nations, spaces, and ruling serious games

8/9/2019 Nations, Spaces, and Ruling Serious Games

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Nations,

Places,

and

Ruling Serious Games

Bruce Caron

Winter 1992


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Frontispiece


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EudoxiaIn Eudoxia, which spreads both upward and

down, with winding alleys, steps, dead ends, hovels, acarpet is preserved in which you can observe the

citys true form. At first sight nothing seems toresemble Eudoxia less than the design of that carpet,laid out in symmetrical motives whose patterns arerepeated along straight and circular lines, interwovenwith brilliantly colored spires, in a repetition that canbe followed throughout the whole woof. But if youpause and examine it carefully, you becomeconvinced that each place in the carpet correspondsto a place in the city and all the things contained inthe city are included in the design, arranged

according to their true relationship, which escapesyour eye distracted by the bustle, the throngs, theshoving. All of Eudoxias confusion, the mulesbraying, the lampblack stains, the fish smell is what isevident in the incomplete perspective you grasp; butthe carpet proves that there is a point from which thecity shows its true proportions, the geometricalscheme implicit in its every, tiniest detail.

It is easy to get lost in Eudoxia: but when you

concentrate and stare at the carpet, you recognizethe street you were seeking in a crimson or indigo ormagenta thread which, in a wide loop, brings you tothe purple enclosure that is your real destination.Every inhabitant of Eudoxia compares the carpetsimmobile order with his own image of the city, ananguish of his own, and each can find, concealedamong the arabesques, an answer, the story of hislife, the twists of fate.

An oracle was questioned about the mysteriousbond between two objects so dissimilar as the carpetand the city. One of the two objectsthe oraclerepliedhas the form the gods gave the starry skyand the orbits in which the worlds revolve; the otheris an approximate reflection, like every humancreation.


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For some time the augurs had been sure thatthe carpets harmonious pattern was of divine origin.The oracle was interpreted in this sense, arousing nocontroversy. But you could, similarly, come to the

opposite conclusion: that the true map of theuniverse is the city of Eudoxia, just as it is, a stainthat spreads out shapelessly, with crooked streets,houses that crumble one upon the other amid cloudsof dust, fires, screams in the darkness.Italo Calvino Invisible Cities


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Nations, Places, and Ruling Serious Games I1

This bias towards the temporal ... is an instanceof what Soja (1989) has termed the suppressionof space in social theory. As he demonstrates,both positivist and Marxist historians andsociologistswith the exception of Canadianeconomic historian and communication theoristHarold Innis, who is not mentioned in hisaccount, and subsequent thinkers influenced byhimhave tended to privilege historicaldeterminations in the interpretation of societyand culture, and to render spatial determinantsas both static and secondary. (Berland, 39)

Part One: The Problem of Place

The Problem of not Problematizing Place

The human sciences have not problematized space sufficiently.

We lack a fundamental understanding of the spatial qualities of action,

and of the historical processes that produce places we call nations. I

find it curious that even theorists, such as Foucault, Bourdieu, andGiddens, whose work rests directly upon the spatial order of actions

and institutions, have failed to significantly address the

epistemological and historical processes that underlie our concept of

space.

The modernist notion of space, of a vacuous undifferentiated

universe where physical and metaphysical laws apply uniformlythe

space of experimental reason that defies local aberration; the space of

truthstill underpins critical social theories long after these have

problematized spaces younger sister: time. At the drawing boards of

national histories, time is the chalk, but space is the board itselfall


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histories take place and make time; these are the body and the

life-narrative of nations.

To speak of a modernistnotion of space suggests alternative

notions. Pre-modern and extra-modern come to mind, if one

wishes to again to temporalize modernity. But then that which is

extra-modern not only exists outside the time of modernity, but alsooutside its space. In it universalizing narrative of (evolutionary)

development, modernity has defined itself as a time in advance of

other times. So we find stone-age peoples in the Philippines, and a

pre-industrial third-world advancing (or not) upon the atomic clock that

has passed now from London to New York to Tokyo. All this talk of

time, and silence on space. The post-modern historicization of

modernity problematizes its control over the clock, but we have yet to

address modernitys death grip on space.

In The Order of Things, Foucault reminds us of a place in time

where all things existed in a patterned order somewhat like the carpet

of Eudoxia. I am not simply saying that people conceived of time and

space in this fashion, although this is sowhat I wish to show is that a

universe so conceived allowed people to live in places (also imagined)

that were astoundingly different from the spaces of modern nations,

and that the process of nation formation was necessarily preceded by

the epistemological shift which Foucault described (although again not

sufficiently in it spatial nature).

The co+incidence of this epistemological shift with the early

reformation in Europe and the initial opening up of the New World; withthe founding of universities in Paris and Oxford, and, subsequently, the

particularist speculations of Ockham at Paris and the vernacular de-

ritualization of praxis by Wycliff at Oxford; with the musings of

Copernicus and the decentering of the Earth; with the invention of


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cross-ocean navigation technologies and the maps these explorations

required; and with the need for accurate survey technology to

articulate land holdings in new colonies, and the effects of cultural

decentering because of travels to new worlds (to other places)

particularization re-places similitude in the natural sciences, and

relativization re-places cosmic order in the physical sciencesall ofthis occurs centuries before the modern nation is announced, but also

happens in those very places where the nation-state is to be

conceived.

I dont have a blow-by-blow description of the transition from the

epistemology of place-as-microcosm to that of space-as-empty-and-

uniform. But it is relatively evident that the latter formed the

epistemology upon which the nation rests. The task becomes that of

critically revaluing our theories to uncover these spatial

epistemological assumptions, and then forging a spatially self-

reflective critical theory that will allow for the problemization of place

in ethnographic work.

From Places to Nation Spaces

Turning now to the uniform space of nations1, two spatial

processes seem to be working in the creation of nations. The first

process in the spatial consummation of the nation is a process I will

call interiorization. This is the emptying out of pre-existing places

within the nations bordersthe absolute destruction in place and

memory of the sui-generis distinctions that formerly articulated

localities. These distinctions are elided together with the verbal

(dialectical) distinctions that once marked them. National languages,

enforced through national education systems, erase local knowledges

1Nations are always plural. They were and are created within a spatial grammar of

contraposition.


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and those pre-existing customs formerly used to distinguish among

localeslocally exclusive festivals, for one example, local laws for

another.

A totalizing uniformity of space is created within the borders of

the nation. Transportation and communication links are established.

Internal boundaries are suppressed and interior-travelthe newpilgrimage which Anderson describesis promoted. Centralized

military and legal control is applied across the map of the nation.

Local disturbances are now a matter of national concern. The national

boundaries create a uniform power container that subjugates all

citizens in a relatively equal fashion (before this time, as we learned

from Discipline and Punish, the monarchs gaze was focused narrowly:

after this we are all guilty, and await the gendarmes hail).

National maps provide a visual mandala of the national space,

reinforcing the boundedness and internal connectivity of the nation.

Previously locatable local boundaries disappear from maps and from

the landscape. Boundary markers are torn down or simply cease to

have their semiotic effect.

Space and the History of the Nation Notion

In Western Europe much of this interiorization had already taken

place in advance of the formation of nationsit informed the style of

the modern nation-state. But in the colonies of Europe, those sub-

altern nations created by the European nations, the process of

interiorization is pro-active and more evident as a feature in the

creation of the nation. The infrastructure development of India, its

survey, and the complete re-naming of its places to fit an English

tongue, and to fill an English notion of exotic nostalgia. Coromandel,

Malabar, Calcutta, Darjeeling: English names on English maps and


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railroad schedules. A subsequent renaming of places occurred when

India became independent. The new names were announced to reflect

the deep and hoary history of the Nation of India, a space that, in fact,

never existed in anyones imagination before the British arrived.

