Baseball has new rules this season. The perennial conversation in golf about changing the balls used by pros is heating up again. The question of who is entitled to needle or provoke whom during a game, consciously or impulsively, has come up in women’s basketball.
Play is a notoriously difficult subject to fully explain, perhaps a bit like humor. The more you try to explain why we have humor and find things funny or why we play (and care so much about playing) the more that the subject of your explanation escapes your grasp.
Highly functionalist or evolutionary theories of either offer something useful—anything that ubiquitous in human life has to have some deep usefulness—but like most such theories, these are also painfully reductionist explanations. We play as animals do as a form of practice for life—to test some common usages and capabilities of our bodies, to initiate possible relationships, to create a kind of ‘clean room’ for exploring contingency. Play is sometimes mimetic—overtly representing some non-play practice in a compressed and safe form—and sometimes intensely abstract, with no apparent referent. Play is an escape from life, a relief from pressure, but also often an intensifier. Play is the root of creativity and imagination, or it is the primary expression of same. There’s a lot of theories, and all of them are useful; none of them are sufficient.
Games are a bit easier to deal with, just like certain genres of humor can be approached as genres, in both cases deferring somewhat an explanation of the underlying phenomenon. Games confine and define play. They have rules. Their referential origins are often murky or contested, but as they evolve, they mostly refer to themselves and to related families of games. The history of games in that sense is a pretty good way to make the case that the origins of cultural forms provide little useful guidance for understanding their later practice, and that trying to explain particular games in terms of some underlying deep or essential function is a particularly useless exercise. If American football, for example, often references military culture or martial objectives, that’s not because it derives from the same place in some primordial sense—it’s an acquired meaning that was forged with particular intensity in the post-1945 era. If chess is seen as cerebral or a sign of intelligence, that’s a modern acquired meaning, not the deep function of the game. But more intensely by far, games reference themselves and thus explain themselves.
When players change the rules, they’re often trying to preserve some sort of delicate balance that allows the outcomes to remain somewhat contingent. If there’s one thing both spectators and players hate, it’s a game where the same person or team wins every time because of an advantage that is external to the game. If the only way to win a boating race is to have the most expensive boat, and the most expensive boat wins every time regardless of the skill of the sailors on board, that’s a bad game. If the only way to win a multiplayer video game is to install an invulnerability cheat and everyone who installs the cheat wins equally, that’s a bad game that will drive all non-cheaters out in short order.
But rule changes are also about preserving the tension and aesthetics of contingency. Spectators and players like it when the allowable play within a game is fully and dynamically explored. An unused play is a pointless one—but a play that is difficult but powerful is one of the most potent signs of a beautiful game. If you could shoot the moon in Hearts easily, you’d have to change the rules, because every player would try and every game would become monotonous. If you couldn’t shoot the moon, the game would also be a much more tediously incremental one. If getting on first base meant you always stole second base, that takes any tension out of it. If the odds of stealing are too low, that also destroys the tension.
Games with complex rules are also platforms for continual emergence of new forms and strategies. If players can voluntarily adopt new shapes or weights for equipment, that changes the ecosystem of play. If a canny player or coach examines the rules and realizes there’s an underutilized strategy or move, they can radically transform how the game is played within a single season or interval of play. Sometimes that makes the game better, especially when there are opposing transformative ideas that nicely counter one another. Sometimes it makes the game into a dull monoculture stripped of contingency, at which point an adjustment of the rules is needed.
But players and spectators also contest the aesthetics of play. Some people love cunning uses of the clock in games that are timed, or love just-barely-legal moves that a close reading of the rules uncovered. Others prefer a “pure” game that derives from the core mechanics or nature of the game. When you’re a player, you generally want to find opponents and team-mates who match both your skill levels and your sensibility. When I was actively playing tennis, for example, there was just nothing worse from my perspective than playing someone who thought it was very clever to occasionally do a soft underhand serve. But at the same time, my game at its best lacked touch or subtlety—I could just hit the ball hard—and that gets boring or intimidating for a player who wants a softer or more interesting game. When you’re a spectator, you kind of end up having to take whatever the best or most elite players have evolved the game towards until or unless they and the game’s owners drive the whole thing into a ditch with bad or destructive rules and play styles.
For what it’s worth, I like what Major League Baseball has done this season. I like it much better than unannounced alterations to the ball, for example—or the impact of widespread steroid use at another point in the game’s history. I hate the idea that baseball fans just want to see lots of hits and home runs; what we want to see is a varied game where there’s skill and unpredictability. And at least for me, one of the charms of baseball is that it doesn’t have a set time and it doesn’t have elaborate abuses of a clock. But I don’t mind speeding up the pace of the game’s core play of pitcher v. batter.
The thing that’s interesting to me is that the passion that both players and spectators have for debating both rules and the emergent style of play that follows from them doesn’t coherently follow into game-like domains of institutional practice that are highly rule-constrained.
E.g., what we know to be a terrible outcome that can destroy an otherwise beautiful or beloved game is not guarded against in game-like practices, namely, allowing players who acquire advantages outside of the game to always win regardless of the validity or skill of their play within the rules.
Some years ago, this was a theme that some liberals and progressives tried floating up as a way to make political headway—that they were in favor of the people who played by the rules and they wanted to change the games that were consistently disfavoring them—the rules of the judicial system, the rules of economic accumulation, the rules of middle-class culture. That doesn’t seem to have caught on. At least one reason might be that the political leadership, regardless of party, are not especially devoted to the rules themselves, and moreover, are deeply dependent upon donors and elites who view the rules and rule-followers with contempt. It’s Silicon Valley’s motto, after all: move fast and break things, where “things” very explicitly means “rules and laws”.
I think it’s a pity that there hasn’t been more effort to continue framing our political moment in these terms, however. When you move back into games themselves, there’s nothing that most Americans hate worse than overt cheating and nothing they hate worse than changes to the rules that very obviously ruin the game—that ruin its existing culture, that ruin beautiful strategies or beloved modes of play, that take all the tension and contingency out of a game. Sure, with cheaters, we often forgive them soon enough—look at all the fervid attempts by commenters during the last World Series to proclaim the Astros “over” the cheating scandal, now safely back into the realm of “winning because of skill and talent”. But we understand that cheating ruins the game, and we understand that games where money and power win before it is ever played are terrible games absent of pleasure and legitimacy for anybody but the rich and powerful.
That’s what has happened to almost everything game-like in our world—and it is what is what actual games increasingly struggle against as well, whether it’s bass-fishing tournaments where players illicitly put weights in the fish or Manchester United skirting financial rules.
Whatever its nature, play is something intensely meaningful to modern humanity. Meaningful and precious. It is, we know very well, also intensely fragile. Its joys can be destroyed in a single moment of rage, in a single revelation of persistent cheating. In games, we understand best the ways that rules cultivate an ecology of constrained behavior that creates and sustains the pleasure of play for everyone. I think that understanding is something we can broaden successfully to cover many other aspects of our lives. When the fix is in, life is broken.
Image credit: "Pitch Clock" by Rich Renomeron is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.