Unserious

Is it interesting that game studies scholars, critics, and designers tend take our object more seriously than most of the people of who play games? Of course, it is not. After all, academia is concerned with serious things and as scholars of games and play, who else should take games seriously. But, what if there was something to learn, not just from the unseriousness of the players whom we study but rather from unseriousness as an epistemological value? Could there be meaningfully unserious scholarship? In all honesty, I am not sure, but who better to explore this than scholars of games and play. It is with this in mind that I am proposing, in this article, to attend more not just to the unseriousness of play but also to the entire enterprise of a game studies which purports to know about it. In this way, the object of game studies shifts from being merely about games and play to being about unseriousness. I suppose this would be the field of unserious studies.

In suggesting this, I do not mean to say that game studies should necessarily be more fun, silly, or even less serious. Instead, I will propose that game studies and game design should be more unserious. Game studies should be an unserious academic field for the critique and creation of games understood as unserious culture. This article follows from a presentation I made at the “Critical Evaluation of Game Studies” seminar in Tampere in 2014 and continues the provocation for a collective discussion of what we might call an unserious epistemology for the study and design of games. How can we take unseriousness seriously? Is this not a contradiction, as one reviewer has already observed, made obvious by the fact that I am writing this peer-reviewed scholarly article. I will accept the paradoxical nature of what I propose for now, but I ask the reader to play along as I self-consciously try to temper my language with needless colloquialisms, unsupported provocations, and other kinds of potentially unserious speech. Can my argument be serious and unserious at the same time without just being half serious? The risk is that my argument will be lost in a confusion of trivial observations. My argument may be playful perhaps, but pointless, and bordering on narcissistic. But, part of the argument here is that play as unseriousness always appears as an unfulfilled proposition awaiting the reader/player to take it up or walk away. Writing, like playing a game, is a delicate thing. I do not claim any superior expertise in either, but if writers and readers could play together in all unseriousness, I think that would be something.

So what if it is true that game studies scholars take games more seriously than most people who play them? Consider for a moment that the phrasing of this question has normative implications especially when it comes to games. Isn’t it possible that by taking games more seriously than most players, we run the risk of misapprehending or misunderstanding our object even as we seek to produce knowledge about what we study? Might there be something important to learn about games from the relative unseriousness of most players? Might the players, and not the scholars, be occupying the superior epistemological standpoint? Are we sure that we have not, in our quest to develop and legitimate this academic field of game studies and design, become too serious for our own good?

We should ask these questions perhaps not as game studies practitioners but as pretend or make-believe sociologists of knowledge (the same kind that study how the natural and social sciences came to be the disciplines they are today). We know that game studies is composed of a collectivity of actors working to constitute knowledge about a wonderfully fuzzy set of objects which we tend to refer to as “digital games” with all of their gamey family resemblances to other similar and dissimilar kinds; play, fun, and joy; board games, casual games, serious games, and art games; sports, stories, theater, and old and new media of all sorts; freedom, childhood, and creativity; geek, fan, and military cultures; and so on. We, and here I am speaking of the “we” of game studies, constitute our object together, and in so doing, our object constitutes us as a more or less legitimate field of scholarly inquiry, design, and criticism. Because of this, the answer to the question, “what is a game?,” is the same as the answer to the question, “what is game studies?” This is important. The object of knowledge (games) and knowledge of the object (game studies) are co-constitutive so we must be careful what we wish for. Science is what science does.

I should acknowledge that this is a fully and unabashedly social constructivist or even nominalist position in the sociology of knowledge. A game is whatever the various folks talking about what it is happen to be able to convince, coerce, and cajole each other into agreeing with (or at least not disagreeing with). Thus, a game is not defined by goals, rules, or the meaning of the myriad formal properties that we scholars have given them, but rather by the collective agreement of players as to the goals, rules, or meaning of a specific shared activity that they tend to refer to as “playing a game.” It follows from this that if we want to know what a game is then we have to make sense of what players say and do since it is only their activity that constitutes the thing that we want to study (and in this way, games are not like rocks, in case you were wondering). If we don’t want to, or can’t, talk to the players directly, then we can rely on interpretive methods that discern deeply embedded, institutionalized, and distributed cultural understandings that tend to underwrite the things players say and do.

Chess, for example, is a game not because it has the formal properties of a game but because in our culture, almost everyone knows it is a game. Go ahead, ask anyone about chess. The gaminess of chess is so ubiquitous that it has become an archetype or convention for thinking about and playing many kinds of games. This ubiquity is also important because the shared robustness of chess helps us to think of moments when assumed common knowledge about a game and its putative goals, rules, and meanings breakdown. The typical cases we trot out are attempts to play with strong willed children, cheaters, and other sorts of chess ne’er-do-wells. The dominate chess culture helps to mitigate against chess deviance with its rule books, lexicon of opening gambits, school clubs, and competitions as well as legitimating discourses of nostalgia, heroism, and the triumph of human reason (Fine, 2013). A game in this sense, even one that is digitized, boxed, and commodified is a tender thing. Since the game’s mere existence cannot ensure play it must be buttressed and scaffolded by cultures. These game cultures can be idiosyncratic and may, at times, become obsessive, obtuse, and esoteric. Indeed, one explanation of fan cultures for games may have to do with this tenderness problem. Fan cultures can help a great deal with the scaffolding of gameplay, circulating sociomaterial resources that work like a kind of putty to help fill the cracks and keep the players on their game.

