More on Games
Continued from this.
Luke P:
First, I am not speaking about games in a universal sense. However, I have found myself wondering recently if there might not be some connection between the creation of a game and other kinds of creation: say, a work of literature. I wonder if man as a game-maker is not perhaps a sub-category of man as maker. Perhaps the man who creates a game is in this sense fulfilling something in his nature. I think of the Mayans and (I think) the native Americans playing lacrosse. Both of these games were somehow sacred to the gods. I would imagine there are other examples of this. And it would mirror the early place of poetry recitations within ritualistic worship. I’m not trying to sacralyze the production of games, but I am suggesting that, in Christian terms, a piece of the imago dei is man as a sub-creator.
Next, I think of those playing a professional sport. I have a good friend who is a soccer fanatic. Over the course of a year living with him, I had plenty of opportunities for him to try to explain the “beauty” of soccer and illustrate his explanation with footage. What I am willing to grant him for all his trouble is that any game (competitive ones, at least) can have internal criteria for judging its playing. So we can call a baseball player a good hitter, on the one hand, simply by looking at his batting average, but those who devote themselves to the game can break down certain hitting techniques that simply work well. These techniques are internal goods, and they can even in some cases be considered “beautiful.” But notice that beauty here becomes somehow entangled with the characteristics of the game in question (i.e. a beautiful stroke, putt, pass, etc.). I’ll extend my correlation here to say that these techniques, good, bad, or indifferent, correspond to styles in works of art. As I understand painting, writing, and music, once we grant some basic involvement in an artistic tradition (i.e. vague familiarity with the diatonic scale, competence in a certain language, etc.), there are certain things one can do with techniques that can be effective or ineffective. Diagonal lines move the eye and rhymes pique the memory, for example. And it seems to me that style, which in both sports and art I am making a means, can become good or even beautiful in relation to how effectively it furthers a purpose. But here the analogy breaks down, for in sports and many games we usually know the purpose beforehand. But in art we often must discern the purpose as we go. Or if one dislikes the term purpose, then I suggest that one discerns how the various techniques all work together to create some unified structure (and I use unity as a merely formal term, for the “unity” of a work of modern art may well be creating the impression of chaos).
Lastly, and I should mention that this was actually the starting point for my thought, we have man in relation to a game not as a maker or a player, but as a spectator. This is the aspect that troubles me most, especially about modern professional sports. I can’t help thinking that the appeal of watching some sports is invaded by the negative phenomenon of spectacle: A fiery Nascar crash, a particularly hard foul, or any number of legal plays in football. The lust for this type of thing especially reminds me of the Roman gladiator fights, beast hunts, and naumachia. But there is another aspect of spectating that also seems negative: that of vicarious identification. It simply seems wrong that I see folks actually become depressed when the Eagles lose a football game. And I suppose that to be even-handed I should deprecate the elation of having a favorite team win. The involvedness of a spectater in a sport seems in most cases ersatz. But perhaps this is only a symptom of man’s innate need for communal connection being displaced from real community onto the only kind of community available.
How is the vicarious aspect in a spectator sport any different from that when you watch a film, read a novel, or recite an epic poem — or even, to evoke the religious, the participation in the Eucharist — an event that is in some senses more popular than any of the above? I suggest that one distinguishing feature is the extent to which one participates in mass emotion — that is, where the experience is shaped by the environment, also the extent to which the individual emerges as an individual. To explain further, various of the above forms ask more or less of their participants. Even though it is a guided experience, the novel requires that we exercise our own, often visual imagination, whereas a picture, and indeed, a near continuous succession of still images, impresses the sensory faculties in the same fashion as a gladiatorial spectacle or the court of Mayan kings.
Can man emerge from this spectacle something more than a spectator? Only, I believe, by rejecting the images upon which it is built as nothing more than images. I continue to believe in a progression of the arts, of which poetry is in a sense the most difficult to parse and create, because it can (or in my view, should) make the claim to some necessary linkage with truth — also with that which by definition cannot be stated. I have also, however, a growing sympathy and interest in the visual arts.
Back to games. Would you say that only the creation of the game is an act of sub-creation (via Tolkien I assume) or can the playing also be such?