It might be instructive to consider the nation as a necessarily

post-colonial phenomenon (in terms of space/place). By this I mean tosuggest that much of Western Europe (Germany, Benelux, the British

Isles, Normandy) was itself a colonized space due to centuries of

spatial reconfiguration: originally by Rome, and later by internal and

external nomadic incursions and by Christian polities (Christianity was

as foreign to these lands as it was to India). The indigenous aboriginal

populations (their own Indians) of Western Europe were, over several

hundred years, replaced and replenished by outside rulers including, at

least peripherally, Turks, Moors, and Huns, and internally, by Saxon,

Norse and Norman conquests. The ultimate conquest was that

perpetrated by institutions of the church. By 1500, the sui generis

place attachments of Western Europe had long been severed and re-

instituted under the auspices of the church. And by 1800 the churchs

hold over its hierogenous zones2 in Western Europe had been

effectively severed again by the Reformation. At the time of the

blossoming of the modern nation and in terms of space and language (I

do not wish to press this analogy in terms of politics or economics),

Western European states already fit a post-colonial description3.

2 As will be seen below, the notion of sacred space, similarly, the notion of

national space are varieties of fabricated places. Because of the implied

theological meanings of sacred space, I propose an alternate term, hierogenous

zone, for places that generate hieros (the sacred, the supernatural, shades, demons,

whatever). As Bourdieu (1988) pointed out, one of the first steps towards a truly

scientific human science is made away from naturalized, scholarly commonsensical

descriptions. The hierogenous zone is a site of embodied practice embedded within

its locale, or more recently, a channel and a time on the television schedule.


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The second process, which I will call rearticulation, is a curious

and necessary perversion of the first. This involves the rearticulation

of locales as sites of the nation. National monuments, public buildings,

national highways and railroads, battlefields, stadiums, and also cities,

natural parks, and rural habitats: all become emblematic of the nation,

of its history, its naturalized beginnings and its future glory. Awaterfall becomes an object of national pride. Locales are presented in

their distinction as capitals or body parts of the nation: for example

the corn (or porn) capital of America; the heart of American

industry. As Jennifer Robertson (1991) points out, the notion of

furusato (the Japanese nostalgic traditional village place) applies both

to the individual reconstructed village (which offered a menu of

required furusato ingredients and a zest of reconsidered local treats)

and metonymically to Japan as a nation. Furosato is Japan.

Forgetting to Remember

The rearticulation of the nation occurs continuously. It is applied

to focus national attention, and divert the same. It informs the

national imagination. This rearticulation happens not only internally,

but provides the narrative for external perspectivesthe nation

continually reinvents the spaces of other nations. Reagans evil

empire of communism has been replaced by Yeltsins inept (and

perhaps more dangerous by this) commonwealth of independent

states. Ex-colonies reinvent relationships with their ex-rulersby

redescribing the space of the other.

The rearticulation of locales succeeds only insofar as places can

replace spaces within the modern epistemology. The places of

modernity must be reinforced by an active national ideology, or else

they will fall prey to irony and re-imagining. Before the nation, each


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place was its own author, liable only to its own claims. The authority

and authenticity of each place rested upon those who made the claims

for that particular place. But these claims also were made upon

epistemological grounds that supported the idea of places. Such a

place may offer sanctuary, special powers, healing waters, youthful

reinvigoration, Epiphanies of beauty or fear: based on the story of theplace, on its natural markings, and on an epistemology that describes

knowledge as em-placed.

Because there is actually no room for places in the

epistemology of the modern nation, the reinvented place, the national

locale, is of a completely different epistemological order from the pre-

national (pre-modern) place or locale. As sites created by and for the

fabrication of experience, they require maintenance, particularly,

efforts to escape suspicion and doubt. So, they rely upon the

processes of naturalization for their claim to have epistemological

support. As this claim is contestable, nations must work even harder,

they must avoid even the suspicion of a doubt. Nations require

continuous performances of what Homi Bhabha termed the

problematic totalization of the national will (1990, 311). This time of

forgetting to remember, (ibid.) is a strategy for eliciting selective

inattention (Goffman 1961, 38): a boundary condition required for the

ruling serious game (much more about this below) to commence.

Authenticity for the national space is an expensive and

continuous proposition. The modern national place cannot violate

undifferentiated space. It cannot offer miraculous cures, it cannotreverse the uniform unfolding of time. Ultimately, national places are

subject to one fragile authoritythat of the nation: we see flags sprout

in a sudden spring of nationalist sentiment when a war is announced,

and the same flags burned when the armies return without


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employment. We witnessed in a week every (well most) public

statue(s) of Lenin disappear across the former Soviet territories.

The replacement of places that are epistemologically grounded

with fabricated places that uneasily hide their epistemological

contradictionsplaces transformed out of space only by the force of

ideological equivocationis actually the destruction of place acrossthe face of the planet. I do not wish to suggest that our epistemology4

is, somehow morally deficient, nor to promote nostalgia for old-time

places. The suggestion that a critique of the modern place must

involve a romantic return to a former authenticity is itself a modernist

counter-move. The interest in other places and their epistemologies is

an attempt to discover alternative strategies of place which might

inform a theory of place that would re+place the vacuous space of

modernity.

The Hyperlocale

For much of human history, activities of various sorts have

created places from spaces, places that are identifiable as locales.

Recently, the characteristic of places to be tied to locales seems to be

loosening in the face of the modern global place. Part of this has to

do with the increased distanciation brought about by communications

and transportation technologies. Another part, as we have seen, is the

articulation of this distanciated space by the processes of nation

formation and maintenance.

As Anthony Giddens noted5, the disembedding mechanisms of

modernity tend to evacuate the historical idiosyncratic locality of place

4Epistemology is simply another level of fabrication, made innocent (if it is) only by

its democracywe are all subject to it. Yet this universalized/-izing notion of

epistemology (particularly Foucaults notion of episteme) is itself the result of the

application of the modern spatial formula: it declares what is really true must hold

true everywhere. Truth is never local nowadays.


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in favor of re-embedded globaly-organized places. This new planetary

realm is, in effect, a type of hyper-locality, one consequence of which

is a continuing impact upon the reality claims of other, necessarily

smaller localities and their realms. What seems evident is that

processes in modernity act to sever places from locales, and that this

tends to un-transform the local places back into spaces.The hegemony of modern space (and time) seems to be an

accomplished fact. We have entered the realm of the hyperlocale, of

global spaces taking on the facade of local places. The markings that

formerly signaled the individual distinction of the locale now play as

signifiers within a global language of marking. They are the simulacra

(cf. Baudrillard, 1983) of what were formerly individuated places. We

now create local places as tourist destinations, demarcated and

marketed through iconic architectural motifs. The Eiffel Tower, the Taj

Mahal, Big Ben, the Venice Canals, the Great Wall: Epcot Center at

Disneyworld (the word world is no mistake) re-places the world as a

hyperlocale, as a semiosis of equivalent meanings. This global

metropolitan location supports the nation as one-among-equals: but it

elides a good portion of the world in its picturesque montage. Where is

Islam in this picture? Where is Africa?

Does the hyperlocale admit to any resistance? Hardlythere is

no obvious locus of active resistance to modern nation formation

everyone seems to want a place in Disneyworld. Yet, how uniformly

has the epistemology of modern space/time penetrated across the

globe? Clearly the global economy and world systems implicated in

5For a discussion of Giddenss use of time-space relations, see: Gregory, 1985.

Modernity, as a synthetic term used to describe historically embedded but

increasingly globalized institutions and structuration, has not acquired a consensus of

meanings in the literature, I am comfortable with Giddenss outline of its features (cf.

Giddens, 1990).


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this process are active agents in the spread of the modern episteme.

