Abstract
In the course of modernity one might note a shift away from maps that acquire meaningfulness during an activity, that inform and are completed through the activity, to a type of map that can be created and then interpreted without the experience or memory of such engrossment. The distinction between maps the interpretation of which requires a link to engrossment in activities and those that do not is, of course, determined by this feature of the realms/places the maps describe. As modernity is bound up in the devaluation of knowledge/meaning tied to bodily activities (in favor of disembedded meanings, rational discourses, experimental reasoning, etc.) there is a corresponding devaluation in the production and interpretation of maps of such realms (in favor of maps of spaces, satellite images, topographical representations, etc.). The field of hyper-locality emerges in the vacuity of de-activated places. Once the activities that sustained these places disappear, there is no place left to “save,” no “there” there to take away. The task facing the ethnographer is thus two-fold; to acquire knowledge of a place (as thickly described, to use Geertz’s term) and also to develop the theoretical and practical means to map (represent) this place.
All games, serious and trivial, have expected durations. They can, therefore, be distinguished according to this feature. Most trivial games, such as recreations like baseball or chess, occur in one day. Let’s call these “short games.” Serious games are often meant to endure throughout the lifetimes of their players. These might be called “long games.” Some apparently short games (such as festivals) actually reoccur at set intervals (yearly, say) throughout the lives of their players and should better be classified as “intermittent long games.” Other games have no pre-set duration, merely thresholds where the challenge of the action or the realized resources no longer maintains them. Warfare is such a game. These are perhaps “open ended games. [1] ” What should be remembered is that a game must provide all the resources needed to sustain its action throughout its expected duration, and that the longer the game, the more there arise possibilities for players to lose their spontaneous involvement and to leave the game. This also brings up the point that a nation-state is not a single game, but a congery of games. It falls to the habitii (and there are more than one of these) to provide the coherence among games.
All games have some way to mark their beginnings. There is always some action that signals the start of the game, or the introduction of a new player. Short games also have endings, while long games simply outlast their players. Intermittent long games have starts and endings every time they occur, but the ending also signals the preparation for another beginning. Open ended games may end in disarray or they may have some form of closure. However they begin and end, games usually keep their own sense of time, marking this in ways that are important only to that game [2] . At the edges of this time are the temporal boundaries of the game, within which the game must provide all the time needed for its proper play.
A player in a long game may, and probably will, become a player in a succession of short games. However, since an individual can be a player in only one game at a time, he must abandon his role as a player in the long game for the duration of the short game. During that time his role is limited to that determined by the short game. So a person can play chess this morning, soccer this afternoon, and join the festival next week. Games can also easily be embedded into other games as long as it is remembered that a player at a sub level is at most a pawn in a higher level game.
Games also keep a sense of place. They define the loci of their action. Serious games create serious boundaries. Players and pawns confine their attentions within these boundaries, and even boundary infractions by strangers might result in their expulsion from the game place. Within the outermost boundary of the game all the necessary resources for the game’s duration must be found, including the space it needs. The nation’s borders are also the boundaries of the nation’s ruling serious game. In order to expand this game, the nation must expand its borders. (See After-Words below for a discussion on the study of game places.)
Technologies of Experience
The creation of game-space and game-time occurs on the conceptual as well as the performative surface. The histories and the lore of these are all part of the game. If this paper tends to dwell on the performative side of serious games, it is not because the conceptual side is lacking in form or features, but rather because serious game theory has more profound implications on the study of performance than it does on that of ideas. Most importantly, this theory permits an examination of both of these aspects under the condition that they do not transparently reflect each other. What the two aspects exhibit in concert is a culture created and invested with serious ideas and performances, with trivial ideas and performances, and with the inevitability of change.
To create and repeat specific performances, what I call technologies of experience are devised and maintained at the performative and the conceptual aspects of action. These, the knowing how to do the action are transformed into the doing of the action at the time of its performance (See: Hymes). These are the material requirements of the habitus, along with the knoweldge of their making and their wielding. Technologies of experience supply all the ingredients of the action and its required context. These inform the experience of the action during its performance. The material ingredients of modern ruling serious games include the normalizing institutions, the schools and hospitals, as well as military and police institutions and their instrumentalities. These are games with deadly intent. What do ruling serious games look like, and how do they operate?
Games and boundaries
The boundary of a game (of a festival, a city, a nation) is fabricated as “an analytical category that itself is part of the social dynamic of that place” (Murphy, 1991, 29). If the ethnographer does not problematize the place as displayed in the practitioner’s map, place disappears as an object of study, and is simply reified in any subsequent analysis (ibid., 26). Each game contains a logic of performance, a habitus which needs to be studied on its own terms. We cannot assume that maps drawn from inside different games are liable to comparison, nor that comparison will reveal some universal logic. In fact, the enterprise of comparison is wholly inadequate for the task at hand. Instead of comparing “their” maps with “our” maps, we should use their maps to reveal the spatial logic of those places deemed serious and trivial to their game, and use their logic to deconstruct the naturalness of our own logic of place.
