Gaming
Saugata Bhaduri
Gaming is generally understood, especially in the current context, as the act of playing video games or games with a digital interface. Accordingly, it is often erroneously presumed that while the use of game as a noun can be traced far back in the history of the English language, game as a verb and gaming as its present participle are of fairly recent origin. However, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, among others, traces the use of gaming to the end of the fifteenth or the beginning of the sixteenth century, connecting this participial form etymologically to gambling. The Online Etymology Dictionary traces the word game as follows:
Old English gamen “game, joy, fun, amusement”, common Germanic (cognates: Old Frisian game “joy, glee”, Old Norse gaman, Old Saxon, Old High German gaman “sport, merriment”, Danish gamen, Swedish gamman “merriment”), regarded as identical with Gothic gaman “participation, communion”, from Proto-Germanic *ga-collective prefix +*mann “person”, giving a sense of “people together”.
There are thus two important components that make up the sense of a word like game—an original sense of communion and a derivative sense of enjoyment. The present participial form gaming also includes a signal sense of taking risks or wagering, etymologically connected as it is to gambling. So gaming should be understood not as simply playing games but as entailing the three features of collectivization, enjoyment, and excess—the former two being already entailed in the word game itself, and the last coming into play in the present participial form of the digital keyword gaming.
While the word gaming has been available since the end of the fifteenth century, it appears to have been rarely used. Why is this so? How can one analyze the reticence of the English language to deploy the verbal—and more specifically, the present participial, and thus grammatically continuing and open-ended, never-foreclosed and never-ending—form of a word whose nominal form game has long been so frequent? In this essay I suggest both the liberatory and the transgressive quality unleashed in the recent rise of gaming as a gerund. While game itself was rooted in communion and enjoyment, the excess of the suffix -ing introduces the risqué and risky. Perhaps gaming is thus essentially subversive, connected to the dangerous wastefulness of gambling. A closer look at the disruptive and myriad qualities of the modern gaming universe, including frequent role-playing and identity negotiation, will shed light on the dual nature, the promise and the peril, of modern gaming.
But before one can move to the present participial form gaming and its implications, let us take a look at what game itself denotes. There are two, presumably contradictory, elements that make up a game. On one hand, a game has to have a structure, fairly set rules, and definable goals and objectives; on the other, a game is supposed to lead to enjoyment. It is in this duality then that the primary feature of a game lies: it cannot be fully de-structured, or de-structive, given its structured set of rules and goals; and yet the fact that a game is also meant to produce joy or enjoyment challenges to disrupt that set structure. Several scholars have noted this instability: For instance, in his Philosophical Investigations (1953, 66–70), Wittgenstein finds games undefinable, while Lyotard and Thébaud too highlight the indeterminacy of gaming in their Just Gaming (1985). Games contain this tension, and the participial form gaming perpetually extends and defers the completion of a game; in gaming, the set structure of a game has not yet arrived.
To understand what gaming is all about, it may be worthwhile to compare and contrast it with a presumably similar word like play. Johan Huizinga’s 1938 classic Homo Ludens posits that to play is what it means to be human—and the basis for human culture, including language, law, war, knowledge, poetry, philosophy, and art. Huizinga says that “culture arises in the form of play, that it is played from the very beginning” (46). In fact, Huizinga continues, “Play is older than culture . . . and animals have not waited for man to teach them their playing” (1). The institution of play is both the source and the original form of human civilization: “We have to conclude, therefore, that civilization is, in its earliest phases, played. It does not come from play like a baby detaching itself from the womb: it arises in and as play, and never leaves it” (173). Like the unsettled structure of gaming, play, Huizinga suggests, at once demands and creates order, and is also the means to freedom itself (8–10). While Huizinga uses the word play and not game throughout, we may see games, gaming, and play as shared human forms for working out order and excess.
