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Abrahams, Roger D.  1982.  “Play and Games.”  Motif: International Review of Research in Folklore & Literature (Columbus, OH), 3 (June): 4-7.
 

“Play and Games” 
Roger D. Abrahams

[beginning of page 4]

One of the ways in which folkloristics and symbolic anthropology have converged to good effect is in the area of “native” aesthetics.  That is, because of the cross-fertilization between these fields, there is a growing interest in recording actual performances and in discovering the terms by which they are understood and judged by the performers and audiences themselves.  This should assist us in breaking down the roughest edges of our inevitable ethnocentrisms, for now we begin to ask tradition bearers and their like what the important features of their art entails.

Recently, I have been approaching the problem of ethnocentricity in another related fashion, by attempting to describe the semantic pulls of the terms we use most commonly in pursuing our discipline.  Here I have been most interested in those terms, like myth and story,game and festival, which are used by folklorists and by the man-in-the-street as terms of art (as opposed to our made-up terms, like oikotype and memorat).

We can redress some of the warping our discipline sometimes inspires on these terms, in fact, by relating our usage to that of the common reader.  How often, for instance, do we see sporting events described as rituals in folklore journals, when what is being discussed is certain elements shared by sports and rituals.  But surely there is such a thing as a “pure” game of contest and a “pure” ritual in the domain of experience.  That is, when we go to a baseball game we know that we are at a game and not a ritual -- though there may be certain actions taken within the game that are not compulsory, if not obligatory as in ritual states.

But let me get to the center of the problem by looking at how we commonly distinguish between ritual and play in the larger sense.  Play and ritual are the two major terms for occasions that potentiate significant events of the prepared-for sort.  Both terms refer to activities which are removed from the flow of “everyday life” (the world of “paramount reality,” to use Alfred Schutz’s term for this psycho-social effect).  This removal is brought about by conventional framing devices and its apartness maintained by employing the moves and ways of expression which are also conventionally associated with that kind of special activity.  Both are concerned with the dimensions of these activities and with the potential of participation and celebration which arises because of these conventions.  Both involve an open display of energies coordinated in such a way that that participation in the event is encouraged.  But play has an “autotelic” dimension, that is, it seems to operate as a congeries of acts and activities that exist for the experience itself.  Freely entered into, playing invigorates as it focuses our energies.  But it is neither obligatory, nor do the personal transformations it calls forth operate efficiently outside of the playground, the playing field, or the playhouse.  This is precisely what is not true of ritual, for even the most serious sacramental occasions bring to a head the possibility of an irreversible transformation of state within one’s regular life-condition -- such as happens when we graduate, or are convicted of a crime, are married or initiated.  To be sure, we want to distinguish between those ritual acts which encourage and potentiate such transformations, and those which reconfirm or commemorate.  But both exist within a universe in which ritual roles are endowed with transforming powers.

The two magisterial studies in the literature of play, Huizinga’s Homo Ludens and Callois’ Man, Play and Games, attempt to discover man’s culture-making capacity through a definition of play that places games at the center of the argument.  Huizinga describes play as: 1) a voluntary activity, 2) not “ordinary” or “real,” that 3) is thus disinterested and life-adorning and enhancing, 4) is “played out” within certain bounds of time and space, 5) has a beginning and an end, and obeys rules, and 6) involves a contest for something while it evokes a representation of something.  He relates play to ritual through their common sense of enactment, a point of view he arrives at through his interpretation of dromenon, the representing of life drama (or at least life-conflict).  By choosing to focus on drama, Huizinga discovers the source of interest in a wide range of play activities -- the agonistic motive -- but in doing so he begins to substitute part for whole, and comes to regard anything in culture which operates by arbitrary rules and draws upon agon as being generated by the play principle.  To be sure, an important meeting place of game, dramatic play, and ritual does lie in the area of conflict as enacted by individuals playing stereotypical roles.  But dramatic performance calls forth many other ways of introducing interest through tension, not least of which is that engendered by the contrived confusion of the real and the artificial through the process of imitation.

