Topic: games
Thesis: we play games to learn, to explore, and to escape. Social fictions, as a kind of conflicted game, mediate power in society; but we can imagine a society without coercive power, one whose social fictions are truly games.
This post is a follow-up to “What’s in a game?” [self-link]. In that post, I laid out a particular definition of a game with a view to creating a dialogue with James P. Carse’s idea of games. Now, in parallel with Carse, let’s look at how my definition can be used to map out the broader world.
If we can answer the question of what a game is by defining it as an activity that exchanges freedom for security—that is, an activity where the player limits their own available choices in exchange for guarantees about what’s at stake—then a natural follow-up question emerges: what is a game for? What justifies a game’s existence?
This question is underscored by an implicit truth: for a game to function properly as a game, its underlying exchange must be guaranteed. Once players have agreed to the restrictions on their behaviour, someone must ensure the security the players are to receive in return. Thus in addition to players, all games must also have guarantors—those who invest effort in holding the game to its underlying contract.
In many sports, the guarantors are obvious: they’re the ones in black-and-white striped shirts. In a computer game, the guarantors are the ones who develop and patch it. In board and card games, some or all of the players take on a dual role as guarantors. In spontaneous, open-ended play, each player is the guarantor of play as they understand it, and their only recourse in a dispute of fairness is to end play.
Why invest the effort of guaranteeing a game?
The motives for serving as guarantor are diverse, but they all trace back to the most fundamental value that games produce. By constraining action and outcome, games create a narrower version of reality. When a player inhabits this narrower version of reality, things that otherwise would be insignificant grow in importance and therefore in creative potential.
A carved horse figurine is of little importance unless viewed from the game of chess. From that perspective, however, a properly positioned knight can be the difference between victory and defeat.
Depending on the player and the game, the narrowing of reality can have many advantages:
Fun. With the elements of play separated from the rest of reality, things lack their usual weight. Spin the Bottle makes light of kissing, which might otherwise be terrifying to a youngster. Play-fighting makes light of real fighting, which might otherwise involve killing and maiming.
Learning. Intentionally or no, games often simulate what is outside of them. Players may learn skills inside games that are applicable outside the game, even skills that would otherwise be extremely risky to learn, like how to survive a high-speed car chase. They may also learn more general skills like keeping a cool head under stress, or how to read another person’s intentions.
Exploration. By narrowing reality, a game allows the player to follow the consequences of its rules farther than would ever be possible outside the game. To go back to the example of chess: the space of legal chess games is enormous, but it is nothing compared to the space of illegal chess games, the ones created by a gust of wind, a misplaced arm, a leaping dog. Only by guaranteeing chess, by holding its inner reality stable, can we explore the enormous space it offers.
Something similar can be said about such a game as Minecraft, how it enables exploration of a quasi-architectural space unconstrained by labour, gravity, material strength, scarcity, or natural disasters.Status. This is a value of games that Carse puts a tight focus on in Finite and Infinite Games. A competitive game decides winners and losers. To win at games that society deems important is to gain status within society. Society may choose a game as a way for players to showcase a skill the society deems valuable: skill at chess is seen as a signal of superior intellect, skill at boxing as a signal of physical dominance. This is based on the belief that the game, by cutting away much of the chaos and noise of ordinary reality, enables the audience to more easily distinguish luck from skill.
Reward. Similarly to status, some games have material prizes for the winners.
Entertainment. Some games are played for the benefit of spectators.
At this point, perhaps we can see a parallel between games and contracts. Both need guarantors in order to be meaningful. In a contract, parties agree to restrictions in exchange for guarantees from other parties; a game is the same. In fact, by this definition, a game is a kind of contract. What separates a game from a contract is that games specify a way of acting and thinking: not just a series of restrictions but an inner reality that flows within the restrictions. As a further requirement, a way of acting and thinking must also be escapable—it must be possible to cancel it with no more than a pre-agreed cost—else it is not a game. This restriction does not always apply to contracts.
There is another, broader analogy: that between games and social fictions. Social fictions include things like money, the law, status, states, nations—and, indeed, contracts. Social fictions exist in the sense that members of some society act and think as if they were real. Just like a game, a social fiction restricts behaviour and offers guarantees in return: obey the law and enjoy its protection; take other people’s dollars as payment and they will accept yours. Just like a game, a social fiction weakens, and becomes more liable to rejection, when its guarantees fail.
Unlike games, social fictions are usually coercive: it carries harsh penalties to violate the norms of a social fiction. Indeed, for most social fictions, the penalty is the point: the punishment that comes to one who breaks the law is exactly the reward of one who follows it. Hence, a person may mentally opt out from treating social fictions as real, but they cannot opt out from the stakes that society imposes.
This brings me to an important difference I have with Carse. Carse makes no distinction between games played for fun and social fictions considered as games. You might think this is because he disagrees on the definitional point of whether a game is something one might be coerced into playing, but our definitions do agree on that point: per Carse, “Who must play, cannot play.” Rather, in his terminology, a social fiction is a kind of finite game; and, while we are coerced into social fictions, the choice of whether to yield to that coercion is ultimately our own.
Carse illustrates this with perhaps the most extreme example possible: the social role of slavery. A slave’s fiction is that he is owned and must obey the one who owns him. He can reject this fiction, but only at the cost of his life. Yet still the choice to play the role of slave is his own, because he has the freedom to prefer death.
