On Balinese Cockfights: Deeply Extending Play

-- ABSTRACT --
In the context of games (and perhaps more-so in video gamed contexts), the core category: play,
has developed an arterial hardness. In the work of Sutton-Smith and Huizinga, many in game
studies have found sufficiency. Yet, play as a theoretical concept has enjoyed a much more
delightfully historical exploration. As we return to questions about the deeply meaningful aspects
of games and play, the critical need to explore the connections between played, player and
context becomes ever more crucial. This essay explores this connective tissue starting with
Clifford Geertz's famous essay, "Deep Play," tracing through its lens the possibilities for "deeply
extending play." From that text, the passage, "[f]or, it is only apparently cocks that are fighting
there. Actually, it is men," (Geertz, 1973, p. 417) demonstrates the intense relationship between
play, culture and structure (rules and otherwise). This essay argues that much work in game
studies could be dramatically transformed through greater connection with the breadth of
literature connected with Geertz's work on Deep Play. Meaningful play, sense making and
cultural negotiations with structure lie at the core of this exploration and encourage a different
kind of reading of play(ful) spaces. It is part of what makes games and play so fundamentally an
aspect of the human (and non-human) condition. In the examination of games, mechanics,
design, rules, platforms, aesthetics, narrative, ... the depth and meaning(ful-ness) of a game can
be drowned out. That emergent playful explorative experience needs fresh conceptual blood to
flow.

-- KEYWORDS --
Play; Deep Play; Meaningful Play; Ethnography; Culture

-- INTRODUCTION --
I teach game design. I also teach game studies. In either case, however, I always begin with
Clifford Geertz's essay, "Deep Play." I spare my undergraduates the follow-up, but graduate
students continue by next reading Claude Levi-Strauss' analysis of the difference between games
and ritual (Lévy-Strauss, 1962, p. 32). I do this for a variety of reasons, but primarily because the
program I work within is rooted in an overarching interest in "meaningfulness." Geertz has
become my antidote to a kind of theoretically reductive thinking that dominates ruminations on
games and play. For many in game studies, Sutton-Smith (Sutton-Smith, 1998) and Huizinga
(Huizinga, 1971) suffice for theorizing about games and play. Yet, the reactions that I receive to
Geertz and Levi-Strauss' work demonstrates that there are important ways in which we can more
deeply explore and extend our understanding of play.

More than anything, Geertz and Lévy-Strauss offer a vision of play deeply imbricated
within/of/as culture. Put another way, both of these texts capture the empirical moment of play.
Play happens. Play is experienced. Play is observed. Play can be theorized, but it will always
remain a very empirical occurrence, fraught with context and specificity that falls away as we
extract it from those moments[1]. Geertz and Lévy-Strauss offer an instantiation of the tension
between the beautifully messy theories of play like those of Bernard Suits (Suits, 1978) and
Bernard De Koven (De Koven, 1978) and the relatively clean, accessible and mobilizable
theories of Huizinga and Sutton-Smith. Geertz and Lévy-Strauss put to play the tension between
theory and empirical material. All of that isn't to say that these things are antithetical, rather that
they are always in tension, and as such, how do I as the "professor" of such things ensure that my
students and my own theorizing maintains that tension, rather than writing it out?

In this essay I explore a variety of ethnographic/anthropological literature both connected to and

disconnected from "play." I begin by exploring Geertz's essay in particular, as well as Lévy-
Strauss' and the role that deep play has for thinking about extending our understandings of play.
The essay then turns to ethnographic work exploring the role of ethnography in/of/as a system in
context and the implications that holds for teaching and theorizing on play. This is not new
territory for Games and Culture. For example, Celia Pearce's call for rooting play in a productive
capacity opened up new analytic perspectives in her work (Pearce, 2006). In that case she began
not with Huizinga, but with Victor Turner's work on the seriousness of play (Turner, 1982). Yet,
despite attempts like Pearce's to push play into new conceptual pastures, the more orthodox
versions persist. Let us try again.