Roger Callois, recognizing these limitations, points out that agon is but one of the motives that enters into play.  The major departure from Huizinga arises from Callois’ insistence on the centrality of the principle of the principle of uncertainty of outcome in the playing of games.  He points to four parameters of play: agon (contest), alea (chance), mimesis (representation), and ilinx (dizziness).  He proceeds to classify play activities usefully by the relative intensity of employment of these principles, alone and in combination.  He establishes a continuum of playful behavior, from paideia to ludis, from the frolicsome free expenditure of energy to the highly conventional and rule-bound focus of game. 

From a perspective which underscores the relationship between all modes of play activity -- not only games but festivals, theater and circus and other popular entertainments -- the strengths and the limitations of the Huizinga and Callois arguments are patent.  For what both Huizinga and Callois describe characterizes only certain kinds of game-play and is applicable, as well, to other kinds of -- but not all -- play activities.  It would be difficult, on the basis of just these elaborated distinctions, to distinguish games from other kinds of intense focused gatherings. [beginning of page 5]  Huizinga explicitly relates games to the dramatic dimension of ritual (and, by extension, to narrative and especially theatrical drama).  Callois, on the other hand, noting the limitations of this approach, rather ties games into the dimensions of play more definitive of the carnivalesque and the celebratory and confirmatory events like festivals and celebrations.  Perhaps the concept of play differs in English from other European languages.  But neither Huizinga nor Callois really offers explanations that encompass the wide variety of activities and motives included in our everyday meaning for play.

In the Anglophonic world, we make a distinction between game and play which is not so clearly made in French and other romance languages.  On the other hand, the distinction which Callois pursues between ludus and paideia he derives not from a native French distinction but from the Latin and Greek.  Americans do, in fact, link these motives of unbound and unbiased frolic and the more focused competitive activities under the general rubric of sport, recreation, fun, or amusement.

Let me explore the first of these for the moment to get at some of thee “native notions” I have referred to above.  Though we continue to refer to hunting and fishing as sporting activities in the main, we have developed that term primarily in the direction of organized team activities in which the participants are concerned with a defined outcome, usually winning and losing.  Implicit in the idea of hunting, of course, is the bringing home of the trophy, and this too is to some degree the objective of both individual and team sports, in which both excelling and winning becomes the means of obtaining the prized object.  In this dimension of usage, we have begun to specify a difference between game and sport by how focused and intense and expertly played the activity has become, and by this, how much drawing power to attract spectators it has.  Though sports are also called games, the former term is more exclusive, a kind of game which invites observation and thus involves the distinction between player and spectator or fan.  Beyond this, we point to athletic events as a means of emphasizing these crowds that may be attracted, and the sharing of energies when such a coming-together occurs.  An event must be a situation in which great energies and attentions are called forth.

When we choose to report everyday life in terms of a significant kind of event, alternatively we drift toward describing the activity in theatrical or game terms.  This happens not just because they both convey the possibility of completing action with a clear sense of meaning, point, or resolution in the final move.  The more self-conscious our behavior, the more Westerners in general and Americans particularly like to impose a completed frame of reference around the action, thus turning confrontations into resolvable -- indeed resolved -- conflicts.  Whether we project the completed action as a dramatic resolution to a theater piece or a movie, or as winning and losing a game, we like to feel that we are getting it over and done with.  Thus in one way life models itself on art or game; for in our tense moments in everyday life, by bringing about closure in our interactional exchanges, we magically seem to feel that the problem highlighted in the personal exchange will have been taken care of.  Envisaging life in these terms contributes to the “pedestal effect,” of course, perpetuating the fiction that life itself may enjoy an integrity and wholeness of experience -- that in intense situations we can finish off whatever is started  by having it out with boxers or with kid gloves, or by ventilating, yelling, gesticulating broadly, or whatever.

Performance and game terms often seem to be used interchangeably in our discussions of interactions.  In describing one of these tense scenes, we often discuss the roles people are playing, the lines they speak, even the scripts they play out; similarly, we may describe the same scene in terms of the game being played, the strategy of the moves made, and what game-plan is being followed.  But there are very major differences between them, specifically with regard to our ways of interpreting movement, especially interactions, by the frames placed around the activities and the way in which patterned expectations are processed.  In games, we exist within a bounded space and with a heavy burden of endowing both objects and conventional movements with power.  The world of the game is extremely restricted, though there are motives that may be acted on in such a “world” that are commonly restricted and redirected in the everyday.  There are a limited number of designated types of players, as well as styles of play; moreover, the entire activity is governed by the rules of play and the boundaries of the playing field (or board).  Perhaps most important, in game-play, there is seldom any question of the motives of the players; rather, they are judged by their mastery of the repertoire of moves and how well they demonstrate they have prepared themselves, through drill, practice, conditioning, getting psyched-up, etc.  In fact, motive and meaning are virtually absent in the game world except as such criteria of interpretation are organized by the competition going on.  We do talk about high or low motivation of players but that is far from the same as their motives in the playing. 