But arent there dis-enfranchised, marginalized peoples who have not

so much resisted as they have been ignored? Are there contra-nations

out there? What is a post-modern nation? Must we re-invent the

locale for the epistemology of modernity to come into critical focus, ?

How do we study alternatives to the modern place? Where do welook? Can an archaeology of spatial knowledge help us here? What is

the role of ethnography?

The human sciences have not problematized space sufficiently.

We lack a fundamental understanding of the spatial qualities of action,

and of the historical processes that produce places we call nations.

Partly, this theoretical oversight is due to the priority that space has

within modern epistemology. We valorize only knowledges that are

moveable. For a century, anthropologists have brought back souvenir

knowledges of other cultures as though these represented the actual

knowledges in play in these society. As Bourdieu, Foucault, and

Giddens (among others) remind us, the study of practice requires the

study of places of practice. We need a theory of spaceand of

spatialized practicethat will allow this type of study. What follows is

the beginning of such a theory.


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Nations, Places, and Ruling Serious Games II1

It is not the act [of sexual intercourse] as suchthat the spirit of the language tends to conceiveas play; rather the road thereto, the preparationfor and introduction to love, which is oftenmade enticing by all sorts of playing. This isparticularly true when one of the sexes has torouse or win the other over to copulation.(Huizinga 1949, 43)

One's feel for the game is not infallible; it isshared out unequally between players, in asociety as in a team. Sometimes it is completelylacking, notably in tragic situations, when peopleappeal to wise men who, in Kabylia are oftenpoets too and who know how rule aimed toguarantee can be saved. But this freedom ofinvention and improvisation which enables theinfinity of moves allowed by the game to beproduced (as in chess) has the same limits asthe game. The strategies adapted in playing thegame of Kabyle marriage, which do not involveland and the threat of sharing it out (because of

the joint ownership in the equal sharing out ofland between agnates), would not be suitable inplaying the game of Barn marriage, where youhave above all to keep hold of your house andyour land.(Bourdieu 1990, 63)

In daily life, games are seen as part ofrecreation and in principle devoid of importantrepercussions upon the solidity and continuity ofcollective and institutional life. [from: Caillois1957, p.99] Games can be fun to play, and funalone is the approved reason for playing them.Because serious activity need not justify itself interms of the fun it provides, we have neglectedto develop an analytical view of fun and anappreciation of the light that fun throws oninteraction in general. This paper attempts tosee how far one can go by treating funseriously. (Goffman 1961, 17)

Part Two:

The Theory of Serious Games

Preliminary Stuff

The basic notion of a theory of serious games is that society as

an object of study can be described as a set of serious and non-serious

games which involve its members in rule-governed and rule-creating


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actions. As Giddens (1991) notes, the sociologists society, applied

to the period of modernity at any rate, is a nation-state... (15). As

such, societies and nations today (socialization and nationalism) are

mutually implicated. Yet, the genres of serious games played in the

nation-state are different from those played in other societies. By

exploring this difference we will be able to better describe thecontingent possibilities of action within each type of society.

The notion of society as serious game is not presented as a

monopolistic explanatory tool, but rather as a descriptive figure more

nimble at times than society as text or society as drama. Drama

and text are both implied in the play of serious games (more of this

later). Similarly, members of a society can perhaps be better

described as players, and pawns rather than as agents6 or

actors. This theory brings to the fore the embodied performative

aspect of society. The actual serious games that envelope us, the

society we belong to and others we encounter as strangers, are only

formally delimited by the theoretical model of serious games. This

theory provides the barest of form, a basis upon which any number of

serious games, fantastic or not, can be (and have been) fashioned.

This, as Bourdieu notes, is the advantage of having such a model:

even if it remains for the most part empty, even if what it provides us

with are above all warnings and programmatic guidelines, [having a

model] means that I will choose my subjects in a different way...

(1990, 160).

6The terminology is confused, perhaps, as the following description of the player

relates very much to Bourdieus and Giddenss notion of the agent. Giddens

discounts (and so do I) the value of the term player in its British dramatistic sense

(what Americans would call a stage actor). I will stay with the term player

because not only do they make plays but they are also involved in serious (or deep,

or thick) play. The Derridian overtones are also important here.


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Embedded in the following text is also an implicit critique of

rationalism as Habermas (1984) would have us use this concept; that

is, of rationalism as a mature/advanced state of dialectical cultural

growth/evolution. At the end, it is hoped that the reader might

consider instead that rationalism has been a remarkably successful

strategy for legitimizing certain aspects of serious games. As such it isa powerful alibi for actions, no more, but certainly this is enough of a

role for any concept. In order to approach play seriously (yes, this also

means rationally) an expanded and reordered notion of rationality is

needed, one not based on the pristine separation of subjective and

objective realms. (For more discussion ofmainly objections to

objectivism, See: Bourdieu 1988, 781; 1990, 62-63 & 184; Giddens

1987, 59-60, Lakoff 1987, xiv; Weedon 1987, 78-80.) As Zizek(1991,

179-81) after Lacannotes, it is time for dialecticians to learn to

count to four, to embrace the negative, the difference outside of

serious pretensions of the ruling game. (Part III below will outline this

trialectic process.)

Herein is presented a discussion of terms like nationalism and

game, work and play, serious and trivial, risk, and

action. In their new (or rediscovered) meanings these terms become

tools of the game of creating a theory of games. As the semantic

space of such terms and many others changes, these changes are

signals of the transformations I wish to describe, transformations as

broad and profound as the Protestant Reformation, and as narrow

and yet profoundas the shift from the performance of a singleJapanese matsuri as a festival to its performance as a pageant. The

following theory of games may be seen as a part of the change from a

modern to a post-modern outlook (See: Kroker), or it may not. What it

demands of the reader is notthat it be accepted as true, but rather


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that it be taken seriously, which is all that any game can actually

demand.

Strategic Play

This paper will explore Pierre Bourdieus notion of strategic

action from the perspective that social action generally takes place

within frameworks or contexts that can productively be called serious

games. Action, particularly in its nation-creating and sustaining

capacities, can be discussed using terms defined in the theory of

serious games. Before looking at this serious game theorys more

specific socioanthropolinguistic (its an ugly word but someone has to

use it) extensions, the paper will introduce the theorys place within

the human sciences.

In serious game theory, festivals, pageants, rituals, rites,

breakfast conversations, working lunches, clandestine afternoon trysts

(Huizingas winding road to copulation), supermarket checkout

encounters, freeway driving, political conventions, supreme court

sessions, military coups: each of the various social encounters that

envelope our actions from day to day or minute to minute are

individually determined by the game that promotes and sustains its

context and its conduct. Donning a three-piece suit for a business

meeting is actually much more than superficially analogous to donning

ones whites for a cricket match.

Serious game theory allows for a further examination into the

strategic logic of suit-donning and other actions, as well as a

perspective on the knowledges (habitus) and constraints that frame

these actions. The use of an extended theory of serious games

extended, that is from Erving Goffmans original notion of game


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encounters (1961)provides a methodological entre to what

Bourdieu calls the feel for the game:

I wanted, so to speak, to reintroduce agents that Lvi-Strauss and the

structuralists, among others Althusser, tended to abolish, making them into

simple epiphenoma of structure. And I mean agents, not subjects. Action is

not the mere carrying out of a rule, or obedience to a rule. Social agents, in

archaic societies as well as in ours, are not automata regulated like clocks, in

accordance with laws which they do not understand. In the most complexgames, matrimonial exchange for instance, or ritual practices, they put into

action the incorporated principles of a generative habitus: this system of

dispositions can be imagined by analogy with Chomsky's generative

grammarwith this difference: I am talking about dispositions acquired

through experience, thus variable from place to place and time to time. This

'feel for the game', as we call it, is what enables an infinite number of 'moves'

to be made, adapted to the infinite number of possible situations which no

rule, however complete, can foresee. And so, I replaced the rules of kinship

with matrimonial strategies. (Bourdieu 1990, 9)

Specifically, agency is found in both performances (events and

their contexts) and texts (oral, written, and video), and, more

problematically, in the unexpectedly thick region between these two

aspects7. Serious game theory allows for explorations into the actions

evidenced in performances, into the semantic ordering of texts, and

most significantly, of the structure of the hidden space between these.

