On Balinese Cockfights

Introduction

I teach game design. I also teach game studies. In either case, however, I always begin with Clifford Geertz’s essay “Deep Play.” In this essay, Geertz analyzes his experiences as an ethnographer in Indonesia, where he found himself and his partner part of a community cockfight. He explores that ethnographic moment through a culturally interpretive lens, exploring what he terms “Deep Play,” reading Balinese culture through the cockfight. 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 (1998) and Huizinga (1971) suffice for theorizing about games and play. ¹ Yet, the reactions that I receive to Geertz and Lévy-Strauss’ work demonstrates that there are important ways in which we can more deeply explore and extend our understanding of 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, are implicated by and reflect back a broader cultural system that surrounds it. Games, play, and culture are enmeshed and entwined in ways that intimately implicate one another. Games produce culture. They reflect it back. They shift it. Mainstream games in particular contribute to and reinforce hegemonic cultural projects. 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 and interpreted. Games even at their worst are deep. ² If a single student of mine ever utters the phrase “It's just a game,” I would have failed.

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. ³ Above all, play is not “primary” as Huizinga (1971, p. 46) states, it is striated and it is not smooth in a Deleuzian sense (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 351–423). 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 (1971) and Sutton-Smith (1998). To unpack this a bit more, Huizinga and Sutton-Smith's formulations have traveled so well, precisely because of their relative clarity, which play isn't always. Suits and De Koven's conceptions of play have proven more difficult to appropriate, precisely because they capture quite well the striated space of play. Geertz and Lévy-Strauss pull at and play with that tension, demonstrating it; putting it into play. 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 in my function as a teacher of such things ensure that my students and my own theorizing maintains that tension, rather than writing it out?

In this article, 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 article then turns to ethnographic work exploring the role of ethnography in/of/as a system in context and the implications that hold 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. In the examination of games, mechanics, designs, rules, platforms, aesthetics, narrative, and so on, the depth and meaning(ful-ness) of a game can be drowned out.

Let us try again.

Games and Deep Play

There are many things that game 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 which 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 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. One such debate could be the often mentioned ludology versus narrative debates.⁵

Games in/as/of/through culture is an alternative framework for understanding the various forms and structures that games offer as meaning-making systems. (1) They are designed often reflecting/dubbing various cultural forms that they are embedded. (2) In doing so, they objectify the world around them; games render the world in systems. (3) Games are played and spectators observe the players; these experiences are always subjective. (4) Players and observers may tell these subjective experiences to others or use them as inspiration for games of their own creation. (5) Thus, games in/as/of/through culture shift and move, although they can be analytically untangled.

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 game’s 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 surround the game are 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 arm’s 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 cockfight 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 govern- ment funds for a school, and a community's desire to fund 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. These connections are of course different across context. The worlds of anime production (Condry, 2013) are different from AAA (“triple-A”) game development (O’Donnell, 2014a), which is also distinct from thermonuclear war games (Ghamari-Tabrizi, 2005).

Which leads to the role of “meaningfulness” in both the design of games and the role that games play. Cockfights matter not just to the cocks. ⁴

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 inspiration for games that I present 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 (Rheinberger, 1997).

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” (Lévy-Strauss, 1962, p. 32) but must be viewed based on context. The “disjunctive effect” of games is 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 game’s mechanics and rules yet simultaneously indicates that such an interpretation must simultaneously examine the contex, “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

In the 1990s, the subfields 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, p. 98) 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. Anthropologists answered this call enthusiastically, extending their analysis into the same kinds of complex realms that games find themselves embedded in. There is no reason to not consider the contexts of games as complex and intertwined as those of anthropology: financial markets and algorithmic trading, environmental disasters and toxicity, energy markets and “green” corporations. They may not be games, but they are just as complex.

This resonates with calls for our understanding 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. Games need to be seen 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.

A different start: After their first foray into the world of Geertz, I ask my students to take the weekend following that introductory class and go out into the world. “Find a game. You'll be surprised where you find them. Watch an interchange at a bar. Go to the Department of Motor Vehicles. Host a Smash Bros. Brawl tournament, but don't watch the game, watch the people. Heck, most of you will be at the football game, watch the game, the crowd, the concession lines.” This exercise is certainly more De Koven (1978), Geertz (1973), and Suits (1978) than it is Huizinga (1971). These lessons are followed up by a myriad of others, including one which points out the difficult ethical dilemma that providing meaningful feedback creates, often making game designers the limit between meaningful play and addiction-friendly Auto-Play (Schüll, 2012). When games are in/and/of/through culture, a designer’s responsibility changes.

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, 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 studies” or “cultural production” 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 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 article replies, these are not new monsters that game studies should, or even ought, face alone. Other fields have braved these troubled waters previously, that is science and technology studies with social construction on one hand and nature on the other, and feminist and queer studies with biological determinism and social construction. These are ultimately empirical questions that end up being answered in interesting new conceptual categories for making sense of the world, which is why I start with Deep Play.

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, 2014a). 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) is (are) always at play in the rather clean confines of a game's play space.

Conclusion

In all of this, I offer a 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 coconstructed (Boellstorff, 2003)? Start with the contextual, partial, uncertain, and personal nature of DJs playing with music is enmeshed with culture and epistemological innovation (Miller, 2004). Perhaps use this opportunity to bring back other forms of game, play, and sport into game studies’ frame of analysis. Games have always been in/and/of/through culture. As I revise this article, the World Cup is underway. Anthropologists have long noted how deeply rooted in broader culture sports have been. ⁵ 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, and so on. 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 rethinking 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.

The goal, in offering up Geertz and Lévy-Strauss, is a call to breathe new life into these experimental systems. It is also my attempt to avoid the Scylla and Charybdis between formalism and whatever is on the other side: narrative, emergence, the assemblage, and so on. It will always depend. That game is always the same. The reality is that it is a deconstructive and culturally situated kind of analysis. Rules matter, subjectivity matters, the game itself matters, its context matter. What Geertz pushes us to do is respect the meaningfulness of it all and do it justice in our analysis. Deep Play and games in/as/of/through culture is an alternative to the false dichotomy between proceeduralism/formalism and the assemblage. What matters is how might the analyst playfully and meaningfully play with and explore those systems. Many fields have faced these issues. Game studies need not go alone. Science and technology studies faced it with social construction and nature and feminist and queer studies with biological reductionism and social construction. The answer is always it is complicated or it depends, which is why I start with Deep Play.