From The Ethics of Play to Gaming Across Cultures (Presented at Hangzhou Normal University — forthcoming in Chinese.)
Harold P. Sjursen
Although I am going to theorize about games, this is not a discussion about what is meant by game theory, a branch of mathematical theory that analyzes economic and strategic choices, although something like this notion of game theory resides behind the approach I am taking.
Nor is it the reflections of a “gamer” for that I surely am not. Playing games of any sort has never attracted me and has neither been an interest nor activity of mine.
So what am I doing giving a presentation on this topic? I wonder about this myself, but I think it is because a “gaming” approach, to a degree at least, characterizes most mundane activity in our day.
What I aspire to in these remarks is a kind of discourse on how games have defined much of life for all of us including non-gamers like myself. Being a non-gamer is not the same as not playing games; indeed a thesis undergirding these remarks is that societies tend to structure experience in a game like fashion. Our notion of free will, for example, to a large extent is conceived in the terms of choice and action. That is to say, we find ourselves presented with a set of options — sometimes only a few but other times with a vast number — that we choose among. Do I take the left or right fork in the road; which door do I go through? According to many, not to choose is tantamount the abnegation of our freedom, even leading to reduction of our status as a fully realized human. A choice or decision of this sort, of course, implies action or is not complete without the attendant action. And these choices and actions define who we become, indeed our being-in-the-world. Understanding games in this way clarifies an existentialist account of life.
In a presentation to an earlier session of these HZNU online forums I discussed play as differentiated from and in contrast to games. I was interested in spontaneous or natural play and how it shaped the development of a child’s character and moral development. I argued that digital technology (especially AI driven augmented reality) was blurring the distinction between natural play and rule-defined games, challenging and potentially adversely affecting a child’s moral development. In these remarks I do not back away from this thesis but rather embrace it more fully, arguing that it was already an issue long before the advent of digital technology and computer games. But my thoughts about the potentially adverse consequences of games are also modified to include qualities that may potentially be liberating.
Games are serious business as we all know. I don’t mean this just in the sense that they are commercially important, but as the impetus to a wide range of human activity. The (English) word athletics derives from the Greek word meaning “compete for a prize.” Thus it is the social pursuit of rewards. The Olympic Games are associated with Zeus, the ruler of humankind and the dispenser of good and evil. The ultimate prize of athletic competition was the good life, however that is understood.
The original Olympic Games included not only athletic sports as understood in our own time, but a wide variety of arts attesting to one or another life enhancing skills. This tradition perhaps explains, at least in the West, the veneration, almost elevation to status of gods, of competitive athletes and the intense interest in competitive tournaments. But does this attachment establish the formative quality of games on the development of more general marks of fulfillment and criteria for the same? In other words, does living in a sports saturated society provide a sufficient explanation for the deep influence games have on the formation of values?
Let’s start with what may be parallel distinctions: problem solving and thinking compared with games and spontaneous play. In my previous presentation I characterized spontaneous play as unstructured, that is, not governed by protocols and rules, and its purview generally unlimited. Play is creative in the sense of being inventive; it’s social when it captures the imagination of another but may be solitary and not understood by others and partly for this reason is often dismissed as unproductive. The imaginative, unstructured free play of children is sometimes stifled by well meaning educators and other adults on these grounds, out of concern that such idleness does not prepare one for success in the world. Game playing, on the other hand, encourages conformity to rules and the necessity to compete and cooperate, the latter often affording the best means to compete effectively. Likewise games provide clear criteria of success whereas the term is not applicable to free play. To be a player means to be a participant with success yielding a bounty of benefits.
Problem solving resembles gaming with structure, protocols, rules and strategies all aiming at a solution to a problem.. It is quintessentially worldly with clear criteria for success. Thinking is something entirely different, a kind of openness not directed toward any particular resolution. In her last work Hannah Arendt described thinking in this way:
Thinking aims at and ends in contemplation, and contemplation is not an activity but a passivity; it is the point where mental activity comes to rest. According to traditions of Christian time, when philosophy had become the handmaiden of theology, thinking became meditation, and meditation again ended in contemplation, a kind of blessed state of the soul where the mind was no longer stretching out to know the truth but, in anticipation of a future state, received it temporarily in intuition... With the rise of the modern age, thinking became chiefly the handmaiden of science, of organized knowledge; and even though thinking then grew extremely active, following modernity’s crucial conviction that I can know only what I myself make, it was Mathematics, the non- empirical science par excellence, wherein the mind appears to play only with itself, that turned out to be the Science of sciences, delivering the key to those laws of nature and the universe that are concealed by appearances.
So my tentative hypothesis is that what I previously referred to as natural play is when compared to games like thinking whereas games themselves are examples of problem solving exercises. (This already assigns a higher status to games than some might, but we must note that if games or problem solving were to take the place of thinking, then surely something important would be lost.)
By way of exploring my hypothesis I have been considering some of the recent work of of the American philosopher C. Thi Nguyen. He makes the interesting claim that games are a way of specifying particular modes of agency. He puts it this way:
To some, games are a trivial endeavor; they are merely a way to relieve boredom and idle away the time. Even worse, games might seem like egotistical indulgences in the pleasures of competition, victory, and status. After all, what could possibly be the point of taking on these arbitrary rules and goals? What could be the point of all that aimless struggle? The answer, I will suggest, is that the rules and goals of games are not arbitrary at all. They are actually a way of specifying particular modes of agency for the player to adopt. This is what makes games a distinctive art form. Designers of such games do not simply create the gaming environments and obstacles. They designate goals and abilities for the player; they shape the agentive skeleton which the player will inhabit during the game. Game designers work in the medium of agency. And players, when they play games, are fluidly taking on alternate agencies in a controlled and limited fashion.