[beginning of page 6]  On the other hand, play in performances is primarily concerned with imitation and stylized extension of everyday interactional motives (only one of which is conflict).  The range of possible roles to play, though finite and subject to convention, is much greater than in games.  The major limiting factor in performance has to do with the range of outcomes.  Whereas game is defined in terms of having an indefinite outcome, performance calls forth an expected resolution (or an irresolute ending).  We can rehearse a performance for this reason, making it more interesting and artful by devising means of intensifying even by misleading; but the audience then knows that the performers know how it is going to come out in the end, and they begin to look forward to cues, hints, forewarnings.  This looking forward, in fact, is often a looking backward as well, a reexperiencing of past performances in this medium and this genre, for such a past provides all the clues one usually needs to know how the piece will end.  To take a similar expectation into a game or contest is to guarantee that the event will fail to be interesting.  If one feels, for instance, that a wrestling match has been thrown, or even choreographed, then either the thrill of the event is undercut or the spectator must begin to look at the event as a show, a display of acting ability brought to bear on making the performance seem spontaneous and the outcome unrehearsed.

Such a display is obviously more like a performance than a game or a sporting event.  For performance involves a stylized celebration of the motives of the most common everyday actions -- in this case, fighting by wrestling.  The vocabulary of performance -- dance, song, reported speech, and other behavior -- these are simple and stylized extensions of the processes of the unmarked actions of walking, running, working, talking as they are organized in the larger forms of engagement.

Performance, then, embroiders action and recurrent scenes by stylizing them through self-conscious display techniques.  The frame statement of performance is, “This is just pretending” -- thus bringing into relief the relationship between the original and its imitation.  The cue that the performance is going on, moreover, relieves the player of responsibility for the results of his actions, as Diderot noted long ago.  The very existence of rules of play, and of umpires or referees when games become sports, emphasizes that responsibility is not totally abrogated on the field of play.

Moreover, continuity between the “worlds” of play and real-life are maintained at the same time as a profound disjuncture between them is practiced.  This point of departure is often as simply done as using the word “just” -- as in “just fooling.”  Such a use of just insists that we are making a connection between the two worlds of interpretation at the same time we are articulating a continuity between them.  This is what is comical about looking closely at the formulaic just statement of fiction, the stock disclaimer we find at the beginning of novels: “Any resemblance to persons ... living or dead is purely coincidental.”  This is not only often a momentous lie, it is an open invitation to search through the story which follows to see who it is that the novelist had in mind when he wrote the story.  It is, then, another of the little self-cancelling moves which simultaneously remind us of the materials of real life out of which play is fashioned and the artificiality of the behavior within the play-frame; the self-cancellation forces us to interpret the activity through a higher level of abstraction, one emerging from the classification of the enacted behavior as beyond the real.

“Play” in the context of performance, then, focusses on virtuosity -- the way in which play language is extended and transformed into display language.  To be sure, other motives enter into the process by which we interpret and judge performance, motives which intensify the participation potential of both players and audience members in the play, motives like dramatic involvement, like dressing up and wearing masks, like beginning the show with applause, a prayer, or the singing of the national anthem.  But these are intensifying, not defining features of performance in which we are concerned with the projection of imitative means and the nuances by which the flow of play is enhanced.