On the other hand, the differences hidden in the supposed cognates game and play, once examined, help shed light on what is distinctive about gaming. To define play, one can turn again to Huizinga and his classic definition:
Summing up the formal characteristic of play, we might call it a free activity standing quite consciously outside “ordinary” life as being “not serious” but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner. It promotes the formation of social groupings that tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress the difference from the common world by disguise or other means. (13)
Now contrast this fairly constrained definition of play with the tactical sense of the gaming term gameplay. Gameplay refers to the interactive and strategic experience of playing a game, or, as Craig Lindley puts it, “gameplay [is] a pattern of interaction with the game system. . . . In general, it is a particular way of thinking about the game state from the perspective of a player” (2004, 186). “The experience of gameplay” he continues elsewhere “is one of interacting with a game design in the performance of cognitive tasks, with a variety of emotions arising from or associated with different elements of motivation, task performance and completion” (Lindley, Nacke, and Sennersten 2008, 9). While play for Huizinga was absorbing, orderly, and constrained, gameplay for the gaming world involves openly strategic, individual, and contingent action. Gameplay introduces, as Gonzalo Frasca (2003) points out, “manipulation rules,” or what an individual player can play beyond the set “goal rules” and “meta-rules” of the game (231–32). That manipulation and strategy are unique to gaming is further clarified by the word gamesmanship, or the art of strategically manipulating rules to win a game. This differs not only from the more orderly notion of play in Huizinga; it also differs from the sense of sportsmanship, as defined by Stephen Potter (1947)—playing by the rules and accepting defeat with grace—thus marking gaming as different from another presumably cognate word, sports, too.
Here we can see what may be the essential difference between games, on the one hand, and sports and play on the other. Games, and especially the present-continuous-tense sense of gaming (connected etymologically as it is to gambling), feature the possibility of subversion, strategy, and manipulation, while sports and play invoke mostly rule-bound action. The phrase gaming the system affirms this observation—as does the related and recent process of gamification, whereby gaming elements, like scoring points and competition, are extended to nongaming contexts like education, business, and online marketing. In this and other forms of gaming, including the interdisciplinary study of gaming theory, game studies, or ludology, the point is to find enjoyment for the player by reaching beyond the ordinary bounds of play, while also looking at the social implications of the same. It should not surprise that the academic and public reception of games, since at least the Frankfurt School, has at times raged against its excesses with concerns about the negative effects of graphic violence in games, the promotion of digital and class divides across the world, and many other social issues. Indeed, the gaming world, a far larger topic than I can take up in this conceptually narrow keyword study, courses with much of the vicious hatred and abuse that typify modern problems of sexism, racism, and classism. This essay neither denies nor engages with these gaming problems; rather it simply frames them as a deeply unfortunate consequence of the fundamentally transgressive character of gaming.
To move ahead with the relation between game and gaming, which this article believes to be the crux of understanding the latter as a keyword, one can see how game theory—initiated by John von Neumann in his 1928 article “On the Theory of Games of Strategy” and popularized in his coauthored 1944 book Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour—offers an interesting contrast case to gaming theory. Game theory concerns “the study of mathematical models of conflict and cooperation between intelligent rational decision-makers” (Myerson 1991, 1), and its key criteria of rationality, predictability, and determinability appear to diverge sharply from the subversive or excessive quality of gaming. Eric Rasmusen expands on the game in game theory:
The essential elements of a game are players, action, payoffs, and information—PAPI, for short. These are collectively known as the rules of the game, and the modeller’s objective is to describe a situation in terms of the rules of a game so as to explain what will happen in that situation. Trying to maximize their payoffs, the players will devise plans known as strategies that pick actions depending on the information that has arrived each moment. The combination of strategies chosen by each player is known as the equilibrium. Given an equilibrium, the modeller can see what actions come out of the conjunctions of all the players’ plans, and this tells him the outcome of the game. (2001, 31–32)
Here we see again the earlier tension of all games. A PAPI-based model or approach to games theorizes games with the goal of successfully predicting, and thus eliminating uncertainty, the outcomes of games given certain strategies and conditions. Equilibrium is a far cry indeed from the constantly unsettled sense of gaming. Yet game theory, an artifact invented in the turbulent interwar period, is also an exacting response to and embrace of these same profound uncertainties. The creative uncertainty with which every act of gaming throws a player off balance is the same set of uncertainties game theory seeks to operationalize and bring back into balance. So, whether one considers it the antithesis of gaming theory or its natural consequence, or both, game theory—the risk-averse darling child of modern economics, political science, evolutionary biology, and some forms of pragmatist philosophy—may be distinguished from the openly risky senses of gaming.