-- GAMES AND DEEP PLAY --

There are many things that games researchers could take from Deep Play. In this section, I
explore only the three most salient that I encourage my students to glean from the text. The first
is that games are played, but often they are also spectated. They are watched and they are read.
Games never occur in a vacuum. This leads to the second point, that games are always
imbricated by context and culture. Finally, it is precisely that layering of games, play and culture
that makes games matter. Not only do they matter, they often matter a great deal, because they
objectify and systematize the world around them. Yet, games are always played and spectated,
an experience that is always subjective. Thus as we analyze games and play, we must glean from
the a game's context those elements most in need of analytic attention. It is through Geertz that I
encourage my students to avoid the Scylla and Charybdis play debates that periodically move
through game studies.

Perhaps most importantly, Geertz's attendance of a cockfight during his fieldwork in Bali didn't
make him a player. The Balinese cockfight inverts our thoughts about games, by not focusing
explicitly on the games design or its mechanics or its players, all a critical component of the
game. Rather, the text focuses on the observer. The spectator and the "superorganism" (Geertz,
1973, p. 414) that surrounds the game is the focus. Deep play, is as much about the field that
surrounds the game and its broader context. What also emerges is the importance of having been
involved in the game. Deep play is always implicated in the game itself. One cannot hold the
play at arms length as a kind of passive observer. Because games always require and involve the
player, they must be experienced in one form or another. This will always, and perhaps
uncomfortably, position the analyst in interesting ways. Despite misgivings about the game or
play, the analyst is always implicated, and it can often be that this implication or involvement is
precisely the thing that makes other players or observers accept the analyst.

The second aspect of the cock fight is its inextricable connection to context. Deep play is always
enmeshed in broader systems. There are "official" boundaries, but even these can be surmounted,
and often that is precisely the point, by various other mechanisms. Put another way, there is an
outside to a game, but it is partial and contextual. In Geertz's essay, things like the bribing of
local officials, the lack of government funds for a school and a communities' desire to funds that
school are fair game for analysis. Geertz includes in his analysis the official rules of the game,
the game's context and why the game matters so much for the Balinese.

Which leads to the role of "mattering" or "meaningfulness" in both the design of games and the
role that games play. Cock fights matter, not just to the cocks.

Like any art form – for that, finally, is what we are dealing with – the cockfight
renders ordinary, everyday experience comprehensible by presenting it in terms
of acts and objects which have had their practical consequences removed and
been reduced (or, if you prefer, raised) to the level of sheer appearances, where
their meaning can be more powerfully articulated and more exactly perceived.
The cockfight is 'really real' only to the cocks – it does not kill anyone, castrate
anyone, reduce anyone to animal status, alter the hierarchical relations among
people, or refashion the hierarchy; it does not even redistribute income in any
significant way. What it does is what, for other peoples with other temperaments
and other conventions, Lear and Crime and Punishment do: it catches up these
themes – death, masculinity, rage, pride, loss, beneficence, chance – and,
ordering them into an encompassing structure, presents them in such a way as to
throw into relief a particular view of their essential nature. It puts a construction
on them, makes them, to those historically positioned to appreciate the
construction, meaningful – visible, tangible, graspable – "real," in an ideational
sense. An image, fiction, a model, a metaphor, the cockfight is a means of
expression; its function is neither to assuage social passions nor to heighten them
(though, in its playing-with-fire way it does a bit of both), but, in a medium of
feathers, blood, crowds, and money, to display them. (Geertz, 1973, pp. 443-444)

This passage, perhaps more than any other sums up why I care about games. It is what games can
(or ought) strive to be. To push the point further, it is what I hope my students strive to make. To
make sense of the world and put it back on display in ways that engage people deeply and from
which they can tell meaningful stories to others that encourage a newfound interest or
engagement with the world around them. Geertz's vision of what deep play means is the gauntlet
that I throw down for all of my students.

As I have argued in other contexts (O’Donnell, 2013), perspectives on games and play from a
variety of fields can only increase game studies' ability to explore and think through the complex
issues that many now find themselves attempting to pull apart. Much like anthropology found
itself at a crisis moment the early to mid 1980s and the move toward cultural critique and the rise
of cultural anthropology as a field, the move to position core concepts like "culture" in more
responsive or reflective ways proved a productive exercise (Marcus & Fischer, 1999). In a
similar move, now turn to games and play as a kind of theoretical experimental apparatus, which
analysts can and ought return to over time.

