. Even Mancala, generally regarded as the national game of Africa (in any of its myriad forms), has numerous counterparts throughout the Middle East and virtually the whole of southern Asia.

So there is plenty of scope for an exhibition of material from the Asian world of games and gaming, and its title "The Arts of Contest" is more than apposite. That games are contests is obvious from the fact that they are defined in terms of winning and losing. That they relate to the arts is equally obvious, on reflection, though closer examination will reveal levels at which relationships are rather more subtle.

The most obvious level is that of the visual arts, manifested not only in artistic representations of games and players but also in the design, ornamentation and craftsmanship exhibited in various kinds of gaming equipment and associated furniture. Equally fecund are representations of gaming in literature, from the dicing contest central to the plot of the Mahabharata, through Dostoevsky's Gambler, to that most perceptive study of gamesmanship constituting Yasumari Kawabata's novel The Master of Go. It may be going too far to claim literary merit for a lucidly drafted set of rules for any particular game (though the writing of such rules is an art in itself), but many admirable volumes have been written on the study, appreciation and history of games. Turning to the world of music, we immediately encounter an opera based on Pushkin's The Queen of Spades [2] and Sir Arthur Bliss's ballet Checkmate [3].

Other aspects of the subject, though equally aesthetic, are less obvious to the extent that they cannot be put on display. There are, for example, what might be called the performing arts of play, from the bodily prowess of the polo player to the mental dexterity of a winning combination at chess. "Poetry in motion" is a phrase often employed by sports commentators. The word "art" also carries with it implications of skill and technique: it is more artistic to win elegantly and efficiently than clumsily and luckily. Bridge-players who take pride in their skill may prefer to win exactly the number of tricks they bid than some higher number, despite an additional score for the excess.

Subtler still are qualities of beauty and artistry inherent in the structures and strategies of games themselves. Wei-qi (Go) takes the basic process of placing alternately black and white stones on the 361 intersections of a squared board and derives wonderful combinations of unfathomable depth from the pure simplicity of the raw material. The structure of Snooker, developed by British army officers in India, is of a subtlety that calls forth from a game of hand-eye co-ordination degrees of strategy comparable to those of Chess. But you have to have played either game, or attempted to do so, to fully appreciate the inherent beauty of the underlying concept. The deepest beauty of a game can only be brought into play - and display - by the process of playing it [4]. A successful game embodies properties of order, harmony, balance and fluidity common to all forms of artistic creation - a fact increasingly reflected in the tendency of professional games inventors to be referred to as "designers", or even, in yet more generous circles, as "authors". And the inventors of Chess problems have always been known as " composers".

Further relationships to the arts appear in the vocabulary of the subject. It is not only games that you play, but also musical instruments. To play a game is to perform it, just as you perform not only a piece of music but also a "play". A game has rules equivalent to the score of a piece of music or the script of a play. A play is performed on a stage set apart for the purpose, as a game is played on a field or a board or table equally set apart for its own purposes. And the performance of games is often perceived as dramatic, in their own terms, by players and onlookers alike.

   All the world's a stage
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts.

So Jaques, in As you like it [5]. But Shakespeare might with equal validity have written:

   All the world's a game
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their victories and their defeats,
And one man in his time makes many moves.

The close affinities of games to the arts are a major reason for devoting attention to their exploration and study. "The proper study of mankind is man", wrote Alexander Pope, and "Mankind", according to Schiller, "is only fully human when playing games, and only in the playing of games does it achieve its full humanity" [6]. Appreciating the role of games in civilization is therefore key to an understanding of civilization itself. "It is not absurd", writes Roger Caillois [7],

to try diagnosing a civilization in terms of the games that are especially popular there. In fact, if games are cultural factors and images, it follows that to a certain degree a civilization and its content may be characterized by its games. They necessarily reflect its culture pattern and provide useful indications as to the preferences, weakness and strength of a given society at a particular stage of its evolution.

And yet it is an observable but anomalous fact that games are, by and large, accorded little serious attention or respect in the western world, where everyday turns of phrase testify to an outmoded view of games not just as trivial in themselves but as models or metaphors for triviality itself. "It's only a game" says the mother separating her children squabbling over whose turn it is to throw dice, or the Bridge-player to her partner irate over the minor misuse of some arcane bidding convention. "This isn't a game" says Henry Fonda in Twelve Angry Men as he spots two jurors doodling at Noughts & Crosses. (But he was wrong on both counts. Few things are more gamelike than either Noughts & Crosses or juridical contests.) Nor is it only the everyday world that pushes games out of serious consciousness. "In scholarship", notes Sutton-Smith "the denigration of play in intellectual terms is shown by the absence of the key term play from the index of almost every book about the behaviour of human beings" [8].

The roots of disdain are not too hard to uncover. If anthropologists and social historians ignore games, or dismiss them out of hand, it is at least partly due to a misperception of games as being essentially childish, perhaps resulting from the obvious fact that children have both a greater compulsion to play and far more free time in which to indulge it. It is aggravated by the fact that games themselves do not contribute to the serious business of wealth creation on a national scale or of earning a living on the personal scale. (Apart from professional players; but there is, as we show later, a sense in which they do not really "play".) As such, games conflict with the Protestant Work Ethic that casts its shadow over so many of the values of western society.

In Indian cosmology, play is a top down idea. Passages to play and their premises are embedded at a high level of abstraction and generality. The qualities of play resonate and resound throughout the whole. But more than this, qualities of play are integral to the very operation of the cosmos. To be in play is to reproduce time and again the very premises that inform the existence of this kind of cosmos... Now in cosmologies where premises of play are not embedded at a high level and are not integral to the organization of the cosmos, as in Western society, the phenomenon of play seem to erupt from the bottom. By bottom up play I mean that play often is phrased in opposition to, or as a negation of, the order of things. This is the perception of play as unserious, illusory and ephemeral, but it is also the perception of play as subversive and resisting the order of things. (Handelman, D, "Passages to Play: Paradox and Process", Play and Culture 5(1), 1992, p. 12 Cited in Sutton-Smith, B, The Ambiguity of Play (1997), p.55

Much the same could be held to the account of the arts in general, as it still is in some faith communities. But games are more extreme in this regard than the other arts and are tainted by wider negative associations. They offer a facile association with gambling, which, being a more pernicious activity in the eyes of many, acts as a brush with which the most intellectual and skill-dependent games may find themselves ineluctably tarred. There are those, furthermore, who are keenly conscious of the fact that games are by definition contests, therefore embodiments of conflict, and as such tainted by the whiff of warfare, an activity whose contribution to the advancement of humanity is widely assessed to be in inverse proportion to its universality. The rightful appreciation of games is inhibited by false assumptions and misassociations. Where, then, should a rightful appreciation begin?