Roger Caillois
trans. Meyer Barash
Man, Play and Games (1961)
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CHAPTER V
Toward a Sociology Derived
from Games
For a long time the study of games has been scarcely more than the history of games. ... There was no thought of attributing the slightest cultural value to them. ... Thus, weapons fallen into disuse become toys... [or] originally were magical devices. A number of other games are equally based upon lost beliefs or reproduce in a vacuum rites
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that are no longer significant. ...
Huizinga, however, in his key work Homo Ludens, published in 1938, defends the very opposite thesis, that culture is derived from play. ...
A truly opposite thesis would not merely invert the absolutism of the first but rather argue a more nuanced line.
The two theses are almost entirely contradictory.
I would say instead that they are complementary.
... In one case games are systematically viewed as a kind of degradation of adult activities that are transformed into meaningless distractions when they are no longer taken seriously. In the other case, the spirit of play is the source of the fertile conventions that permit the evolution of culture.
This sounds very...complementary.
...
I believe that it is possible to resolve the contradiction. The spirit of play is essential to culture, but games and toys are historically the residues of culture.
Yes.
Misunderstood survivals of a past era or culture traits borrowed from a strange culture and deprived of their original meaning seem to function when re-
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moved from the society where they were originally established.
In other words, when they are appropriated.
Appropriation can be good. I would say it is essential, actually. Much "appropriated" culture not only seems to function when detached from its original meaning ; it also fills new roles and meet new needs, some (not all) of which are as important (while probably also differently important) to the appropriator.
Of course the devil is in the details...
They are now merely tolerated, whereas in the earlier society they were an integral part of its basic institutions, secular or sacred.
What could be so great about being merely tolerated as opposed to being an integral part ? Doesn't everybody want and need to be a part of something?
Of course we do, but people are not games, nor are they symphonies, nor hair styles. The only commonality among such cultural productions is that they can be appropriated.
Not everything about a person can be appropriated. When who you are is your hair or your symphony, though, you could be in a tough spot, or you could be reveling in that imitation which is the sincerest form of flattery. The latter would be more generous towards all the other people who think they want to be that hair or that symphony too, though admittedly that is a pretty weird thing to want in the first place.
At that time, to be sure, they were not games, in the sense that one speaks of children's games, but they already were part of the essence of play, as correctly defined by Huizinga. Their social function changed, not their nature. The transfer or degradation that they underwent stripped them of their political and religious significance. But this decadence only reveals, when isolated, what is basically the structure of play .
So, we can be thankful for the revelation. But it can come only at the cost of decadence ?
... The first and no doubt the most remarkable example is the mask—a sacred object universally present, whose transformation into a plaything perhaps marks a prime mutation in the history of civilization. ... The greasy pole is related to myths of heavenly conquest, football to the conflict over the solar globe by two opposing phratries. ... [etc., etc.]
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...
...
Games of chance have been associated with divination in the same way games of strength or skill or riddle contests had probative value in the enthronement rituals for an important responsibility or ministry. The real game is often sadly bereft of its sacred origins. ...
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...
...
... there is hardly a game which may not appear to specialized historians as the last stage in the gradual decline of a solemn and decisive activity that used to be tied to the prosperity or destiny of individuals or communities. I ask myself nevertheless whether such a doctrine, which persists in regarding every game as the ultimate and humiliating metamorphosis of a serious activity, is not fundamentally erroneous , to wit, a pure and simple optical illusion which does not resolve the problem.
... we are not at all certain that prehistoric children might not have been playing with bows, slingshots, and pea-shooters "for fun" at the same time that fathers used them "for real,"...
This observation is no less valid for the sacred than for the profane. Kachinas are semidivinities that are the principal object of piety among the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico. This does not prevent the same adults, who revere and reincarnate them in the course of masked dances, from making dolls resembling them for the amusement of their children. ...
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...
...
There are grounds for suspecting that children's games are not a degradation of serious activities, but rather that two different levels are simultaneously involved. ... Today children play soldiers without armies' having disappeared. ...
To pass to adult activities, tournaments are games, wars are not. ...one can be killed in a tournament, but only accidentally,...
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...roulette is a game, but playing the market is not, even though the risk is no less. The difference is that in the former case it is forbidden to influence the outcome, whereas in the latter there is no limit on manipulation except the fear of scandal or prison.
Through this approach, it is seen that play is not at all a meaningless residue of a routine adult occupation, although it eventually perpetuates a counterfeit of adult activity after the latter has become obsolete. Above all, play is a parallel, independent activity, opposed to the acts and decisions of ordinary life by special characteristics appropriate to play . These I have tried to define and analyze at the outset.
