#95 PLAY

OH MY, THE GAMES WE PLAY

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

H

umanity’s propensity to play predates the inclination to live together in a singular culture.

Play today allows escape from the constraints of life limiting freedoms that have been reinforced over time with rules and policy to such an extent that spontaneous play within that culture now feels a lot like freedom.

One time though a long, long time ago, before the freedom limiting superstructure, spontaneous play was just the way people interacted.

In organized societies, sports replaces those prehistoric spontaneous events that provided opportunities to experience  freedom. Sports provides a place to gather where everyone agrees that the minimal number of rules encourages the greatest amount of play.

Once in a while during moments of sports there arises evidence that play without any rules of any sort clearly can lead to anarchy.

The popular definition of anarchy may be that something dangerous abounds, but anarchy may also mean merely, voluntary cooperation without an authoritarian overwatch.

The child the age of a toddler may be a bit of an anarchist while at play, more concerned about just having fun free-form style than having the slightest clue about rules. If there are more than one toddler at play within a finite space, voluntary play may deconstruct into a free-for-all, whereas anarchy may merely describe in some instances a purely free society without any political institutions making that freedom happen.

When authority speaks of freedom, that freedom is something less free than what an anarchist might invite. The toddlers on the other hand are merely experiencing spontaneous play still oblivious to any rules and policy about how many toddlers are allowed to free-form in the same space at any one time.

Authority figures must surely be grateful that the toddler years are short in duration and that children quickly learn that everyone are better off with rules, even within play, as part of life moving forward.

The professional athlete begins life in this way with just spontaneous toddler play that becomes more and more elaborate with more and more structure. One would think there would be less overwatch in sports than that which the helicopter parent provides to the toddler, but with the coach and the referee and ultimately at some point the spectators, there might be much more authority involved than just dear mom and dad.

After years of gradually learning the rules from those toddler years on, the rules of the game and the rules about training and about preparing for game day, the clearly identifiable talent eventually become stripped of all the masks for the one last rule to be learned.

Money makes the world go around. So, cash in.

Those chosen few talents that can cash in on their sports careers come to personify the purest form of capitalism when market forces turn an athlete with proven performance standards involved in play into a commodity.

The end game, is of course, participation in the spectacle, where the greatest amount of money can be made.

Even the spectator participates in the purest form of play present in society, with the spectacle providing a break from the mundane routine of an incessant day to day reality. But most of all, the greater the spectacle the greater the financial rewards.

The spectacle offers an opportunity to drop the work uniforms for a baseball cap and a sports jersey.

Even the demands of dependent family members are put on hold as they too of all ages become spectators of the spectacle. We can at least all agree to be spectators of the spectacle for a brief part of the day, especially with popcorn, hotdogs, nachos and beer involved in keeping everyone in their seats.

Spectacles come in all shapes and sizes with music concerts being the most commonly available alongside the movie blockbuster. The whole world seems on pause with millions and sometimes billions of spectators all tuned in at the same time over the same weekend to watch the sports spectacle.

Streaming spectacles bond an entire world in a singular moment, for that brief time watching play, regardless of the outcome.

BONDING AN ENTIRE WORLD IN A SINGULAR MOMENT

Spectacles do have rules of engagement. The first rule is that everyone should have the heads-up on Yankee concessions, with the Yankees charging $5.99 USD for a hotdog and 47 cents per ounce of beer to be enjoyed inside the stadium.

And baseball has that seventh inning stretch where everyone including people watching the game on television at home are given an opportunity to get up off their seats and take a walk to the kitchen to replenish snacks and drinks. Afterall, the last two innings can be the most exciting and may take the longest with the ever present possibility in clockless baseball of extra innings being added ad infinitum.

Play without any rules may be the purest form of freedom.

Spontaneous play creates joy from that instant break from the confinements of whatever you were doing that preventing you from play in the first place.

To play, there must still be rules of engagement. But spontaneous play leaves everything in the ether as long as everyone is enjoying the instantaneous moment of pure freedom.

Play without any rules may have spontaneous play devolve into chaos, though, much like politics leads to conflict, and then war to a lot of death and destruction.