The goal of serious game theory is to provide the minimal form

for social action, a description wherein action and concept(performance and narrative) are not transparently connected. As

7 Unexpected because the social order presents itself as transparent on both

surfaces, as a structured order of meanings and practices that correspond to each

other without hidden intermediaries. Thus, studies of meaning, (e.g., those of

religious doctrines or political ideologies) have seen no difficulty in asserting that this

level is both internally consistent and can be mapped also on the action surface of

ritualsas actions designed to represent ideational notions. Similarly,

structural/functionalist descriptions of actions and objects see no difficulty inasserting the clear and comprehensive accord between these and the worldviews

that they represent. The society sees itself as a thin surface where thought and

action are consistent and their connections immediate. Game theory posits a region

between these two surfaces, and then shows that the structures on both surfaces are

arbitrarily determined within this thick interstice where meanings and actions are not

taken seriously.


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Giddens (and others, such as Geertz, 1973a and Boon, 1982) have

suggested, action must not be confused with discursive knowledge:

You cant wink (or burlesque one) without knowing what counts as

winking or how, physically, to contract your eyelids,... But to draw

from such truths the conclusion that knowing how to wink is

winking...is to betray a deep confusion as, taking thin descriptions forthick, to identify winking with eyelid contractions...(Geertz 1973a, 12).

The problematic that Geertz uncovered with his call for thick

description is one of determining what goes on between the worn-

smooth surfaces of narrative, on one hand, and performance, on the

other. Between these two hands, or behind them, something is said to

be happening. What we get out of Geertz is talk of deep play and

meta-commentaries (1972) What we need is just enough form to pry

these two surfaces apart. Between knowing how (and when and where

and with whom) to wink and doing it, liesa lie8, or rather a whole

passel of lies. (Actually, I prefer Barthess term, alibi, but am

uncertain of the proper group adjective. We could be looking at a

cohort of alibis.) The biggest alibi of all is actually the one that

narrative gives to performance, and that performance uses on

narrative (it never fails), and it is something like this: I am good and

true and beautiful, and I am just like you. We can thus restate the

8 This is not as distressing as it might sound. As Umberto Eco noted: semiotics is in

principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie (1976,

7 emphasis in the original). This does, however, leave us with a theory of games

based on a theory of lies with which to replace a theory of culture based onnotions of universal truths. This suggests some necessary lowering of

expectations. Like the two fools in Bruegels engraving (See: frontspiece) tugging at

each others nose, meaning and performance make fools of us all. Why? Because

we take them seriouslyor notupon their word. Who is the real fool: the clown or

the person that takes him seriously? What is it about culture that makes us want to

be lied to?


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brought into perspective many events, actions, narratives, and

meanings that have not heretofore been readily classified as parts of

games, or in any fashion necessarily linked to performance. Partially,

this failure to to approach performance represents a Post-Reformation

critique of the efficacy9 of human actionEuroAmericans live in a

world where play and games have been marginalized in contrastwith work and other serious pursuits, and where embodied and

emplaced knowledge gives way to narratives and universal laws.

Serious game theory hopes to show how performance can be

rediscovered, and that we work at playing serious games every day. In

order for serious game theory to succeed, it must provide some

advantage over other perspectives on social action. This paper will

outline some of these advantages. Some potential objections to

serious game theory will also be discussed below.

If you are not part of the action, you are part of the context

Let us now look closely at the proposed theory of serious games.

First, a few more assumptions: As with Geertz (and before him, Talcott

Parsons, and before him, Max Weber and mile Durkheim)the basic

presupposition that empirically observable actions are important in

themselves is crucial to the serious game theory. What Bourdieu and

Giddens (and others) added to this presupposition is the importance of

the agents knowledgeability. Like Bourdieu (above), Giddens would

revive the knowledgeable agent:

In the work of Lasch, and many others who have produced rather similarcultural diagnoses, one can discern an inadequate account of the human

agent. The individual appears essentially passive in relation to

9 The disengagement from the symbolic control of natural processes from

religious ritual in favor of the incremental controls provided by scientific

knowledge is instrumental in the commodification of human action, and in the

marginalization of the body.


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Nations, Places, and Ruling Serious Games II2overwhelming external social forces, and a misleading or false view is

adopted of the connections between micro-settings of action and more

encompassing social influences. An adequate account of action in relation to

modernity must accomplish three tasks. It must recognise that (1) on a very

general level, human agents never passively accept external conditions of

action, but more or less continuously reflect upon them and reconstitute them

in the light of their particular circumstances; (2) on a collective as well as an

individual plane, above all in conditions of modernity, there are massive

areas of collective appropriation consequent on the increased reflexivity of

social life; (3) it is not valid to argue that, while the micro-settings of action

are malleable, larger social systems form an uncontrolled background

environment. (Giddens 1991, 175)

Knowledgeability and constraints on knowledgeability are central

to the theories of Foucault, Goffman, Giddens, and Bourdieu. What

game theory adds to this mix is a basic parameter to describe these

knowledges and also a notion ofobservable attitude. The study of

human action is thus a study of what people do, what they know about

how to do it, and what they think about what they do10. (From now on,

the word action will be used to mean a behavior with its associated

knowledges and attitudes.) It is not enough to view individuals as

merely subjects or even actors in society; they must be players

if the society is to be performed and the performances to succeed and

thus to recreate the impetus for the continuation of the societyof the

ruling serious game.

To say that serious game theory asserts that a society is a

serious game is an oversimplification of the concepts of society and

of game, although this might have once been true in very small,

isolated societies. It is more accurate to say that a society (the

nation/state) maintains a ruling serious game, which encompasses its

10 Obviously there are behaviors, knowledges, and attitudes that are not public,

most properly, there are actions that people do alone. These arent many, and oftenthey are done alone for observable reasons. More problematically, there are times

when knowledges, or attitudes, or even behaviors (as in esoteric rituals) are masked.

People lie about these, or are themselves unaware of them. This means that some

actions are more difficult to study than others. One advantage of serious game

theory is that it provides some methodological toe-hold (mostly thanks to the work of

Erving Goffman) into the process of masking actions.


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forms of legitimation and which contain one or more (and possibly

many) major sub-games that define domains of action such as the

political and the religious domains. This ruling serious game is

inherently serious for two main reasons: first because of the overlap

between the survival needs of the various players and the objects

required for the game (e.g., food, shelter, weapons, medicines, socialapproval, ego recognition, etc.); and second, because it enforces its

rules with lethal (or near lethal) means (execution, excommunication,

life imprisonment, etc.).

Actions and Narratives

Publicly observable actions have two general aspects: one, a

performative aspect that shows up in events; and the other, a

conceptual aspect, which gets written down or taped, or, in oral

cultures, gets remembered. A telling of a story or a reading of a text

forms the boundary between these two aspects. This is a fuzzy

boundary and it is not all that apparent exactly where concept meets

performance11. The material requirements for performancethose

artistic (visual, audio, kinesthetic, sculptural, etc.), spatial and

architectural, sartorial, tonsorial, gustatory, olfactory, pharmaceutical,

11Wittgensteins musings on games and on the fuzzy boundaries between action

and concept which games display, are much to the point here. I would like to

introduce the notion of virtuosity, as a useful way of describing the zone between

concept (knowledge) and its performance. The advantage of this term is that it

carries meanings of embodied knowledge and the performative display of this. As

Wittgenstein noted about virtuosity (actually about expert judgements) is that it is

not governable by a system of rules: What one acquires [as one becomes avirtuoso] .. is not a technique; one learns correct judgements. There are also rules,

but they do not form a system, and only experienced people can apply them right.

