THE ARTS OF CONTEST

2. What is a game?

One might begin by asking "What is a game?" But this is a trick question, as the philosopher Wittgenstein was quick to spot and sidestep [9]. Obviously, as he points out, a game is any activity to which the word "game" is applied; but a glance at any substantial dictionary will uncover a long list of intuitively but not analytically related usages. They include triviality ("This isn't a game", "Blow this for a game of soldiers"), scheme or intrigue ("So that's your little game!"), pursuit ("The game's afoot, Watson!"), object of pursuit ("Big game hunter"), prostitution ("On the game"), performance of a game ("My game's a bit off today"), target score ("Game is 121 points"). Eric Berne's book Games People Play is a psychological study of "social transactions" [10]. James Carse's Games Finite and Infinite is an exercise in theology [11] "Game theory" started life as a mathematical model of economic behaviour, and has been extended to a variety of practical and academic studies, but offers little of interest to the players of real games like Faro or football [12]. About the only thing these uses have in common is some underlying concept of purposeful activity, except in ironic mode, when with equal facility they come to connote purposeless activity.

It may be more helpful to note that a game is something you play. It is an interesting fact that English uses two unrelated words for the noun and the verb, where most languages use words of identical root: in French on joue à un jeu, in German man spielt ein Spiel, and so on. This becomes particularly illuminating when we note that the noun game can also be used as a verb, when it means specifically to play for money or to take a chance, while play can also be used as a noun, when it has the narrow meaning of a theatrical script or production and a much broader meaning that involves everything to do with games and much more besides.

Essentially, a game is either a particular session of play (French partie, as in "We had a game of tennis yesterday") or a particular species of play (French jeu, as in "Tennis is an international game"). As "play" itself covers more than just "games", a way of clarifying what "games" are might be to explore the meanings of "play" and deduct those to which the term "game" is not normally applied. Even this proves to be a trick question. Mihail Spariosu, noting that there are hundreds of definitions of play of which none seems satisfactory, quotes with approval Susanna Millar's suggestion that "Perhaps play is best used as an adverb; not as a name of a class of activities, nor as distinguished by the accompanying mood, but to describe how and under what conditions an action is performed" [13].

The underlying connotation of play is repeated movement or activity, a sense reinforced by the image of sunlight playing over the waves, or fingers over a keyboard [14]. In addition, and more essentially, it implies voluntary activity or freedom of movement, as for example in the play of a wheel or piston in a machine - that is, the area in which that component has a limited freedom to operate [15]. The freedom and voluntary nature of play means that, by definition, it does not serve a conscious utilitarian function in the individual playing, unlike other human activities such as eating, reproducing, keeping warm, finding shelter, and so on. You engage in play, not because you have to but because you want to. Play is a self-validating, self-actualizing activity [16].

Just as "all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music" [17]. so might it be said that all human activities aspire to the condition of play. Johan Huizinga, in Homo Ludens (Man the Player), goes further, arguing that all major manifestations of civilized culture have their roots in the urge to play [18]. Play is a universal human activity, and therefore presumably has some sort of survival value to the human species; nevertheless, adds Huizinga, the need for play is only urgent to the extent that the enjoyment of it makes it a need. The same thought is more pithily expressed by theologian James Carse:

Whoever must play, cannot [really] play [19].

Play therefore belongs to the superior field of activities which define us as spiritual beings, together with religion and the arts. Huizinga goes so far as to characterize art as a form of play in itself - music is playing with sounds, painting is playing with paint, poetry is playing with words, and so on. (Which is not to say, nor does he assert, that they are nothing but play.) He traces the civilizing function of play on, for example, warfare, as expressed in the ethical rules and ceremonials of the tournament and the duel. Turning to law, he notes that jeopardy derives from jeu parti, meaning (literally) an evenly balanced game, and -

That an affinity may exist between law and play becomes obvious to us as soon as we realize how much the actual practice of the law, in other words a lawsuit, properly resembles a contest whatever the ideal foundations of the law may be [20].

Courts of another kind figure in the civilizing influence of play on human relationships. "Andrew the Chaplain", a 12th-century troubadour, outlines in The Art of Courtly Love the rules of the game of love and reports cases and decisions in the courts of love attributed to Marie de France (Countess of Champagne) and Eleanor of Aquitaine [21]. An English-language "love-child" is in German ein Spielkind, a "play-child" and few agony aunt columns of the present day will not, at some time or another, find some excuse to get round to the business of "foreplay".

Huizinga characterizes all play as either a contest for something or a representation of something, thus subsuming under one head both the playing of games and the performance of plays, in the loosest sense of the words. Others have since argued that Huizinga does not go far enough. A wider-ranging analysis by Roger Caillois recognizes four classes of play, covering not only contests of skill (agon) and struggles with chance (alea), but also drama, representation and ceremonial (mimicry or ilinx) and transcendent, ecstatic or out-of-body experiences such as Ferris wheels, switchbacks and the whirling of dervishes (ilinx or vertigo) [22]. Where Huizinga maintains that "In acknowledging play you acknowledge mind, for whatever else play is, it is not matter" [23] Eigen and Winkler assert:

The history of play goes back to the beginnings of time. [...] The energy released in the "big bang" set everything in motion, set matter whirling in a maelstrom of activity that would never cease. The forces of order sought to bring this process under control, to tame chance. The result was not the rigid order of a crystal but the order of life. [...] Chance and rules are the elements that underlie games and play. Play began among the elementary particles, atoms, and molecules, and now our brain cells carry it on. Human beings did not invent play... [24].