I can concede a grain of truth to this statement: there is a difference between the enslaved person who sees himself as a slave and the enslaved person who sees himself as a free human who chooses to play the role of slave only as long as the alternatives are worse. In Carse’s terminology, the former is a finite player of a finite game; the latter, an infinite player of a finite game. Yet when enslavement is the “game” in question, that description reads to me like a cruel joke, and I struggle to believe that, if neither are freed, the infinite player of enslavement is in any way better off than the finite one.
My disagreement with Carse on this point is on the level of emotional valence and semantics: what I call a social fiction he calls a finite game, but the basic logic is the same. We also agree, in broad terms, that a society is a patchwork of social fictions, and that those who perform best in the contests of those fictions are also the most motivated to defend society—that is, to serve as guarantors of its social fictions (i.e. games), and to hide the element of choice that is their boundary.
We differ again on the concept of power. Carse’s definition of the term is somewhat esoteric: he states that power consists in the general recognition that a certain player of a finite social game is already the winner, whether by having ended the game outright or by possessing dominance that is obvious beyond challenge. To my mind, this misses something obvious: that power inheres in the ability to change the rules of social fictions, to carve out convenient exceptions, even to rewrite a society’s fictions entirely. That is: the one who holds power in a society is the one with the capacity to rewrite the rules of society’s coercion.
Cynicism, in the contemporary sense, can be defined as a rejection of all social fictions, a mode of analysis that sees social fictions only as vehicles for power—dispensing with the fiction itself and seeing only the obedience of the ruled to the ruler. There is always considerable truth to cynicism; embedded as we are in the social games of our society, it is a corrective we all need. Yet absolute cynicism also misses something of the complex relationship between the powerful and the games that serve as proof of their power.
In Carse’s terms, power to rewrite the rules of a society can still be considered a type of finite game: in this case society itself is the game, i.e., the power relation that governs such-and-such a population inside such-and-such a boundary. In Carse’s vocabulary, the coercive nature of society is what makes it a finite game, opposed to the infinite game of culture (which in Carse’s vocabulary is a thing always fluid, always creative, where no boundary is final). In my vocabulary, the coercive nature of society is what makes it a conflicted game. It may be a game to those who wield the greatest part of its power, but not a game to the subaltern, those who are thrust to its edges and pinned beneath its hegemony.
Which is more important to a society: the social fictions that hold it together, or the powerful individuals who control the social fictions? To answer this, remember that a society is only as strong as the commitment of its people; and consider that there are three basic reasons a person might maintain their commitment to a social fiction:
They benefit from it
They face intolerable consequences if they reject it
They believe it: it makes sense to them, they prefer to understand the world on its terms.
The powerful person may be able to rewrite social fictions for their own benefit, but when they do so they threaten the people’s commitment. If the laws of society seem like a sham, the only reason remaining to commit to the laws is to seek reward or avoid punishment; but if the powerful person consumes all the rewards and punishes indiscriminately, no reason remains. The powerful person will be deposed or the society will crumble, its visions erased by collective disbelief.
By the same token, the flow of power is not always from individuals to visions. Sometimes it is from visions to individuals. The revolutionary is powerful not because of his status, but because he symbolises a world, an order, that many want to see. Thus, the most powerful people in society tend to be the ones who embody the dominant social fictions: they model, sincerely or no, the life of one who believes them all. And it is precisely because of this identification of a body with a fiction that the body may then direct the fiction along a willfully altered course.
Carse’s main point and most valuable insight about society is that its constructs, whether we call them games, contracts, or fictions, are voluntary: we may not be able to escape a society’s incentives and deterrences, but we can always choose whether to adopt its fictions. Moreover, if we do choose to adopt the fiction, we may or may not hide this choice from ourselves. If we hide that choice—if we become finite players in Carse’s terminology—we lose the fullest recognition of our own agency.
Indeed, I suspect that power itself, in any society, does not go to those who view that society’s fictions as immutable and real. To wield power, a person must not only be able to perceive the fictions but also to see through them to other possibilities, dormant fictions that might come to life to serve the needs of a new world. This cannot be done if the powerful person does not have some sense of himself outside the fictions that define his specific social identity.
The concept of the powerful person contrasts in crucial ways with Carse’s notion of the infinite player. The wielding of power is not unlike Carse’s idea of play: power, too, is creative, is alive to the malleability of all existing rules. But, in a society founded on coercion, power is also destructive. It suspends the play of those it coerces: “Who must play, cannot play.”
In a society not founded on coercion, where all social fictions are adopted and discarded freely—this is, as far as I can tell, the meaning of the term anarchy—power is nothing more than effective playfulness. The most powerful player is merely the one who plays the most, whose fictions invite the most creative participation. Power in this society is unstable. Its symbol is not the barrel of a gun or the edge of a blade, but an outstretched hand.
We have created a portrait of games as they model society. Whether they are truly games or social fictions is a choice of terminology. In either case, the logic is the same: one can reject the constraints or embrace them. If one embraces them, one can learn their way of being; by learning their way of being, one can gain status; by gaining status, one may be able to rewrite them. Or, by rejecting them, one might be able to create a separate or secret society whose foundation is not coercive.
This is one part of how we might think of games. The other, and the one that I believe was closer to Carse’s heart, is how we might use them to understand the individual. Can my life be a game? Would it be better thus? That is the question we will turn to in the next segment.
Recap of Terms
Guarantor: the role of keeping a game secure, that is, making sure that outcomes stay bounded by the promised stakes.
Social fiction: something that members of a society tacitly agree to treat as true.
Social game: a game embedded in a society’s social fictions: those who play it best earn status in society (think money, public office, philanthropy).
Cynicism: a way of understanding society that disregards the language of social fictions and focuses only on power.
Anarchy: a social system where participation in social fictions is not coerced.