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Abstract
Here I examine Bernard Suits’s definition of games and explain why that definition is in need of reference to representation or, put more generally, to semiosis. And, once admitting the necessity of the representational in games, Suits’s definition must also then admit the essential paradoxy of games.
Notes
1. Suits’s distinction between role play and game play emphasizes his separate understandings of game play and play more generally. As a consequence, there is some potential conflation, at least from Suits’s point of view, in this essay’s references to game play, about which Suits writes persuasively and influentially, and its references to play, about which Suits writes less. Suits (Citation1977) certainly draws a very clear distinction -- a logical independence -- between these two. However, as advanced by Morgan (Citation2008) and repeated by Ryall (Citation2011), this distinction seems ‘odd’. Most commonly, perhaps, the distinction between game play and play is not held to be that between different genera, nor between different species, nor even between different breeds -- such as, for instance, the difference between poodles and chihuahuas. This difference is held to be more that between the dog in the field and the dog on a leash. As such, game play is a restrained form of play more generally. And, to the extent that this restraint might be spelled out by game rules and enforced by, say, a lusory attitude governing the representation and interpretation of game rules, this relationship between play and game play might seem amenable to Suits’s presentation. But Suits (Citation1977) makes it clear that this is not so. While I do not wish to put Suits’s definition of play to direct and immediate test, I would expect, in another essay with an argument drawn along lines similar to this one, that what is said here of the semiotic properties and necessities of game play might apply equally to play more generally.
2. Let me explain briefly further. To place the golf ball in the golf hole is trivial but for arbitrary restrictions imposed by the rules of golf. Yet the rules of golf are not arbitrarily derived from human behavior in toto, but rather from the comparatively narrow set of human behavior that results in placing a ball in a hole. In fact, we can identify definitional characteristics of this set -- human, ball, hole -- that are identical for all set members. In this sense, then, each member of this set, efficacious or otherwise, within a game or otherwise, is imitative of the other. Given Suits’s definition of games, the only circumstance allowing for a non-imitative lusory attitude would seem to be a circumstance in which a more efficient means of achieving game goals does not exist. No, in fact, more than this: a circumstance in which a more efficient means of achieving game goals is non-existent and inconceivable.
3. This is based on a notion of formal mimicry: one that is divorced from any further use to which that mimicry might be put. That is, it is not necessary that any mimicry employed by games reference the object of its mimicry (even if it could subsequently be used to do so). This distinguishes mimicry of this formal sort from, among other sorts, reproduction and satire. The reproduction is a mimicry governed by the function of substitution; the satire is a mimicry governed by the function of value assignation. Thus, while a reproduction may be said to be ‘imitative’ of its original, and while a satire may be said to be ‘imitative’ of its object of ridicule, a more fundamentally ‘imitative’ form need not be so purposeful as these. Indeed, the disassociation of imitative forms within games from any external-to-the-game referents seems a critical property of formal mimicry and, correspondingly, a lusory attitude.
4. In order to speculate that Suits’s lusory attitude is a ‘base state’, it is necessary to refer to its applicability beyond the relatively restricted contexts of games, game rules, and game play. This is indeed the speculative part.