...it must not be forgotten that adults themselves continue to play complicated, varied, and sometimes dangerous games, which are still viewed as games. Although fate and life may involve one in comparable activities, nevertheless play differs from these even when the player takes life less seriously than the game to which he is addicted. For the game remains separate, closed off, and, in principle, without important repercussions upon the stability and continuity of collective and institutional existence.
The many writers who persist in viewing games, especially children's games, as pleasant and insignificant activities, with little meaning or influence, have not sufficiently observed that play and ordinary life are constantly and universally antagonistic to each other . Such an error of perspective does have a moral. It surely shows that the history of games or their evolution through the ages —the destiny of a liturgy that ends in a roundelay, a magic instrument or object of worship that becomes a toy— is as remote from revealing their nature as are the scholars who have discovered these enduring and hazardous connections.
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In the end, the question of knowing which preceded the other, play or the serious, is a vain one . To explain games as derived from laws, customs, and liturgies, or in reverse to explain jurisprudence, liturgy, and the rules for strategy, syllogisms, or esthetics as a derivation of play, are complementary, equally fruitful operations provided they are not regarded as mutually exclusive .
This point deserves emphasis. Still, it is secondary.
What is primary? The explanation du jour cannot be fruitful if it is not true. It cannot be, as the author himself puts it above, a pure and simple optical illusion .
This challenge remains even for bidirectional, dynamic theories of play. Unless of course "truth content" or "explanatory power" is incidental to the purported need for an explanation in the first place, as it occasionally seems to be.
The structures of play and reality are often identical, but the respective activities that they subsume are not reducible to each other in time or place. They always take place in domains that are incompatible....when a culture evolves, what had been an institution may become degraded. A once-essential contract becomes a purely formal convention to be respected or neglected at will, because abiding by it is now an extra responsibility, a luxurious and charming survival, without repercussions upon the actual functoning of society. Gradually this reverence deteriorates to the level of simply a rule of the game. ... However, it must be remembered that the latter is ruled absolutely, without resistance, and like an imaginary world without matter or substance. In the confused, inextricable universe of real, human relationships, on the other hand, the action of given principles is never isolated, sovereign, or limited in advance. It
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entails inevitable consequences and possesses a natural propensity for good or evil.
In both cases, moreover, the same qualities can be identified:
The need to prove one's superiority
The desire to challenge, make a record, or merely overcome
an obstacle
The hope for and the pursuit of the favor of destiny
Pleasure in secrecy, make-believe, or disguise
Fear or inspiring of fear
The search for repetition and symmetry, or in contrast, the joy
of improvising, inventing, or infinitely varying solutions
Solving a mystery or riddle
The satisfaction procured from all arts involving contrivance
The desire to test one's strength, skill, speed, endurance, equi-
librium, or ingenuity
Conformity to rules and laws, the duty to respect them, and
the temptation to circumvent them
And lastly, the intoxication, longing for ecstasy, and desire for
voluptuous panicThese attitudes and impulses, often incompatible with each other, are found in the unprotected realm of social life, where acts normally have consequences, no less than in the marginal and abstract world of play. But they are not equally necessary, do not play the same role, and do not have the same influence.
In addition, it is impossible to keep them in proper balance. They largely exclude one another. Where the ones are honored, the others are of necessity decried. Depending upon circumstances, one obeys the law or heeds the voice of unreason, relies on reason or inspiration, esteems violence or diplomacy, prefers merit or experience and wisdom or some unverifiable (hence indisputable) knowledge supposed to come from the gods. An implicit, inexact, and incomplete division is thus made in each culture between values that are regarded as socially efficacious and all others. The latter then spread into secondary domains
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which are abandoned to them, where play occupies an important place.
Here is a more nuanced version of the theory of "compensation."
......trying to define a culture by deriving it from games alone would be a rash and probably fallacious undertaking. In fact, every culture has and plays a large number of games of different kinds. ...it is clear that in Ancient Greece, the stadium games illustrate the ideal of the city and contribute to its fulfillment, while in a number of modern states national lotteries or parimutuels go against the professed ideal. Nevertheless they play a significant, perhaps indispensable, role to the precise degree that they offer an aleatory counterpart for the recompense that—in principle—work and merit alone can provide.
In all ways, because play occupies a unique domain the content of which is variable and sometimes even interchangeable with that of modern life, it is important first to determine as precisely as possible the special characteristics of this pursuit, which is regarded as proper for children, but which, when transformed, continues to seduce adults. This has been my first task.
At the same time, I must affirm that this supposed relaxation, at the moment that the adult submits to it, does not absorb him any less than his professional activity . It sometimes makes him exert even greater energy, skill, intelligence, or attention. This freedom and intensity , the fact that the behavior that is so exalting develops in a separate, ideal world, sheltered from any fatal consequence, explains in my view the cultural fertility of games and makes it understandable how the choice to which they attest itself reveals the character, pattern, and values of every society.