The game realm
Erving Goffman (1984) used the term “realm” to signify “the meaningful universe sustained by [an] activity.” The process of the “framing of experience”, which he described in careful detail, acquires its geographical extension in the notion of “the realm” (26). Let me propose that his notion of “realm” can be translated in its geographical extension to mean “place”. Geographically speaking, place means realm, and realm stands for place. [3] ; Games create and sustain meaningful universes we can call places. They make these places out of pre-transformed vicinities we can call “spaces”.
That places can be separated from spaces they “occupy” is an essential notion for social geography. The transformation of spaces into places is the very process which interests many social theorists today. How locales acquire and maintain “place-ness” is deemed integral to social integration, and such processes have finally been acknowledged as central to social theory and ethnographic practice. At the same time, one characteristic of places is that these have tended to be tied to locales [4] . The locale is the extended place of the game, it contains all the localized resources for the game.
The difference between maps of such a place [5] , and, say a topographic map of the corresponding space is not only, or even importantly, a question of a simple transformation of scale, or projection, or perspective, or accuracy. It is also important that this difference is also not that between a “mental or subjective map,” of a place, compared to its “actual physical” representation. The difference signals the significant shift of meaning that occurs during the course of an activity when meanings internal to the activity “re-place” meanings that hold outside (or before or after) the activity. Places are event-full, they are locii of repeated practices. They acquire meanings during these practices. [6]
To study a place
The point here is that the need for engrossment presents a limitation on the study of places in that their meaningfulness is acquired partially through the engrossment of the practitioner and is thus accessible in a reliable manner only during the activity. The study of their maps requires an ethnographic exploration of the activities that use these maps.
The necessity of the ethnographic moment in no way lessens the need for a history of maps, of places, or of realms. Again, things aren’t so simple; There are answers to questions that can mainly be sought during activity when the logic of the realm of the activity is in place. The same question asked outside of the activity—in another realm—will generate a different answer. At the same time, activities not only create realms of meaning, but also institutions, communities of participants (and outcastes), texts, and histories. These become resources that are recursively used in the continuation of the activity. Of course they must be explored. What is also implied in the need for an ethnographic moment is an experiential realist semantics of place (cf Lakoff, 1987), one that ties this study to bodily activities and thus to an ethnography of these activities. Such a semantics might acquire the label post-(or late) modern, for it challenges modes of categorization (such as subjective/objective) implicit in most modern types of discourse. Whatever position these new semantic theories achieve in relation to modern intellectual thought, they are quite useful for interpretive ethnography, and also for the task of creating of maps of places.
In the course of modernity one might note a shift away from maps that acquire meaningfulness during an activity, that inform and are completed through the activity, to a type of map that can be created and then interpreted without the experience or memory of such engrossment. The distinction between maps the interpretation of which requires a link to engrossment in activities and those that do not is, of course, determined by this feature of the realms/places the maps describe. As modernity is bound up in the devaluation of knowledge/meaning tied to bodily activities (in favor of disembedded meanings, rational discourses, experimental reasoning, etc.) there is a corresponding devaluation in the production and interpretation of maps of such realms (in favor of maps of spaces, satellite images, topographical representations, etc.). The field of hyper-locality emerges in the vacuity of de-activated places. Once the activities that sustained these places disappear, there is no place left to “save,” no “there” there to take away. The task facing the ethnographer is thus two-fold; to acquire knowledge of a place (as thickly described, to use Geertz’s term) and also to develop the theoretical and practical means to map (represent) this place.
[1] This scheme is also perhaps open-ended. Serious game theory is less interested in providing an exhaustive typology of possible game types than it is in sketching the bare outline of their normative form. So this is enough typology for now.
[2] One way of locating games then is to locate all of the ways that time is kept in a culture. A variety of conflicting measures of time can usually be found, and the use of these externally ad hoc measures of time (hours, innings, quarters, laps, seasons, centuries, moves, sides, sets, campaigns, trends, millennia, strokes, various calendars, and so forth) signal the existence of different games.
[3] A corollary to this is that realms typically describe places can be mapped and these maps reveal a logic of spatial meaning for the realm. I would suspect that some quality of “mapability” will be found in any place that qualifies as reality. Of course , mapability is not restricted to the one type of graphic representation, but is simply the geographic extension of a more general “describability.” The availability of a geographical description of a certain level of specificity might be a central quality of places that acquire “reality.”
[4] For a discussion on “locale” see: Anthony Giddens, “Time, Space, and Regionalisation”, in Gregory and Urry, 1985, p. 271.
[5] Think of maps of fictional countries, of invisible cities, fantastic planets; and also of statistical atlases, tourist guides, communication networks. On the surface, Goffman might seem to be saying that all these maps describe places the meaning of which is determined by the realm (singular) which qualifies as reality; this is something of a Habermasian take on Goffman—a suggestion that any rational discussion would settle the issue of which map most closely describes some external reality—but Goffman is suggesting something quite different. What Goffman is saying is that an activity sustains a place which is taken as real by participants while they are engrossed in this activity.
[6] What are those questions that can only be answered by the practitioner while engrossed in the practice? How are these properly translated into academic prose? The difficulties of the “new ethnography” are inescapable in this project.
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