Episode 27: The Invisible Rules of Roleplaying

[jared]

I admit you've lost me. What do these layers of pointing-to-the-pointing have to do with play and games?

Play with Structure is Game. The greater the Depth or Degree to that Structure, the more Game-like the Play is. And because Structure exists in Degrees, in can sometimes be at a level that is unapparent during Play. In these cases, Game still exists, even if only through implication, through the simple interaction of Play and Structure. Such an interaction "creates" Game to satisfy its nature, even if no Game defined as such is apparent to the participants.

Yeah! So, this idea jives with the idea that "game" is an emergent property of play (in role-play, specifically). That is, when we play, our play takes on form processually. The form shifts and changes with play in complex, fleeting ways. We can call this form "game," but I think it's worth pointing out that this conception of "game" runs deeply counter to the colloquial idea of what a game is and how game interacts with play. 

Looking around, we imagine that games exist in some persistent way in the world. We find a game, we choose it, and we play (with) it, and the game informs or even creates our play. When we stop playing, the game continues to exist, and we can go back and play (with) it again some other time. But if "game" is emergent from play, then all of that is false. Instead, play precedes game, and play persists after game has gone. Different moments or instances of play can resemble one another insofar as their structures (the "games" emergent from them) share some set of superficial similarities, but the whole is so complex and ineffable that it seems unreasonable to call these "the same game" in any meaningful way. Perhaps we could categorize various instances of play in this way to some degree—play with X characteristic, play with Y characteristic, and so on—but are these categories "games" by any reasonable gloss of the way people actually use the word? By this point we've gotten so far afield of anything that actually resembles what folks seem to mean when they say the word "game" (and what it can actually mean in cases like video games and board games that it cannot mean for role-play) that I suspect it's actually a net negative to keep the word around. This is an example of where the eliminativist position with regard to game comes from.