Unlike calculating-rules (1958, 227). Virtuosity disambiguates the two main

semantic fields of the term experience: the knowledgeable aspect (as in She is an

experienced artist) and the performative aspect (as in the experience of a

concert.) The virtuoso is a repository of knowledge/performance.


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and temporal ingredients of the eventare part of the performance

aspect, are its context, and yet these also contribute to the conceptual

aspect as they engender theories, myths, histories, etc.

While the playing of any game takes on a narrative-like aspect (a

beginning, then some determinate activity, then some closure or

failure to close), and while narrative accounts of games are a part ofthe history and thus of the available knowledge about games, it is

important not to confuse the playing of the game with either the act of

writing a narrative description of a game or of reading one. Narrative

accounts of serious games can tell us much about these, however,

they cannot12 convey that part of the action which is known and played

non-discursively, that part which responds and creates the habitus of

the game. As Bourdieu notes, the habitus is written into the body of

the player:

...The habitus as the feel for the game is the social game embodied and

turned into a second nature. Nothing is simultaneously freer and more

constrained than the action of the good player. He quite naturally

materializes at just the place the ball is about to fall, as if the ball were in

command of him but by that very fact, he is in command of the ball. The

habitus, as society written into the body, into the biological individual,

enables the infinite number of acts of the game written into the game as

possibilities and objective demands to be produced; the constraints and

demands of the game, although they are not restricted to a code of rules,

impose themselves on those people and those people alone who, because

they have a feel for the game, a feel, that is, for the immanent necessity of the

game, are prepared to perceive them and carry them out. (1990, 63)

A theory of social action cannot rely simply on a narrative

account of the game as it was or is played, but rather on an

examination of the habitus which creates the player, and of the role ofthe player as an agent in the creation of habitus. White (1987)

conflated social actions (the playing of serious games) with lived

12 More precisely, they have not, to date. The role of the new ethnography is

to explore ways in which non-discursive knowledge can be discursively described.

Serious game theory will be of certain value here.


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narrativizations. Serious games are certainly lived, but they are only

after the fact rendered as narratives.

The confusion of action with narrative is a hope, often held by

historians or literary theorists; the hope that the story of the game can

substitute for the game as an object of study. This hope is also

expressed by those who wish to describe the nation in terms of itsnarrativity. The late A. Bartlett Giamatti (president of Yale University

turned commissioner of baseball) used baseball as a trope in the

national story, :

Baseball is part of Americas plot, part of Americas mysterious, underlying

designthe part in which we all conspire and collude, the plot of the story of

our national life. Our national plot is to be free enough to consent to an order

that will enhance and compoundas it constrainsour freedom. That is our

grounding, our national story, the tale America tells the world... Byrepeating again the outline of the American Story, and by placing baseball

within it, we engage the principle of narrative. (1989, 83-84).

Giamatti goes on to remark on the telling of baseball stories, at

baseballs second-favorite venue, the hotel lobby. It is in the telling

of these stories that baseball is transformed into myth. It is in the

move from performance to narrative that the game acquires its time of

forgetting to remember. Narrativity is implicated in the imagination

of the game (and of the nation). The deconstruction of narrativity is a

counter-move, a remembering-not-to-forget: that is also its limit.

As Hayden White (1987) noted, the move from game playing to

narrativity does happen in many places. Theirstories oftheirgames

and ourstories oftheirgames (most ethnographies to date) are thus

deemed commensurable. However, this commensurability takes place

at an innocent, infantile level of practice; it is the sitting around the

campfire, listening to the Wanga-Wanga spin their culture type of

anthropology. No matter how much deconstructive virtuosity one can

level on these texts, they will never reveal what they were never


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meant to conceal in the first place: the habitus of the game... which is

always concealed elsewhere. Again, let me return to Bourdieu:

But it is not enough to reject the juridical ideology (what the Anglo-Saxons

call the legalism) that comes so naturally to anthropologists, always ready to

listen to those dispensers of lessons and rules that informants are when they

talk to the ethnologist, that is to someone who knows nothing and to whom

they have to talkas if they were talking to a child. In order to construct a

model of the game which will not be the mere recording of explicit normsnor a statement of regularities, while synthesizing both norms and

regularities, one has to reflect on the different modes of existence of the

principles of regulation and regularity of different forms of practice: there is,

of course, the habitus, that regulated disposition to generate regulated and

regular behaviour outside any reference to rules; and, in societies where the

work of codification is not very advanced, the habitus is the principle of most

modes of practice. (1990, 65)

If discursive rules were all that pushed agents into actions, and all that

constrained these actions into coherent system-like patterns, then the

lessons of narratives would suffice as anthropology. The need to go

beyond this type of data in order to determine how the agent knows

how to go on (cf. Giddens, 1979, 67; also Wittgenstein 1958) is a

need that serious game theory will attempt to fulfill. And so, let me

move on to the details of this theory. While this part of the paper

takes us seemingly far away from the nation-state, it will all be useful

in re-imagining the nation and its ruling serious game not too far downthis narrative path.

[A foretaste of a problematic to be addressed by this theory: The

ruling serious game has few players and many more pawnsthe

question is not why the pawns play this game, but why they are

satisfied by it... why dont they (we) demand or create a better game?]

Encounters of the gaming kind

In order to further explore the concepts of attitude and

motivation, we must first expand the description of what a serious

game is, and how this is played. The notion of a serious game as it

will be developed below owes much to Erving Goffmans work on


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events that he calls encounters. Goffmans definition of an

encounter begins with a general statement of potential event

sequences:

Encounters. I limit myself to one type of social arrangement that

occurs when persons are in one anothers immediate physical presence, to be

called here an encounteror a focused gathering. For the participants, this

involves: a single visual and cognitive focus of attention; a mutual andpreferential openness to verbal communication; a heightened mutual

relevance of acts; an eye-to-eye ecological huddle that maximizes each

participants opportunity to perceive the other participants monitoring of

him. Given these communication arrangements, their presence tends to be

acknowledged or ratified through expressive signs, and a we rationale is

likely to emerge, that is, a sense of the single act that we are doing together at

the time. Ceremonies of entrance and departure are also likely to be

employed, as are signs acknowledging the initiation and termination of the

encounter or focused gathering as a unit. Whether bracketed by ritual or not,

encounters provide the communication base for a circular flow of feeling

among participants as well as corrective compensation for deviant acts.

Examples of focused gatherings are: a tte--tte; a jury

deliberation; a game of cards; a couple dancing; a task jointly pursued by

persons physically close to one another; love-making; boxing.

(Goffman 1961, 17-18, emphasis in the original)

What is important here, rather than a specific list of actions, is

the notion that the encounter creates a boundary, allows participants

to enter this voluntarily, and then facilitates both communication and

ex-communication. What is this boundary condition? How does it

work? To illustrate, he chooses a small, well-defined example, that ofthe game of checkers:

Here, games can serve as a starting point. They clearly illustrate

how participants are willing to forswear for the duration of the play any

apparent interest in the esthetic, sentimental, or monetary value of the

equipment employed, adhering to what might be called rules of irrelevance.

For example, it appears that whether checkers are played with bottle tops on

a piece of squared linoleum, with gold figurines on inlaid marble, or with

uniformed men standing on colored flagstones in a specially arranged court

square, the pairs of players can start with the same positions, employ the

same sequence of strategic moves and countermoves, and generate the samecontour of excitement.

