On being part of a game

ABSTRACT

What is it for someone to be part of a game? While significant work has been done on the concept of playing a game, less has been done on the concept of being part of a game. This paper will look at how someone’s status of being part of a game can be distinguished from their status of playing a game, and will then introduce a new taxonomy for the different ways in which someone can be part of a game.

KEYWORDS:

• Games
• gameplay
• definitions
• Suits

Acknowledgments

Thanks to my dissertation committee of Alastair Norcross, Garrett Bredeson, David Boonin, Chris Heathwood, and Nick Villanueva for their early questioning which led to this paper. Thanks also to Paul Gaffney and the anonymous reviewers from this journal who gave substantial feedback. And extra-special thanks to the late Bob Shor, whose selfless work as race starter and meet official helped generations of young people experience the joys of athletics.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. There are some, including later Suits (1988), who think that some sports such as 3-meter dive are not games, but rather are athletic performances. On this view, the judge couldn’t be part of the game because there is no game.

2. The exact relationship between referees and the state of the game, however, is not a clear or universally agreed upon one. For a fantastic discussion, see Griffioen (2015).

3. Yes, both examples are autobiographical, and they pain me to remember. But to be fair, much credit for the bonking in the first example is due to my own poor tactics early in the race, as well as my failure to prepare for such eventualities. The second example is more loosely based on real life, as the event that inspired it was fortunately a mere ~20km leg on an ~300km relay, leading to a significantly less impactful bonk. But certainly many others have experienced incredibly similar events in their games of marathon.

4. For a thorough discussion of some major moments in Major League Baseball history involving fans physically impacting a game, see Wade (2010). For a more general discussion of the phenomenon of a home field advantage due to less direct fan interaction, see Eveleth (2013).

5. While this may be in line with the rules of the sport, any real cross country runner knows that we should highly value mudders and grinders, and that the current US trend towards manicured courses is an affront to the spirit of cross country.

6. Thanks to Alastair Norcross for pointing out that in some games, such as cricket, there are grounds crews that work during the game as well. In such cases, we should say that the grounds crew is part of the game in the same way that a referee is part of the game if they are working for some neutral site, or that they are part of the game in the same way that a coach is part of the game if they are working for some home team.

7. While this holds when we are talking about specific game-instances of our typical games, there are games in which we would want to say that grounds crews can be part of the broader game despite seeming to act not during an obvious game-instance. Take for example the game of ‘NFL Football Playoffs,’ where some group of typical games of football are moves in the larger game of ‘NFL Football Playoffs.’ Actions such as those of the grounds crew and roster changes by coaches would not be pre-game with regards to this larger game, and would indeed count as moves in this larger game of ‘NFL Football Playoffs.’ For further discussion see Kolers (2015) and Wolf-Root (2018).

8. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting that I use the term ‘constitutive’ here. It is genuinely a much better term than the one I originally used!

9. For some discussions on different ways one can be a fan, see Dixon (2001) and Mumford (2013).