Now let us consider digital games and gaming in particular. A cursory glance at the history of video games and digital gaming suggests a similar arc from relatively closed, nonmanipulable, single-player video games to the relatively recent development of open, user-adaptable, multiple-player, interactive role-playing, simulation gaming (with mods and hacks coursing throughout the gamer community). In a phrase: from Space Invaders to Second Life. Of course online gaming took root as early as 1974 with the rise of Mazewar, MUDs (multiuser dungeons), and MMORPGs (massively multiple-player online role-playing games), having built on an ancient tradition of offline gaming. And of course some of the most popular digital games—particularly the app-based social games popular on Zynga—have connected over a billion people online in what many consider mindless, gold-farming games no more subversive than Pong. The difference in the histories of popular video gaming, such as that by Steven Kent (2001), and the histories of online gaming, even as early as T.L. Taylor’s (2006), evidences an uneven rise in collective open indeterminacy among digital gaming communities separate from closed app-based social games.
The collective creation of gaming subcultures is just as essential as enjoyment and excess to understanding modern gaming. A lone gamer enters a gaming community, according to McKenzie Wark (2007), through creative and subversive appropriation of societal norms, through subverting or rearranging official game narratives through hacking, modding, cheating, sandboxing, participating in or designing open world games, and through extending his or her own gameworld to other worlds through cosplay, fanfiction, machinima, and the like. In each of these three acts, gaming becomes a collective act of tactical reappropriation and creativity, excess and subversion. David Getsy (2011) too has pointed out how games—originally created for diversion—are first and foremost sites of subversion. There are many critical reflections that must be examined in contemporary gaming culture and subcultures—no less than the reifying and fantasizing of the virulently toxic politics of gender, race, and class discrimination that many scholars have analyzed.1 These pressing issues deserve attention, although they fall outside the scope of this immediate keyword study. Rather, it may be fruitful to argue that perhaps the social problems that currently beset the gaming world have emerged, as indeed have its transgressive and enabling aspects, out of the consequence of the thesis of this essay: that twined excessive character of gaming, and its ongoing openness to both virtue and vice, that ever renders our nominal world as a game into something subversive and unstable.
See in this volume: community, geek, hacker, meme, personalization, sharing
See in Williams: community, creative, folk, mechanical, myth, popular, violence
Note
1For critical writings on gaming, including those exposing the problematic politics of gaming in the domains of race, class, gender, sexuality, etc., one can look at the following:
Select articles from readers and anthologies: e.g., David G. Embrick, J. Talmadge Wright, and Andras Lukacs, eds., Social Exclusion, Power, and Video Game Play: New Research in Digital Media and Technology(Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012); Nina Huntemann, ed., Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games (New York: Routledge, 2010); Frans Mäyrä, An Introduction to Game Studies: Games in Culture (London: Sage Publications, 2008); Ken S. McAllister, Gamework: Language, Power, and Computer Game Culture (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004); Jason C. Thompson and Marc A. Ouellette, eds., The Game Culture Reader (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013); Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron, eds., The Video Game Theory Reader (London: Routledge, 2003).
Individual articles: e.g., C. A. Anderson and B. J. Bushman, “Effects of Violent Video Games on Aggressive Behavior, Aggressive Cognition, Aggressive Affect, Physiological Arousal, and Prosocial Behavior: A Meta-analytic Review of the Scientific Literature,” Psychological Science 12(5) (2001): 353–59; D. A. Gentile, P. J. Lynch, J. R. Linder, and D. A. Walsh. “The Effects of Violent Video Game Habits on Adolescent Hostility, Aggressive Behaviors, and School Performance,” Journal of Adolescence 27 (2004): 5–22; Nina Huntemann, “Introduction: Feminist Discourses in Games/Game Studies,” Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology 2 (2013); Ewan Kirkland, “Masculinity in Video Games: The Gendered Gameplay of Silent Hill,” Camera Obscura 24(2 71) (2009): 161–83; David J. Leonard, “Not a Hater, Just Keepin’ It Real: The Importance of Race- and Gender-Based Game Studies,”Games and Culture1(1) (2006): 83–88; T. L.Taylor, “Multiple Pleasures: Women and Online Gaming,” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 9(1) (2003): 21–46.
References
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Getsy, David J. ed., 2011. From Diversion to Subversion: Games, Play and Twentieth-Century Art. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Huizinga, Johan.1938/1955. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Translated by C. Van Schendel. Boston: Beacon Press.
Kent, Steven L. 2001. The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokémon and Beyond—The Story behind the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World. New York: Three Rivers Press.
Lindley, Craig. 2004. “Narrative, Game Play, and Alternative Time Structures for Virtual Environments.” In Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment: Second International Conference TIDSE 2004, Darmstadt, Germany, June 2004, Proceedings, edited by Stefan Göbel et al., 183–94. Berlin & Heidelberg: Springer Verlag.
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