But inherent in the notion of performance is that there are certain everyday activities which, by their very social construction, are performables.  That is, they have sufficient intensity of dramatic interest that we recognize the activities as being reportable, susceptible to direct translation into one or another performance genre.  Central to this notion is that some kind of drama is being played out, the contending of psychic, social, or cultural forces as they are depicted, usually impersonated, in the dramatic representation.  In fact, some forms of performance are often categorized by the kind of face-of or tension that is being depicted.  We make basic literary distinctions between, for instance, tragedy and comedy based on the different modes of agon presented.  Tragedy, it is said, depicts man’s contention with his fate, often in the form of conflict between hero and villain in which the hero must die but carry the villain with him -- thus cleansing the depicted world and providing the audience with a vicarious sense of catharsis.  In comedy, on the other hand, the hero is more commonly a young man in search of a mate, the villain a blocking character, usually an old man or a rival.  But these are imitated conflicts, and ones which are employed as a means of intensifying and focussing the mimetic activity being pursued.  In games, the face-off is the raison d’etre of the activity.  Games involve the principle of direct combat between individuals in actual contention, but within the framework of game-playing, with a strong sense of rules and boundaries.  The for-real character of the combat is insisted upon in that the outcome is not predictable or foreordained, and the ones who are playing must care about the control of play and the winning and losing.  Moreover, they have made themselves worthy of being observed and judged as players by intensifying through practice their everyday abilities.  Thus, a player is both himself and not himself on the field; he remains individually responsible for his actions even when he can get away with some otherwise forbidden moves since he is just playing.  The sense of continuity between roles assumed in everyday life, and those on the stage, and those of the player are not so great as in pure performances.  Nonetheless, the dislocation or shift between the real and the play in games is a profound one, equally worthy of being looked at closely with regard to how it is brought off.

Games are activities in which all the dynamic elements of play are brought to bear primarily in the service of the agonistic motive.  Following Caillois on the dimensions of play, we could say that all four kinds of playing can be found in some measure in games: chance, vertigo, stylized and self-conscious imitation, and conflict.  But in game-playing, the first three are put in the service of adding to the intensity of the last, the agonistic element by which we concern ourselves with observing (or engaging in) winning or losing.  Following the developmental psychologists and ethnologists, we can point to the repetitiveness and the expansive character of play, the strange sense of beginning, ending, the encompassment of the activity, the frequent shifts in role, and the constant possibility of rearrangement of significant moves, of stopping and starting and mixing of sequences -- all of these too are characteristic of game-play, but they also serve predominantly as a means of intensifying the sense of conflict in the contest.

To be sure, there is something like a connoisseurship which develops in game-playing, and becoming a sports fan may mean an approach that looks for a beauty and a subtlety in play, as well as how such dominion contributes to the outcome.  But such stylistic concerns we recognize even as we use them to describe game-play are criteria and judgment appropriated from performance.  The success of game is determined by the flow of the play, by the building up of momentum on the part of a player or a team, a concentration of skills and energy that lead to a [beginning of page 7] making of winning moves.  Rightly we may discuss the beautiful game that an individual has developed through practice and through a development of style.  But when we do so, we know we are doing it in analogy to a performance.  Ultimately, a game-player is not judged by virtuosity except as it leads to victory.  His or her behavior is not really being held up to aesthetic judgment so much as being held up for judgment within a framed event that makes the terms of all other forms of play available for descriptive purposes.  It is, in other words, just as appropriate to comment on the festive or carnivalesque features of a game or even its ritualized character as it is to describe the event in performance terms.

Ultimately, we make the distinction between different play events by 1) how they are framed and named, what their announced rules, ends, and means are, including 2) their vocabulary, syntax, and conventions of moves; 3) the relative fixity of how they are composed, put together, played out; 4) the ways in which they are prepared for, both by participants and onlookers; and 5) the criteria used to judge their relative success, especially in terms of how effectively the activities of the players are carried out, and how successfully the participative energies of the onlookers (audience, spectators) are drawn upon.

Of these, perhaps the most interesting with regard to the difference between game- and performance-play has to do with the way in which preparations are carried out and themselves named.  With games, preparation of players is referred to as practice and drill and is concerned not so much with the rules, but the playing positions (or in board games, pieces), the available move and countermoves to each position or piece, moves which when complex are called plays.  Coaching in such activity means directing practice and working out, and then working on plays.  Simulating actual game conditions is referred to by a wide number of game-specific terms, all of which might be encompassed under practice game (short for practicing “under game conditions”).  The greater the need to coordinate play, of course, the more distinctions will be made between types of practice sessions.