By further introducing the temporary binary of game/ritual, we can discuss the "effect" of games
as being further rooted in society and their context being critical to our understanding of them.
Games, "produce events by means of a structure," but must be viewed based on context. The
"disjunctive effect" of games, that "they end in the establishment of a difference between
individual players or teams where originally there was no indication of inequality." That
"asymmetry" is established "by means of events, the nature of which is genuinely structural." In
a sense, this interpretation puts a great deal of emphasis then on a games mechanics and rules,
yet simultaneously indicates that such an interpretation must simultaneously examine the
context: "we can therefore understand why competitive games should flourish in our industrial
societies" (Lévy-Strauss, 1962, p. 32). However, such a perspective on games is also rooted in its
time and place, but it is part of what is at play when we explore games in/of/as culture.

-- GAMES AND PLAY IN/OF/AS CULTURE --

By the time the 1990s had rolled around, the sub-fields within anthropology that had made the
critical turn found themselves, empirically and conceptually at a crossroads. Existing methods
and ways of thinking about inquiry and conceptual analysis were at a crossroads. The idea that
single-sited ethnography and a reticence to engage with a shifting world system was broadly
recognized, yet how to make that turn remained problematic. Call for accounts of "dissolution
and fragmentation, as well as new processes – captured in concepts like post-Fordism, time-
space compression, flexible specialization, the end of organized capitalism, and most recently,
globalization and transnationalism – none of which could be fully understood in terms of earlier
macro-models of the capitalist world system," (Marcus, 1995) were deemed critical in import. In
short, there was a call for ethnography to move in/of emerging world systems in order to make
sense of them.

This resonates with calls for our understandings of games to be seen as assemblages. It is a
resistance to the "simple system-user/game-player notion and adopt," a perspective where "we
are interwoven with our technologies and how they may at times come to act as a kind of
independent agent we play alongside" (Taylor, 2009, p. 333). Games find themselves at play in
ways they have not been previously. Much like ethnography needed to be pushed to look at its
entanglements with broader systems, so too must games and play look at the ways they are rife
with connectivity beyond a single given "game." As others have noted, these are now games
without frontiers, they are "thoroughly digitized and inhabit the global communications
network," in consequential ways that need to be grappled with more carefully (Malaby, 2007, p.
97).

Through asking designer/analysts to start with Deep Play in mind at the outset, I am pushing
them to think of games and play broadly, rather than narrowly. To see them at the outset as
already knotted up in culture. As anthropologists worked to think differently about the
ethnographic endeavor, so too should analysts of play see their conceptual framework as a kind
of "open system," pushed to "experiment with new research topics, methods, and textual
designs" (Fortun, 2003, p. 177). The same is true for designers/developers/analysts of games. A
push to see games and play as thoroughly imbricated in/of/as culture ought to be seen as Geertz
so eloquently put it, "like any art form." Play needs to not be seen as a static conceptual category,
but one that can be pushed/prodded/developed over time in conversation with emergent forms of
games and play.

Much like thinking about a core concept like "culture" as an experimental system can prove
fruitful for making sense of a conceptual category and pushing it further (Fischer, 2007), seeing
play as an experimental system allows for the generation of "surprise." Perhaps most
importantly, it allows for "differential reproduction," in other words, for play to serve as a useful
conceptual category, it must allow for the "generation of difference" (Rheinberger, 1997, p. 287).
Starting with Deep Play and the cockfight ensures that play as a category is different for my
students and my work. Games as systems of meaning making then become inescapably tied to
their broader contexts. It is what gives them the potential for such profound impact and
importance.

This is an important antidote for, as others have noted, the kind of wide array of studies that
could conceivably be perceived as a kind of cultural approach to the study of games (Shaw,
2010). In essence I am also arguing that there is no "games and culture" or "gamer culture" and
rather that games are in/of/as culture. Games put culture at play and are played and are observed
and reflect back in/as/of culture. To imagine otherwise is to simply ignore the place of games
and play through culture. Perhaps most importantly, drawing on ideas of cultural production, it is
important to recognize that games are actively involved in producing culture. They do not simply
reflect their cultural context, but rather they enter that system and shift it in meaningful and
important ways (Shaw, 2011). Perhaps most importantly, mainstream games continue to
reinforce the more hegemonic elements of broader culture and in so doing contribute to their
entrenchment.