...Another example of this is seen in wall games, wherein school

children, convicts, prisoners of war, or mental patients are ready to redefine

an imprisoning wall as a part of the board that the game is played on, a board

constituted of special rules of play, not bricks and mortar.(ibid, 19-20)


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The boundary condition then is a function of these rules of

irrelevance, which determine for the duration of the encounterwhat is

and shall be taken as serious or trivial. In order to maintain these rules

for the duration, the encounter must localize all the ingredients

necessary for its own completion. The encounter provides the rules

and the materials requisite for the expected outcomes of its actions.These rules and materials Goffman terms realized resources (ibid,

28). (I sometimes call these technologies of experience.) There is

thus an economy involved, a marshalling of resources13, and a political

force to regulate this economy, and a judicial authority to resolve

disputes.

Knowing that encounters define and determine attitudes does

not explain why or how its participants allow their attitudes to be so

determined. Why do people enter into these events in the first place?

What is gained? What is the motivation? Goffman, perhaps

reluctantly, posits a type of euphoria. He promotes the notion that

these encounters are internally motivated and thus self replicating. At

the same time, he adds that this sense of euphoria is dependent upon

the reduction of tension in the encounter, similar to what Gadamer

sees in his notion of play: Like art, play comes to rest in itself, the

sheer transformation of energy into a structure that absorbs the

player into itself, and thus takes from him the burden of the initiative,

which constitutes the actual strain of existence(Gadamer 1985, 94;

reported in States 1988, 126-7). This reduction of tension, of the

13 There are two basic strategies to ensure that all the needed resources areavailable within the encounters boundaries: the first is to provide a strict definition

of what is needed. This is the rule governing strategy. With this, unavailable

resources are a priorily ruled out of the encounter, and become trivialized. The

second strategy is to expand the boundary and allow for new resources and thus new

rules. This is the rule creating strategy. The former is conservative, and the later

reactionary or progressive.


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burden of the strain of existence, requires the spontaneous

involvement of the participants:

...Focused gatherings...have unique and significant properties which

a formalistic game-theoretical view of interaction tends to overlook. The

most crucial of these properties, it seems to me, is the organistic

psychobiological nature of spontaneous involvement.(Goffman 1961, 38

emphasis mine)

When an individual becomes engrossed in an activity, whethershared or not, it is possible for him to become caught up by it, carried away

by it, engrossed in itto be, as we say, spontaneously involved in it. He

finds it psychologically unnecessary to dwell on anything else...(ibid, 37)

...tension refers...to a sensed discrepancy between the world that

spontaneously becomes real to the individual, or the one he is able to accept

as the current reality, and the one in which he is obliged to dwell. This

concept of tension is crucial to my argument, for I will try to show that just

as the coherence and persistence of a focused gathering depends on

maintaining a boundary, so the integrity of this barrier seems to depend upon

the management of tension.(ibid, 43)

Spontaneous involvement is de facto voluntary, since it depends

upon the participants willingness to enter into the encounter as

though it were entirely autotelically motivated, to become engrossed

in itrather like a player gets engrossed in a game. Once this

threshold of involvement is met there is then the further possibility of a

reduction of tension. The reduction of tension is, however, not

merely a negatively defined experience, but one that Goffman, like

Gadamer, finds to be irresistibly attractive for the participant14.

14 Goffman puts it this way: We come now to a crucial consideration. The

world made up of objects of our spontaneous involvement and the world carved out

by the encounters transformation rules can be congruent, one coinciding perfectly

with the other. In such circumstances, what the individual is obliged to attend to,

and the way in which he is obliged to perceive what is around him, will coincide with

what can and what does become real to him through the natural inclination of his

spontaneous attention. Where this kind of agreement exists I assumeas an

empirical hypothesisthat the participants will feel at ease or natural, in short, that

the interaction will be euphoric for them.

But it is conceivable that the participants two possible worlds...may not

coincide... I make a second empirical assumption, that a person who finds himself in

this situation will feel uneasy, bored, or unnatural in the situation, experiencing this


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The game succeeds only as long as it can reduce the tension

between the world it creates and other possible worlds. Success is

predicated first upon the spontaneous involvementof the players.

Without this, the encounter is preempted:

Why should the factor of spontaneous involvement carry so much weight in

the organization of encounters? Some suggestions can be made. Aparticipants spontaneous involvement in the official focus of attention of an

encounter tells others what he is and what his intentions are, adding to the

security of the others in his presence. Further, shared spontaneous

involvement in a mutual activity often brings the sharers into some kind of

exclusive solidarity and permits them to express relatedness, psychic

closeness, and mutual respect; failure to participate with good heart can

therefore express rejection of those present or of the setting. Finally,

spontaneous involvement in the prescribed focus of attention confirms the

reality of the world prescribed by the transformation rules15 and the unreality

of other potential worldsand it is upon these confirmations that the stability

of immediate definitions of the situation depends.(Goffman 1961, 40)

A game is tested every time it is played. For the game notto

fail, it must create an imagined world (a community and its

technologies of experience), a world that is uniquely right and real for

its players for the duration of its play. This is as true for serious games

as it is for recreational and childrens games. In recreational games,

for example, the play normally reaches a point where the internal risk

of the game ends (when a predetermined score is met, a goal isachieved, a time limit is accomplished) or else the game is

prematurely terminated when one or more players become weary or

bored (See also Peckham, 77). Either end brings back the tension of

other possible worlds, of other games and factors, such as the external

15 Goffman proposes that the boundary of the encounter does not actually shut off

all outside contexts, but rather permits selected aspects of outside worlds topenetrate after these have been altered through transformation rules into game

roles and game pieces. the barrier to externally realized properties was more like a

screen than like a solid wall, and we then came to see that the screen not only

selects but also transforms and modifies what is passed through it. Speaking more

strictly, we can think of inhibitory rules that tell participants that they must not

attend to and of facilitating rules that tell them what they may recognize. (ibid, 33)


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motivations that were suppressed during the play of the game. The

goalie returns to being your boss, and the other halfback your

assistant.

When a game ends, the arbitrariness of the rules and roles

determined by the games transformation rules becomes evident and

spontaneous involvement fails. Alternately, when these roles and rulesare seen as arbitrary, spontaneous involvement fails and the game

ends. Spontaneous involvement is predicated upon the attitude of the

player toward the motivation of the game. The player must voluntarily

enter into the game if his involvement is to achieve this spontaneous

quality. External influences need to be filtered and transformed in

such a way that the player becomes engrossed in the play of the game

for its expected duration, otherwise the game has failed.

Motivation

Motivation, as this applies to serious game theory, has one

primary distinguishing feature. It is either autotelic to the action, or

exotelic to it. A theory of autotelic and exotelic motivation has been

developed following the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi at the

University of Chicago (See: Csikszentmihalyi 1975, 1988).

Csikszentmihalyis theory makes a distinction between motivations

using the location of the motivation vis vis the action that results

from the motivation. Autotelic actions are thus internally motivated

(and perceived as such by their participants), and, as we shall see,

voluntarily entered into. This theory dissolves the dichotomy between

play and work found in traditional theories of play such as those found

in Huizinga (1949) and Caillois (1958) and well summarized in Giddens

(1964). These latter theories held only that play, e.g. any game, as


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opposed to work, was a completely bounded experience, the risks of

which had no effect outside the boundary of the game.

What Csikszentmihalyi (1975) argues is that play is simply any

activity that is internally motivated (hence autotelic). This means that

work (labor) can also be play to the extent that it provides internal

motivation16. The notion of play can thus be applied to a broad arrayof actions, and, in fact, to action in general, for any action can be

either autotelic (i.e. play) or exotelic (what should we call this?),

according to the involvement of the individual, that is, to his

perception of the source of the motivation for the action.