Well, sure. But already we're back to reading play for answers to questions which it answers multiply and ambiguously. The lottery example is well-chosen. To read this instance of play "correctly," we need to already know a good chunk of the answer to our question.
It must be said too/again that compensation seems like an overreach: it could be something more like "balance" or "equilibrium," which is concurrent/simultaneous, rather than mere "compensation" after the fact and in isolation. We are driven to the notion of "compensation," I would guess, only because the things we do for work nowadays have become so miserable, or are thought to have become so. Indeed, and especially if culture is defined as: all things beyond the barest necessity.
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Inasmuch as I am also convinced that there exist precise interrelationships of compensation or connivance in games, customs, and institutions, it does not seem to me unreasonable to find out whether the very destiny of cultures, their chance to flourish or stagnate, is not equally determined by their preference for one or another of the basic categories into which I have tried to divide games, categories that are not equally creative. In other words, I have not only undertaken a sociology of games, I have the idea of laying the foundations for a sociology derived from games.
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CHAPTER VI
An Expanded Theory
of Games
The basic attitudes governing play—competition, chance, simulation, and vertigo—are not always encountered in isolation. In many situations it is possible to observe that they are apt to unite their attractions. ...
...
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...a horse race, typical agôn for the jockeys, is at the same time a spectacle which, as such, stimulates mimicry and is also a pretext for betting, through which the competition is a basis of alea. Moreover, the three domains stay relatively autonomous. The principle of the race is not modified, by one's betting on the horses.
This is ideally. And even ideally it is a questionable assertion, since autonomy implies a certain equity which is not usually in evidence.
I assume it can safely be said of some such competitions that they are staged only so that spectators can bet on them, not the other way around. (Or if it is not true yet, it will be soon.) The competition may still be real, but it is hard to imagine total "autonomy" here; or at least it is hard-er if we are biased against the idea that the betting and not the competition is driving the enterprise. But this is a bias and not an analysis; and indeed, betting often has not enjoyed anything like autonomy. The example is in fact quite poorly chosen this time, for at present scale it takes great precautions to prevent "corruption" between these two areas. They could remain autonomous, but this is highly unlikely.
If this objection at the level of mass spectacle does not apply to most street-level activity, then that fact itself suggests that scale mediates autonomy; specifically, that by the time a competitive spectacle qua spectacle truly stimulates mimcry , "autonomy" is endangered. Seeing-and-being-seen is definitionally not autonomous.
...The principles in question do not blend, even in pairs, with equal facility. ...
...
1. Forbidden Relationships
In the first place, it is clear that vertigo cannot be associated with regulated rivalry, which immediately dilutes it. ...[73]
...
... Simulation and chance are no more susceptible to mixing. In fact, any ruse makes the turn of the wheel purposeless. It makes no sense to try to deceive chance. The player asks for a decision that assures him the unconditional favor of destiny. ...
2. Contingent Relationships
In contrast, alea may be associated harmlessly with vertigo, and competition with mimicry. In games of chance, it is indeed common knowledge that a special kind of vertigo seizes both lucky and unlucky players. They are no longer aware of fatigue and are scarcely conscious of what is going on around them. ...ilinx, which destroys agôn, does not at all rule out alea. It paralyzes, fascinates, and maddens the player, but does not in any way cause him to violate the rules of the game. ...[74]
...
There is an analogous relationship between agôn and mimicry. I have already had occasion to stress that every competition is also a spectacle . It unfolds according to identical rules, and with the same anticipation of the outcome. It requires the presence of an audience which crowds about the ticket windows of the stadium or velodrome just as at those of the theater and cinema. The competitors are applauded for each point they score. Their contest has its vicissitudes corresponding to the different acts or scenes in a drama. The point is finally reached where the champion and the star become interchangeable. The two tendencies are also compatible in this respect, for mimicry not only does no harm to agôn but reinforces it, since the competitors must not deceive the audience which acclaims and controls them. In the performance they are expected to do their best, i.e. on the one hand to exhibit perfect discipline and on the other to do their utmost to win.
This actually out-and-out contradicts Lasch. Here, observedness is accountability: the competitors must not deceive the audience which acclaims and controls them .
Again, Caillois is open to the objection that he has assumed an ideal audience which has never existed. It may exist, actually, at the lower levels of organized competition. But it does not exist at the mass level, where too much of the audience have something other than victory and defeat that is driving them to watch. e.g. There is a storm of ludic and spectatorial "corruption" gathering around the growth of women's sports, as a few perceptive and courageous commentators have pointed out.