Deep Play and games in/of/as culture is an alternative to the false dichotomy offered (by no one,
really) between proceduralism on the one hand and the assemblage on the other. What matters to
the analyst is how might game and play analysts respectfully, carefully or even playfully explore
those connections? To which this essay replies, these are not new monsters that game studies
should, or even ought, face alone. Other fields have braved these troubled waters previously.
Science and Technology Studies with Social Construction on one hand and Nature on the other.
Feminist and queer studies with biological determinism and social construction. The answer was
never one or the other, but rather, "it's complicated," or "it depends." Which is why I start with
Deep Play.

There is a reason that game studies scholars are often the first to scoff when a game developer
expresses the position that a game is somehow outside of culture, "We're not sending a message
to anybody. We're just making characters who look cool. Our sensibilities are more comic book
than anything else" (Grayson, 2013). But games, like comic books, or as Geertz would say, any
art form, is implicated by and reflects back a broader cultural system that surrounds it. It is its
rules and systems and controllers and all of those things in conversation with a played context
and broader world system and lens through which it will be read an interpreted. Games even at
their worst are deep[2].

One only need to walk the halls and cubicles of a game studio to see the complex cultural
interplay and intersections through the everyday worlds of game developers (O’Donnell, 2014).
Anime figurines, movie posters, game posters, game character figurines, game consoles, arcade
cabinets and many others line the desks, walls and free spaces within game companies. This is
not something that can be extricated from that context. Something (many things) are always at
play in the rather clean confines of a game's play space.

-- CONCLUSION --
In all of this, I offer the simple suggestion that we look broadly and deeply for ways of shifting
our conceptualizations of games and play. Start somewhere else first. What if instead of starting
with a hardened category of play, one instead started with "dubbing," and the deeply cultural and
contextual nature of how sexual and gendered subjectivities are co-constructed (Boellstorff,
2003)? Start with the contextual, partial, uncertain and personal nature of D.J.s playing with
music is enmeshed with culture and epistemological innovation (Miller, 2004). Give play a
chance at a little oxygen. Allow it to be deeply extended.

All too frequently, efforts to theorize play fall too quickly back on a very small set of theoretical
perspectives. In my offering of Deep Play as an alternative entry point I only hope to bring
culture back into the frame. Bringing the context of play and players back is a push for the
empirical. Furthermore I suggest that we look toward other fields, anthropology in this case, for
means through which complicated concepts, like culture, ethnography and play can be more
open to future reconceptualization.

Perhaps not so ironically, Donna Haraway quoted Helen Watson-Verran at beginning of a

chapter of one of her books exploring Maxis' game SimLife. That quote, "They are suffering
from an advanced case of hardening of the categories," (Haraway, 1997, p. 131) exemplifies the
call that many in game studies have made of late: don't write this out of our frame of analysis.
This is of course, the many things that disappear from our frames of analysis: race, class, gender,
sexuality, ... Too frequently analysts, "succumb to epistemological arteriosclerosis," or a
"hardening of the categories" (Haraway, 1997, p. 139).

Cockfights are unlikely the "answer," what I have offered here is instead a call for not a vast re-
thinking of play and games, but rather an encouragement to connect it more broadly with
material that speaks to a given context. Allow play and games to conceptually reflect the
contexts researcher find it embedded in. Deeply extend play with new frontiers and old.

-- NOTES --
[1] Perhaps this is the "magical" part of the magic circle, which I have long-viewed as a kind of
experimental system, rather than the more rigid "theory" that has been kicked around throughout
game studies.

[2] Others have argued that the "art" of games is not enough to protect them from "censorship,"
and that the observation of sexist (or otherwise) content isn't the same as censorship (Bogost,
2010). It is also problematic for the game industry to make such arguments, when it isn't "art"
that protects them from government regulation, but actually the potential for cultural and
political critique (O’Donnell, 2010), something that is hindered by the walled garden approach to
game publishing and manufacturing.

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