Exotelic actions receive their motivation from without, that is,

from goals or sanctions external to the action. The organization of the

factory requires knowledges that are external to the worker, and thus

her motivation is not informed as to the real purpose of her labor. The

factory cannot rely upon her motivation (nor her knowledgeability) and

so it relies on the regulation of her actions. The worker/agent/player is

reduced to the laborer/functional-unit/pawn:

16 What Gorz (1990)of course after Marxnotes is that factory labor so

alienates the worker from the results of labor that it cannot be knowledgeably

accepted by the worker as autotelic. The important thing here is that the inert

materiality of the machinery (or the organization which imitates it) affords past

poiesis (dead labour or the organization) a lasting hold over the workers who, in

putting it to use, are forced to serve it. The greater the amount of fixed capital (that

is, of dead labour and dead knowledge) per work station, the more unyielding this

hold. ...dead labour, mind objectified, comes between the worker and the productand prevents work being lived aspoiesis, as the sovereign action of Man on matter

(Gorz 1990, 52). This, however, does not prevent an attempt by management to

sell labor as play. The worker must remember to forget his alienation for the

poiesis of work-that-is-play, and to regard dead labor as play. To the limit that

work is not play, the worker sacrifices his life to dead labor. The fiction of the

nobility of work obscures this sacrifice.


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Nations, Places, and Ruling Serious Games II4As it becomes more complex, the organization of specialized functions, for

the purpose of accomplishing a task which exceeds the comprehension of any

individual, is increasingly unable to rely on the agents own motivations for

accomplishing this task. Their favourable disposition, personal capacities and

goodwill are not enough. Their reliability will only be ensured by the formal

codification and regulation of their conduct, their duties and their

relationships. I term functional any conduct which is rationally programmed

to attain results beyond the agents comprehension, irrespective of their

intentions. Functionality is a type of rationality which comes from the

outside to the conduct determined and specified for the agent by the

organization in which she or he is subsumed. This conduct is the function

which the agent has to perform unquestioningly. The more it grows, the morethe organization tends to function like a machine. (Gorz 1989, 32)

Gorzs explication of the term functionality (to describe exotelic

actions and organizations) represent a limit both for serious game

theory and for functionalist notions of society. Serious game theory is

centrally concerned with the autotelic actions of players.

Functionality describes the exotelic regulation of the actions of

pawns. Functionalist social theory (despite its universalist

pretensions) finds its limit in the description of functionality. Within

serious game theory, notions of functionality are useful mainly because

of the presence of pawns within games. Serious game theory also

allows for a further description of autotelic (e.g., embodied) action.

How the Game is Played

Autotelically motivated actions require certain ingredients or

conditions. Internal motivations (and knowledges) can be as diverse as

the actions that spawn them, what they have in common is the fact

that they are autotelic to the action. Only certain varieties of actions

create internal motivations: i.e., there are formal constraints on

games, constraints which the theory of serious games will describe:

Common to all these forms of autotelic involvement is a matching ofpersonal skills against a range of physical or symbolic opportunities for

action that represent meaningful challenges to the individual

(Csikszentmihalyi 1988, 181). And so, performance provides a

differential potential for autotelic motivation depending on the


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opportunities for meaningful challenges to the participant, and also

depending on how the provided challenges match up with the

participants skills and expectations. Because of this differential, an

action, say participation in a collective ceremony, may be autotelic for

one individual and exotelic for his neighbor.

Autotelic motivation creates a particular form of experience.This experience Csikszentmihalyi calls flow, a term derived from a

common element found in many descriptions of it17. According to him,

highly autotelic actions tend to reduce the participants awareness of

time and of self. Similarly, the above encounters described by

Erving Goffman create the selective inattention of concepts such as

time and self:

A visual and cognitive engrossment occurs, with an honest unawareness of

matters other than the activity; what Harry Stack Sullivan called selective

inattention occurs, with an effortless dissociation from all other events,

distinguishing this type of unawareness both from suppression and

repression. (Goffman 1961, 38; after Sullivan)

With all this selective inattention, one might be led to suspect that

autotelic actions were confused, random behaviors. Quite the

contrary. These actions involve intense attention to a perceived set of

well defined concepts, rules, and behaviors. Activities such as rock

climbing and performing surgeryboth of which have been described

as providing deep flow experiencesrequire intense attention to

immediate circumstances (Csikszentmihalyi 1975).

17According to Csikszentmihalyi, the greater the perceived risk, the wider the

symbolic arena of activityup to the point where the individual feels preempted from

entering the activity because her personal skills cannot possibly meet the challengesinvolvedthe more profound the flow experience will be. Furthermore, flow is

apparently not entirely a quantitatively measurable experience: one experience of

an extremely deep flow nature is thus not equitable to several shallow flow

experiences. Deep flow, once experienced, is apparently extremely psychologically

addictive (1975, 138). He also adds that flow experiences organize experience in

evolutionarily important ways (1988, 15-35).


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The Mask of Ideology

Many actions seem to be paradoxically autotelic and exotelic.

The paradox is real, for there is always a friction between these types

of motivation. For example, actions that are motivated by coercion

(and are by that exotelic) sometimes also offer the structures of

activity that create the potential for autotelic involvement. [The actualstructure of such an action is that of a sub-game (autotelically

motivated) within a larger game, where the individual is coerced by the

larger game into the performance of the sub-game. More about this

later.] The explanation is a psychological one. The individual actually

forgets (remembers to forgetthe game is there to remind him to

remember to forget) the original coercion in favor of participation in

the event for the events own sakejust as though his participation

were originally autotelically motivated. Involuntariness gives way to

voluntary participation18. The notion of voluntariness is itself

problematized, since both a positive goal direction and a negative

punishment can be seen as forms of coercion. This describes a

primary effect of institutions that provide autotelic experiences for

ideological ends: these experiences mask other, exotelic factors.

A horrorific and extreme example of this comes from a study of

prisoners (and from his own experiences) in Nazi concentration camps

by Bruno Bettelheim. Bettelheim (1960) writes that the result of the

involvement of the prisoner in the event of his own imprisonment and

18 Weeden describes this process in terms of the formation of the engendered

subject: The crucial point for the moment is that in taking on a subject position, theindividual assumes that she is the author of the ideology or discourse she is

speaking. She speaks or thinks as if she were in control of meaning. She imagines

that she is indeed the type of subject which humanism proposesrational, unified,

the source rather than the effect of language. It is the imaginary quality of the

individuals identification with a subject position which gives it so much psychological

and emotional force (1987, 31)


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torture, was a personality structure willing and able to accept SS

values and behavior as its own. (169 [reported in Giddens19, 126]).

What I call risky games, (See: below) are another example of the

psychological force of flow experiences. Such games are voluntary

from the start but they engender inherently serious risks to the

participants. From sadomasochism to sky diving, people putthemselves into potentially lethal contexts to create a deep experience

of flow.

Flow creating actions commonly include sequences of events

that: a) engender immediate challenges (risks); b) demand a level of

mental and/or physical participation; and c) reward this participation

with a corresponding level of flow. Thus the effort to meet the

challenges20 provided by the flow event is matched with an immediate

sense of pleasure/satisfaction. Such actions are performed and

19 Giddens (1979) discusses how this engrossment works in the behavior of a

mob, as an example of what he terms critical situations. Such situations are

distinguishable as radical disturbances of the day-to-day life in routine settings

(123). Following Freud, he points out that these situations trigger a regressive

reidentification with the event (and particularly with leaders in the event). This

regressive form of object-affiliation is highly ambivalent, however, as it can rapidly

swing from a positive (and serious) identification to negative (still serious) rejection

(127). Todays Great Leader is tomorrows sacrificial lamb. He then notes that this

scenario is true not only for concentration camps and mobs, but for the

psychological dynamics of social movements... (ibid, emphasis in the original.)

