The hero we needed, not the hero we deserved.

I imagine Callois saying this in a mirror to himself, in French, to psyche himself up before a long night of jogo do bicho.

Callois is a well needed reassurance after Huizinga. It’s nice to see scholarly disagreements sort themselves out in the form of critical discourse; Man, Play, and Games is the academic equivalent of a decently written angry internet comment. It’s a glorified rebuttal, Callois pointing at Huizinga and yelling “You’re wrong!”. Though, knowing Callois he’d probably say the latin word for “wrong” because it somehow is truer than the English or French. Really, that’s where my complaints and differences in opinion with Callois lie.

I don’t think games are necessarily free activities, which seems to be the common ground between Callois and Huizinga. The only true variation on this is when Callois discusses corruption in A Sociology Derived from Games using ants as his example. He seems to believe that any sort of situation that changes games from a free activity into something that compromises agency or changes decisionmaking ultimately pushes it away from free play. While I don’t necessarily disagree with this, I don’t really think play is free to begin with.

Play acts as a fundamental agreement. It’s something we do consciously. Kids who run around the yard generally understand that they’re running around a yard. I feel the same about board games and the same about videogames; the mediums gain strength in that they are a past-time one engages with. Then again, I am the kind of person who enjoys watching movies critically and finds value in watching things I don’t like, so maybe I’m just an insane person.

The argument I’m making here is that Games are something we pursue actively. Games are a method for one to enact agency and decision making on an isolated scale. Games shouldn’t need to only be fun, or only be free — Which to be fair, I think Callois ends up agreeing with by the time he gets to the modern functions of ilinx (I feel dirty for even humoring his terminology here) in Chapter 6. Even if I don’t necessarily believe that ilinx is necessarily Game, or even play-like.

I think the functions of play is a little bit deeper than what Callois boils it down to. It’s simple, that much is true, but I don’t think scholars can understand ‘play’ by trying to link it to ritual or experience. Rather, the function of play is what I think gives it meaning. Play is the interaction between man and system — Work can be play, stressful situations can be play, war can be play. We refer to military tactics and economic tactics as Game Theory for this very reason. The interaction here is more important, I think, than the origins that the interaction manifests in.

That is to say that the choice to do something is more important than the reasons we do it. The games we play are differentiated by the actions we take rather than the reasons we take them, most often because the reasons are, as Callois puts it, arbitrary.

This gets into my more controversial point, that Games of Chance are for this reason very bad at being games, because they are more interesting to examine for the reasons why people play them rather than the act of actually playing them. That is to say it was far more enlightening and interesting to read Callois’s assessment that people who aren’t agents in their own decision making (whether this be due to poverty, vices, or other “corruptions” as he describes in both the introduction and the Importance of Games of Chance) prefer games of chance over games of skill as they don’t rely on themselves at all while playing in them. While this is interesting, and frankly quite telling of society, I find it extremely depressing and disturbing.

Most games have elements of chance (RNG is a nightmare in most modern games), but I think part of gaming so to speak is the mitigation and control of chance elements. Not to repeat myself too much, but my point here is that games of chance lack agency and essentially all you get from them is an arbitrary outcome. Most games of chance we think of today have introduced elements that allow the player to control some element of play. Poker is a prime example of this, and it’s the counterplay and prediction between the players and their resource economies that makes it interesting rather than the raw luck of the draw.

It is great that some people have fun while playing dice, but fun doesn’t really mean much to me. When someone tells me to play a game because it is fun I most often have to ask them what they mean, because their idea of fun is not necessarily mine or anyone else’s. This ultra-specific read doesn’t mean much as criticism or analysis. I’d rather play a game because it puts me in a stressful position that I need to actively deal with than because someone else feels nostalgia or enjoyment from its flavortext. However, the mechanics and systems behind games, and how they produce certain actions or outcomes is something that everyone who plays them can grok; this is the sort of thing I enjoy studying.

Callois is a historian of games, and his musings on the history of games and their importance in manipulating society are both valuable and interesting. But I don’t feel like he is necessarily providing an analysis on games. Callois’s time is spent more on the circumstances surrounding them, and the people that play them, rather than what games do. Which is fine, and interesting, and once again valuable, but that’s where Callois and I say goodbye. I would much rather be an analyst, someone who plays and understands games as the experiences they are rather than the experiences they produce in people — mostly because I think these are largely unquantifiable, and aren’t strong criteria in providing a discourse.

Moving forward from Callois I propose that instead of asking why we play, we should ask how we play. I think there is something great to gain through this introspection. How outcomes are being achieved can tell you a lot about people and the games they play.

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