3. Fundamental Relationships
The cases in which there is a basic compatibility between the principles of play remain to be described. Nothing is more noteworthy in this regard than the exact symmetry between the natures of agôn and alea: parallel and complementary. Both require absolute equity, an equality of mathematical chances of almost absolute precision. Admirably precise rules, meticulous measures, and scientific calculations are evident. However, the two kinds of games have opposite ways of designating the winner. ...[75]
...
In play and games, agôn and alea are regulated. Without rules, there can be no competitions or games of chance. At the other extreme, mimicry and ilinx equally presume a world without rules in which the player constantly improvises, trusting in a guiding fantasy or a supreme inspiration, neither of which is subject to regulation.
Well, again the "play" of theater would thus seem to have nothing to do with mimicry writ large, even though there is literal "mimicry" involved. Theater "players" are profoundly rulebound. They only appear unbound (it is perhaps the core of their mandate to appear unbound) to the audience. But Caillois does not seem to be describing the audience when he refers to theater as mimicry; and if he is, the possibility (conventionally, the likelihood) that this appearance is not only illusory but also contrary, this possibility would seem to demand its own accounting. (He does seem to be describing the audience when applying mimicry to spectacular competiton, so maybe I'm missing something.)
......
The combination of alea and agôn is a free act of will stemming from the satisfaction felt in overcoming an arbitrarily conceived and voluntarily accepted obstacle. The alliance of mimicry and ilinx leads to an inexorable, total frenzy which in its most
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obvious forms appears to be the opposite of play, an indescribable metamorphosis in the conditions of existence. The fit so provoked, being uninhibited, seems to remove the player as far from the authority, values, and influence of the real world,... The association of simulation and vertigo is so powerful and so inseparable that it is naturally part of the sphere of the sacred,...
The quality of such sorcery seems to me to be invincible, to the degree that I am not surprised that it has taken ages to free man from this illusion. This has been achieved by what is commonly called civilization. I believe that the attainment of civilization everywhere is the result of a kind of wager made under different conditions in various places. I will try, in this second part of the book, to speculate about the general lines of this decisive revolution. ...
This is either the skeleton key to understanding right-extremism or a textbook piece of midcentury ethnocentrism, depending on who it is being said about and by whom.
%% ... We have just seen that alea and agôn, like mimicry and ilinx, can be readily combined. However at the same time, within the mixture, it is remarkable that one of the elements in the compound is always active and creative and the other is passive and destructive.
Competition and simulation may and indeed do create cultural forms to which an educational or esthetic value is readily ascrib-
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able. Stable and influential institutions are frequently and almost inevitably derived from them. Regulated competition is in fact, equivalent to sports, and simulation, conceived as play, is nothing other than the theater. The pursuit of chance and vertigo, on the other hand, with rare exceptions leads to nothing and creates nothing that can be developed or established. It frequently happens that they paralyze, interrupt, or destroy.
It does not seem difficult to find the root of such inequality. ... alea and agôn express attitudes diametrically opposed with regard to the will. Agôn, the desire and effort to win a victory, implies that the champion relies upon his own resources. ... Alea, on the contrary, seems to be a foregone acceptance of the verdict of destiny. ...
Both of these are certainly symmetrical ways of assuring perfect equilibrium and absolute equity among the competitors. However, one involves a struggle of the will against external obstacles and the other entails submission of the will to a supposed omen. ...
In the chaotic universe of simulation and vertigo an identical polarity is confirmable. Mimicry consists in deliberate impersonation , which may readily become a work of art, contrivance, or
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cunning. The actor must work out his role and create a dramatic illusion. He is compelled to concentrate and always have his wits about him, just like the athlete in competition. Conversely in ilinx , in this regard comparable to alea, there is submission not only of the will but of the mind . The person lets himself drift and becomes intoxicated through feeling directed, dominated, and possessed by strange powers. To attain them, he need only abandon himself, since the exercise of no special aptitude is required.
Just as the peril in games of chance is to be unable to limit the stakes, in this case the danger lies in not being able to end the disorder that has been accepted. ... Games of simulation lead to the arts of the spectacle , which express and reflect a culture . The individual pursuit of anxiety and panic conquers man's discernment and will. He becomes a prisoner of equivocal and exalting ecstasies in which he believes that he is divine and immortal, ecstasies which in the end destroy him.
Thus, in each of the major combinations only one category of play is truly creative : mimicry in the conjuring of masks and vertigo and agôn in regulated rivalry and chance. The others are immediately destructive . They result in inordinate, inhuman, and irremediable excitations, a kind of frightening and fatal attraction, the import of which is to neutralize creative influence. In societies ruled by simulation and hypnosis, the result occurs at the moment when the spectacle borders on the trance, that is to say, when the sorcerer's mask becomes a theater mask. In societies based upon the combination of merit and chance, there is also an incessant effort, not always successful or rapid, to augment the role of justice to the detriment of that of chance. This effort is called progress.[79]
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