Critical situations are thus not extraordinary in their organization, but simply more

pronounced in the contrasts of selective inattention they promote.

20The greater the perceived risk, the wider the symbolic arena of activityup to thepoint where the individual feels preempted from entering the activity because her

personal skills cannot possibly meet the challenges involvedthe more profound the

flow experience will be. Furthermore, flow is apparently not entirely a quantitatively

measurable experience: one experience of an extremely deep flow nature is thus

not equitable to several shallow flow experiences. Deep flow, once experienced, is

apparently extremely psychologically addictive (Csikszentmihalyi 1975, 138).


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repeated in order to achieve and renew this experience. Participation

is its own reward, and performance is the requirement.

Attitude

That such actions always prescribe what must be paid attention

to, and what mustnotbe paid attention to brings us to the role of

attitude in serious game theory, and a major contribution that this

theory makes in articulating the processes of ideology. Attitude, as

this is mapped into the serious game theory, also makes one central

distinction: that of an attitude of seriousness, characterized by careful

attention, and that of triviality, characterized by careful inattention or

denial. Attention is itself a combination of attraction and avoidance;

that is, attention can be defined positively or negatively21.

Sanctions against a behavior or object create attention to its

avoidance. Sanctions are never explicitlyapplied to what is trivial. As

it is not taken seriously, the trivial cannot be acclaimed as a threat.

We will see, however, that failure to follow any of the games rules

even by overt attention to trivialitycan result in expulsion from the

gamebut perhaps in a different manner than an expulsion because of

transgression of an announced sanction. It is perhaps the difference

between insanity and criminality, between the asylum and the prison,

which is a fine difference at that. Attention to the trivial is seen as an

aberrance, rather than a transgression.

A scheme of attitudes

21 Like the world of the trivial, the world of the negative-but-serious was long left

out of functional descriptions of cultures perhaps because of the notion that the

negative-but-serious aspects were actually parts of the individuals psyche, rather

than fully part of public (sometimes less obviously so) actions. This refusal of

anthropology to admit psychology now seems quite arbitrary and short-sighted.


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Games (serious and otherwise, and you can also read

ideologies here) demand that we pay attention to what is serious

(S1), and that we treat as serious what we are told to pay attention to

(S2) (note that these are not the same demands). Money and

patriotism are good examples. Money is serious, and as such it

demands our attention (S1). We are also told to be patriotic (S2)topay attention, and to take patriotism seriously: no irony is allowed

among true patriots. Conversely, games demand that we do not pay

attention to what is trivial(T1), and that we treat as trivial what we are

told not to pay attention to (T2) (these are also two quite distinct

demands). The game is stabilized because it offers a maximal flow

experience for those players who voluntarily follow its demands, who

become engrossed in the game and lose whatever external

perspective that might deflect their correct attitude.

Given the basic demands of the game there are four main

attitudinal stances a participant might have toward the serious aspects

of a game: they can bepakka players, those who follow all the rules

(+S1,+S2); dilettantes, who play the game, but not seriously (+S1,-

S2); dissidents, who play the game against itself (-S1,+S2); and the

avant garde, who deny the game, but still play by its rules (-S1,-S2)22.

There are also four more stances, based upon the attitudes toward the

trivial aspects of the games demands: (+T1,+T2; -T1,+T2; +T1,-T2; -T1,-

22 These fit rather well into Calinescus discussion of modernism. Thepakka players

are the modernists, convinced that they control the future; the dilettantes are into

decadence (an attitude that requires the absence of attention to the boundariesbetween the serious and the trivial); the dissidents are doing kitch and camp (turning

the trivial into the serious and vice versa); and the avant garde is out there

pretending to lead the course of social change, while playing the same game as the

modernists. Of course, the post modernists are opting out of the game altogether, a

stance that looks from various perspectives as any one of the three non-pakka

stances.


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T2). These, we might call respectively the trivial stances of thepakka

player, the skeptic, the deviant, and the clown. Because they take

place in the realm of the trivial, these stances have escaped much

notice and differentiation. For example, studies of culture have

generally not probed the areas of denial that the culture demands.

These are the various marginal positions heretofore relegated tofootnoted descriptions of deviance and farce. The potential for the

world of the trivialthe locus of resistance to the serious gameto

affect the world of the serious has not been sufficiently explored.

Serious game theory brings this dynamic to the fore (and it will be

further explored below).

When combined with the first four attitudinal stances, attitudes

toward the trivial describe a fairly complex range of possible attitudes

toward any aspect of any possible game. There are thus sixteen basic

stances that an individual might have toward a whole game. It should

be noted that to be a player in thepakka sense is only one23 of these

sixteen. This attitude, which I call an attitude of orthoposture is also

a factor in the successful completion of the current game encounter,

and in the players ability to enter future similar encounters. The

orthopostural attitude is that of spontaneous involvement directed as

what is serious for the game, and an equal neglect of what is trivial

within the game. The central task of ideology is to guarantee the

orthopostural attitude of all its players.

Players, Pawns, and Strangers

23All other psychological stances are dangerous to the completion of current game

event, or to conservation of the current game rules. The most dangerous player of

all is the avant garde clown. (These are also the players most likely to be fitted for

straight jackets.)


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A player, as Goffman uses the term does not include everyone

physically within the game space (1961, 36). There is another, more

general level of participation open to individuals, that ofparticipant. A

player is a participant who is empowered by the rules of the game to

makeplays. (Aplayis any action that effects the state of the game.)

In the game of chess there are two players who make plays usingpieces on a board.

In order to be empowered as a player, a participant must be

chosen to fill a required game role, and must enter this role with that

attitude of voluntary and spontaneous involvement that was described

above. Because of this, an individual can be a player in only one game

at any time. This is quite important, since (as will be presented below)

some games have hierarchical levels of sub-games. A player in a sub-

game is never simultaneously a player in the larger game.

There are two types of non-player individuals who might also be

within the localized game space, and which I will term thepawn and

the stranger. A pawn, as the term suggests, is really nothing more

than a participant that fills the role of a piece of equipmenta part of

the contextin the play of the game. If this brings to mind regal

levantine chess games where servants are dressed as pieces and

ordered about on a courtyard-sized board, then the notion has been

correctly understood. A stranger is someone who is not involved in the

play of the game, but who finds or puts himself within the physical

context of the game. As a rule, strangers bring dangers, as they tend

to distract players by their unaware, inappropriate behavior or bysuggestions for alternate games.

Since their role is to create the action of the game, players are

vitally important for the success of the game. A game fails mainly

when its players lose their spontaneous involvement in its play.


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Certainly, problems with the context of the action, including mistakes

by pawns and distractions of strangers can contribute to a dis-

engrossment of the players and the premature end of the current

game event. In the end it is still the role of the players to determine

whether the game will continue to its normative closure. Even the

premature death of players, while this might end the current event,would not prevent the next occurrence of the game from selecting a

new set of players.

It should also be noted that only the players experience the

euphoria/flow of the game. A corollary to this is that players in sub-

games experience a lower level of flow than players in the main

game24. One possible outcome of this corollary is that players in lower-

level games (who are thus pawns in the higher level games) should be

susceptible to invitations of other, higher-level games that offer deeper

flow opportunities. An example of this is perhaps the lure of the drug

culture, or the inducements of religions that promise more attractive

afterlives.

Pawns require no prescribed attitudinal involvement (they

provide docile bodies that serve a functional role), and can be pawns

at different games at the same time. In fact, a player at a sub-game is

simultaneously at most a pawn in the larger game. For example, the

ticket-holding audience of a sporting event are pawns in that they are

allowed into the co

nations, spaces, and ruling serious games

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