Riots are something less than war and something more serious than play. But that element of merging spontaneity and spectacle seems to appeal to rioters. Following through with the definition of anarchy, riots are not episodic streaming anarchy. Nothing is voluntary about a riot.

Riots are still organized with rules of engagement. The police must construct a barricade that is meant to be confronted by the rioters. And the rioters must be repelled by the barricade. And at some point, a small area is cleared with the use of tear gas.

Less rules than at a riot may be evidence of individuals being targeted in urban neighborhoods, gangs swarming targets in cityscapes and ghosts terrorizing neighborhoods street by street. Part of the appeal of urban terror to the terrorists seems to be the lack of rules in the random instantaneous acts of spontaneous aggression and violence.

The less rules the freer people feel until the lack of rules begins to interfere with play.

A game of tag among children has at least the one rule involving the main principal of the game which is that once touched that person touched must touch another person. The intellect may create various incantations of the play and impose rules over that simplicity like a superstructure, but children begin with that one rule when engaged with at least one other child in the spontaneous play known as tag.

Thinking too much about a subject such as tag can ruin that freedom experienced in spontaneous play. So tag is an ideal game for children just a bit older than toddlers.

Rules are everywhere because someone thought of a rule in a given circumstance many years ago. People may not recognize the rule as they have been conditioned so much that the rule pulls in mysterious ways, like through a social conscience.

But part of deriving freedom from play is not having to think other than thinking about how much fun you are having.

People start out with a conscience, but the inner voices placed inside by God and the outer conditioning of society in the environment at some point gets reversed by circumstances – perhaps by a sudden impact that has been absorbed like a great moral spectacle for the filters that sifts people through events and through moral quagmires to determine appropriate outcomes.

War has rules too, but with few people watching there is that instant moment of unconditioned responses when death and killing becomes oversimplified on the battlefield and during fits of urban guerrilla movements, clearing the enemy from field to field and house to house, room to room.

War has elements of organized play with very few rules of engagement and also elements of spontaneous play within the organized play when no one is around to referee the rules. Killing the most soldiers is not a very civilized rule.

War of course is uncontrolled rage with the aggression merely packaged as war to be more palatable for the masses. Warmongers and their soldier widgets do not experience freedom so much as the adrenaline rush created by the fear of dying and the hatred that the fear of dying instills in you, for the the person that makes you so fearful.

ONLY ADRENALINE AND HATRED

Oh, war, again. No freedom still, only adrenaline and hatred.

The trenches along the battlefield dividing lines are subterranean passageways through the worst of humanity. War over there on the battlefield without rules allows for that sense of freedom experienced from naked aggression, but here in the trench a bit of safety exists, and a better sense of freedom has been created.

War unofficially has the fewest of rules derived from civilization. Soldiers may be defined as instruments of deconstruction. And soldiers kill and blow up infrastructure. But soldiers kill anyway, and eventually kill well just about anything until they become morally spent.

Spontaneous play predates civilization. Only by adding rules, perhaps one by one through the trial and error experienced in play, that people are able to live together in society, and then just as in play, freedom occurs although more limited than spontaneous play.

God may have engineered the logarithm of morality, but time and time again, humanity proves the need for more tangible and less metaphysical rules for people to be able to live together without neighborliness disintegrating into hatred and war.

The morality play is part of an imaginative society that discovers through that dialectic process what conduct maintains peace and what acts and thoughts escalate into strangers shooting up the casino and randomly killing each other on the streets.

The spectacle may be a more sophisticated play, but the gathering of the population for that relatively brief moment, perhaps everyone has come to witness a drive by shooting, may also be evidence of a decaying public life. The need for an ever greater reprieve from the rules of society and of ‘extended play’ duration, of longer and longer duration, and more varied spectacles back to back, may indicate, like the prolongation of war, that civilizations are collapsing.

The original simplicity of play may have lost out to a derivative quite a bit more complicated.

Understanding Sports Culture, by Tony Schirato, Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2007.

National Identity and Global Sports Events, edited by Allan Tomlinson and Christopher Young, New York: State University of New York Press, 2006.