What he means is that through game playing what he calls a distinctive human capacity may be manifest, depending on the game. What this capacity might be is suggested by a game he describes as a “live-action role playing game about inventing language” called Sign. His argument is that this game is not merely an example of one of several subcategories of aesthetics including visual art, fiction, cinema and communication, but because (partly, at least), it is a primary activity of basic language acquisition, it comes closer to what Arendt calls thinking. Thus Nguyen’s argument challenges my hypothesis that the necessary conformity to the protocols of formal games resembles problem solving but not thinking. In the end, I will not disagree with him completely, although I am not fully convinced either.
If what he calls a distinctive human capacity is like thinking it is also, unlike Arendt’s conception of thinking, practical. It would achieve practical ends through an activity that does not reduce to mere calculative problem solving. Can this form of playing games bridge thinking and problem solving modalities of human mental activity? Let’s look at the game Nguyen cites. In the booklet accompanying the game the prospective player is told:
Sign is a game about being understood. To
be understood, we need to communicate,
and that isn’t always easy. This is a game
about power from unlikely places and a
language born in play.
Nicaragua in the 1970s had no form of
sign language. If you were deaf, you had
to start from scratch. You likely had simple
gestures that you shared with a trusted few,
not much more than a form of pantomime
to cover your basic needs. Even among close
friends, you had little for deep expression.
In a very real sense, you were alone.
In 1977, something changed. Deaf
children from across the country were
brought together at an experimental school
in Managua. They were expected to learn
lip reading, but by and large they did not.
Instead, something far more remarkable
happened.
For the first time, these children were
among their true peers: kids who could
understand them and be their friends.
Without a language to communicate, the
children did the only thing they could—they
created one together. In no exaggeration,
these kids built the foundation of modern
Nicaraguan Sign Language, giving voice
to the deaf across an entire country.
In Sign, we follow a small piece of their journey.
The first thing that is striking about this story is the children’s invention of sign language was born out of an incipient feeling of community: the children’s human to human sense of recognition in the other an affinity with oneself. This attitude of empathic recognition suggests the theme of Paul Ricoeur’s Gifford Lectures where he introduced his notion of oneself in another, the basis of his philosophical ethics. From this one might speculate that a certain quality of game playing can evoke a level of conscious empathy that in turn might promote ethical consciousness.
The game of Signs, inspired by this story, is very carefully structured — Nguyen mentions the severe restrictions of the game — each participant is assigned a character with a history and a private or inner truth that they must communicate to someone. The rules of communication are strict (the game is played in silence), but this strictness requires the player to commit to the game fully, to try seriously to win. Nguyen states: “the artificial rules, the arbitrary goal, and the player’s dedication to winning ... [are] what makes games both a unique art form and a valuable tool for human-self development.”
I would like to contrast this point of view with that of A.S. Neil, whose experimental Summerhill School operated from exactly the opposite premise, viz., that it was precisely imposed structure and restrictions on personal freedom that stifled the natural ethical consciousness and empathy of children. As I put it in my presentation to this group on the ethics of play:
The guiding principle of this school is that the students are free to do as they please according to his motto freedom not license. In Neill’s conception of childhood development, children desire to know but are averse to enforced learning. If given freedom in a properly nurturing environment children will develop not only intellectually (which still requires access to educational resources), but also ethically with positive civic and social awareness. The problem of ἀκρασία is not an issue for Neill. The boundary between unstructured, natural and spontaneous play on the one hand and virtuous growth and development on the other is, on this account, specious.
Nguyen reconciles this tension through a consideration of the aesthetics of experience. What he calls a paradigmatic form of aesthetic experience is relational. In his example
The aesthetics of [rock] climbing is not only an aesthetics of the climber’s own motion, but an aesthetics of how that motion relates to the rock. It is not only that my movement is elegant; it is that my movement is elegant as a solution to a particular puzzle.
Games, Nguyen argues, can afford this kind of experience, but not all games. He has (like all of us) expressed concern and worry about some trends in digital and internet gaming culture. The relationship between the cultural environment and games is complex. Under culturally determined conditions the gaming experience might be more like the scenario of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies rather than Nicaraguan children discovering a mutually supportive and empathic community.
Questions concerning what kind of game encourages the distinctly human agency Nguyen recognizes and how the aesthetics of game playing form a bridge from thinking to problem solving in my mind remain open. Are we to consider language games and role-playing games as fitting the typology of moral or character development? Is a suspension of disbelief part of the aesthetics of game playing that can produce such an outcome?
Around such questions philosophers need to regroup. Heidegger and Arendt have perhaps warned us of dangers inherent in making gaming paradigmatic; Wittgenstein and John Austin have given us insight into how ordinary language works to connect problem solving with contemplative thinking.
About the aesthetics of playing games and the value of severe restrictions I will end by recalling the comment of Robert Frost when asked about free verse:
“For my part I should be as satisfied to play tennis with the net down as to write verse with no verse form set to stay me. ... Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.”
Bibliography:
Arendt, Hannah. “The Life of the Mind,” 1978.
Neill, Alexander Sutherland. Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing. New York: New York: Pocket Books, 1977.
Nguyen, C Thi. “Games and the Art of Agency,” 423–62. London: Duke University Press Durham, NC, 2019.
Ricœur, Paul. Soi-Même comme un Autre. Paris: Paris: Seuil, 1990.