With performances, preparations are divided between practicing, learning to control the materials and instruments of whatever type of display is involved; and rehearsal, in which the actual pieces to be performed are run through.  Actually, of course, there are many kinds of rehearsal designated by theater people: read-through, blocking session, and so on.  The equivalent to simulating game condition in performance, in which a full run-through is called for, is a dress rehearsal.  Again, the conditions of actual playing will be approximated as fully as possible, to the point of inviting an audience. 

The more intense the play, the greater the need to establish and maintain the boundaries of the playing area, by having defined spaces for players and onlookers, by vicariously establishing the flow of play across those boundaries, and by having non-players in the playing area who maintain both the integrity of the boundaries and the flow of the playing.  With game-play in organized sports and athletic events, this is carried out by umpires, referees, time-keepers, and other officials.  With performance, this is done by masters of ceremonies, stage managers, or conductors, depending on what kind of performance is involved.

The existence of these in-betweeners, these non-players on the field on the field or stage, underscores the deep importance of maintaining the play world within its bounds.  To be sure, as Bateson has argued so convincingly, play doesn’t work efficiently if the boundaries are not constantly challenged.  The constant reminders that play is in process must, he demonstrates, be paralleled by the question, “Is it really play?”  Ultimately, in terms of our native system of enactments or display events which I am outlining here, a major reason why this paradox of play must be reiterated is that precisely this condition is not true of ritual.  Though there may be a great deal of ludicrous behavior carried on in the midst of a rite, there is never a question as to whether the activity is real or not; for the effects of the action are intended to be carried away from the experience, to have potential effect far beyond the special times, places, and occasions in which the enactment occurs.  As always, then, in this semiotic system of significant action, we are able to discover best what is going on and what is meant by seeing the activity in contrast to other related ones.  To the question implied in every investigation of play -- “Is this activity real or true? -- we may truthfully respond, “In contrast to what?”  For play exists in contrast both to the everyday and real worlds; but it also distinguishes itself from the serious and especially the potentially transforming ritual.  Viewing play in this way enables us to ask the other important contrastive questions once we encounter play going on.  For then we can ask “What kind of play?” and begin to recognize that different cultures have a number of distinct ways of playing which are recognizably separate because they arise in specific times, places, and occasions, set up their own distinctive boundaries, rhythms, and rules or regularities, and are then judged and interpreted in distinctive ways.

Once having said this, however, it is clear that the different kinds of playing cluster together in at least two ways.  Once we get an excuse to play in one way, we tend to play in others, especially if play is associated with holidays, vacations, even weekends.  Second -- and perhaps most important -- the vocabulary we use to describe one kind of play (or ritual) becomes available to talk about the others.  Thus, we often find ourselves describing game-play as if it were a performance, a festive celebration, even a rite.  But it remains a game nonetheless.
 
 

Note

In an earlier form, this excursion was prepared for the colloquium, “Le Language de Jeu,” Montecani Terme, Italy, October 25-27, 1979.  In passing, I refer to the work of Gregory Bateson, which is most conveniently encountered in his Steps to an Ecology of Mind (San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Co., 1972).  The concept of frames in relation to the native category “question” is pursued with subtlety and humor in Charles O. Frake’s “Playing Frames Can Be Dangerous...” in The Quarterly Newsletter of the Institute for Comparative Human Development, June 1977, vol. 1, no. 3, 1-7.  Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1950) is available in a Beacon paperback, and Callois’ Man, Play, and Games (Meyer Barasch, trans., 1961) in a Schocken paperback.  Much of what I have learned about play in games emerges from reading Brian Sutton-Smith’s ouvre and from discussion with him.  I have lined out the philosophic rationale of this approach in “Play,” in Proceedings of the Centennial of the Folklore Society, Venetia Newell, ed., pp. 119-122; “Toward an Enactment-Centered Theory of Folklore, in The Frontiers of Folklore, William Bascom, ed. (published by AAAS, 1977); and “Ordinary and Extraordinary Experience,” Edward Bruner and Victor Turner, eds. (University of Illinois Press, in press).  Don Handleman’s argument in his “Play and Ritual: Complementary Frames of Meta-Communication,” in It’s a Funny Thing, Humour, A. S. Chapman and H. Foot, eds. (London: Pergamon, 1977), pp. 185-192, covers similar ground, but with a different focus.