As play implies freedom of movement, so freedom implies unpredictability of destination. An electron performs a quantum leap when it jumps suddenly (playfully?) from one atomic orbit to another without passing through the putative space between. You can determine the speed of a particle or its position, but not both at once - hence Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, and Einstein's horrified refusal to believe that God "plays dice" with the universe [25]. And the brains of both are the result of evolutionary development caused by random genetic mutations with unpredictable results. The mind boggles! Does nothing ever happen in the universe that cannot be characterized as some form of play?

It might be objected that not all play is purely voluntary or non-utilitarian. For example, a professional footballer plays to earn a living - hence, because he must play, he does not really play. Carse's dictum stands up. He is not so much playing for his own enjoyment as performing for the enjoyment of the onlookers who ultimately pay him. In other words, professional football, or any other professional game, is essentially a branch of the entertainment industry. It is a failing of urban, industrial civilization that too many people pay to have other people play games for them instead of doing it themselves, just as they buy ready-prepared meals rather than raw ingredients with which to do their own cooking. We live increasingly in a vicarious society.

It might be objected that play is not mere fun but serves a practical purpose in honing your physical or mental skills in order that they may serve you better in real life. This is true; but it is still play if, as is often the case, your primary motivation for doing so is actually for the sheer enjoyment or fun of it. If not, then you are not really playing but consciously exercising. It is true that play may have utilitarian by-products. The modern science of cryptography, which is nowadays of such personal, national and international importance, has profited from the discoveries of recreational mathematicians who just loved playing about with prime numbers, being intrigued by their oddity and playful unpredictability. (Do mathematicians play with numbers, or numbers with mathematicians?)

Research and experimentation may be initiated for utilitarian and business purposes, as it controversially is in the realm of pharmaceuticals, but the history of science is littered with discoveries - from penicillin down - that have been made quite by accident in the course of just playing about with intriguing phenomena. Perhaps we should add to Huizinga's description of play as either a contest for something or a representation of something the idea of its being an experiment with something. Scientific experimentation is virtually indistinguishable from play if conducted purely speculatively, with the desire to increase one's knowledge, to "see what happens if you do this instead of that" - in brief, for the fun of it - rather than when it is restricted to the goal-directed quest for a specific end product.

Scientific research as play is embodied in Robert Abbott's celebrated card game Eleusis [26]. One player secretly proposes a rule by which one card is to follow another, and the others endeavour to discover what it is by each in turn attempting to add a card to a sequence and being told by the rule-maker whether it can or cannot be legally played. A simple, sample rule is "If the previous card is numerically even, play a red suit; if odd, play a black". The rule has been likened to a law of nature and the players to scientists whose success at divining it depends upon the creative skills of observation, experimentation and induction. (The rule-maker, it has to be said, is more often likened to God than to a Big Bang.)

If a game is either a period or a species of play, we can immediately deduct from various uses of the word " game" listed above those which do not imply free will or freedom from functionality. The "game" that Holmes asserts to be "afoot" is the practical one of detecting a criminal. The "games people play", as described by Berne, are socio-psychological ploys designed to achieve a real-life advantage. The "infinite game" explored by Carse is that of life itself. But all these, and many others, are metaphorical uses of the word. Real games are played for fun: their goals and purposes are self-validating - that is, intrinsic to the fact of play itself rather than to those of everyday subsistence. Goal-directed activities may be called games in a metaphorical sense, but perhaps only to play down the element of danger, or to play up the unpredictability of outcome. What makes a game "real" rather than metaphorical is when the players agree that they are in fact playing a game and not using a gamelike procedure in pursuit of practical, functional ends. Real play comes to an end when its players report back to the real world.

Real games may be structured or unstructured. Unstructured play is something that players drift into and out of ad lib, making a game as such ephemeral and unrepeatable. Typical of unstructured play are children's schoolyard games, like cops and robbers, which are more in the nature of cooperative play-acting than contest. Contest may be present, as implied by the very premise of cops and robbers, but this is (paradoxically) only played or pretend contest, not the real contest of competitive play. Caillois, following Huizinga, categorizes unstructured or informal games as paidia, from the Greek for "children's game", as opposed to ludus, from the Latin for game in the sense of contest [27]. (It also means school, originally a training school for gladiators. Even in English we speak of a "school" of card-players.) Informal or unstructured games occupy an area of overlap between "plays" in the theatrical sense, which involve role-play without competition but are highly structured, and formal games, which resemble dramatic plays in being structured, but differ from them (and from informal games) by being competitive. The overlaps may be tabulated as follows:

The unpredictable outcome of games contrasts with the endings of plays, which are predictable to the extent that they are scripted. Playwrights and directors may encourage a degree of ad libbing in theatrical productions, but once a play has entered the repertoire no one can be in any doubt as to who "wins" - by surviving, marrying, escaping, whatever - in the end. Theatrical plays and informal games also share the essence of representationalism. The informal play of children is largely based on role-playing, while theatrical plays, in the sense of being "about" the events and experiences of real life, cannot fail to be representational so long as they use words intelligibly strung together. Formal games, I will argue below, are at least half abstract even where they purport to be fully representational.

Other features of play in general also apply to games in particular, so let us now turn to other defining features of a game.