Some readers may already be muttering in disgust at my blatant social constructivism (Hacking, 1999). Some may worry about my preoccupation with the cultures of players; don’t the actual games or the play of games (let us simply call this the “gameplay”) have anything to say about the matter? It is one thing to know that chess is a game and to correctly identify it as such in the course of everyday life. It is another to play that game, and we might break with our a priori nominalism a bit to ask how playing a game might matter. Indeed, it is in the course of gameplay that the things we might otherwise take to be games can end up not being games at all. Chess can only cease to be the game that we know in the course of play.

It might seem like the huge cultural edifice of chess has us all locked down. Its players are mere pawns of centuries of cultural buttressing, and their gameplay has been determined so completely that each and every possible move has already been catalogued. To make a move in chess is to play out a script for an action that has already been anticipated by chess culture before the player has been born. And yet, players do not experience the game this way, or if they do, they have learned to see the cultural edifice of chess as a challenge to be overcome by a form of genius emblemized by great heroes like Lasker, Kasperov, and Fischer. The cultural edifice of chess in this sense is something to be played with.

We also know that players’ actions in video games are not simply a recapitulation of a cultural edifice embedded in software. As with chess, all moves in a video game have been preordained by the system, but it is wrong to see player actions in these games as simply the final step in the execution of a program. Many sociologists would follow Harold Garfinkel in stating (or rather demanding) that people are not “cultural dopes” and players are not drones (see Lynch, 2012). Even in video games with their seemingly fixed ends and means, players are active agents in the production of the meaning of the game. There is nothing particularly novel about my articulation of this, but I think it is a necessary first step for any unserious epistemology.

We are left where we started except that our focal point has narrowed a bit. We find ourselves once again at the juncture of the cultural edifice of the game and the players who live with/in it. We might certainly surmise that one only becomes a player in the context of the extant cultural edifice. The cultures of games are ideological in this way since their bare bones proposition is simply an invitation (which is also an interpellation) to become a player. The act of picking up the dice or pressing “start” on the controller interpellates a human subject as a player no less than the question, “are you playing?” Once play begins, we may certainly paraphrase Marx:

[Players] make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living.

This is certainly a fitting description of chess but equally apt for more than a few Team Fortress maps that I have played.

I am doing my best to quickly sketch and convey the weight and power of game cultures in constituting the objects of game studies. Curiously perhaps, I am less interested in pursuing this line of argument if only because this is already well-trod territory in media studies. The continuing critique of game studies coming from critical media studies scholars, especially those working within neo-Marxian, feminist, and political economy traditions, is that we continually underemphasize and underanalyze the role of culture in constituting the objects that we then tend to fetishize. Game studies’ long fixation on the problem of classification (genres, game design patterns, and typologies) can be seen in one sense as an exercise of getting a shared grip on a slippery object, but it is also fetishistic as we work to dissociate games-as-objects from the cultural contexts that scaffold them. This is a fair criticism, but what media scholars often fail to recognize is that games are not (serious) media and so we need to develop our own forms of cultural analysis.

I understand that this is a terrible provocation to leave undeveloped but I hope it will have some bite. Since when did anyone ever consider chess to be media? Marbles to be media? Pond hockey, or shinny? Of course chess is mediated, our encounters with chess are mediated, but all life is mediated in this sense. It is also plausible that some games are media or media-like, while others are not, but their unseriousness does not reside in this fact. This again betrays a kind of disciplinary chauvinism of mine that sees gameplay rooted in the study of social action and interaction rather than cultural representation. The two are related of course, and the idea here is not to disparage media studies so much as push a bit more on less explored domains of social action in specifically game cultural contexts. In short, the cultural contexts, scaffolds, or edifices that constitute games and players are important, but game cultures, unlike media cultures, are patently unserious. If an appreciation of unseriousness can be our one contribution to media studies, then I will die happy but I have, until now, been avoiding the question. What is unseriousness?

The unseriousness of games has intellectual roots in Bateson’s (1972) work on the functional unseriousness of the nip and seriousness of the bite in animal behavior. For Bateson, play is by definition “unserious” activity and its communicative content (or meaning) is framed or denoted as such in specific contexts of mutual interaction. That is, while the behavior may look serious (i.e., a bite from the perspective of onlookers), it is understood by the players as being unserious (i.e., just a nip). Erving Goffman (1961) picks up on this idea and points out that with humans at least, an unseriousness attributed to action can occur in the context of a kind of social encounter, where actors are able to hold each other to account for the way they understand what they are doing. Part of being a player for Goffman is the social work that is required in reminding others that all are in the midst of playing a game. In this sense, all unserious play is defined by its relationship to its potential seriousness along with the mutual negotiation of the idea that observed behaviors are not what they might otherwise seem to be.

Some game studies folk will see this as one route to the infamous magic circle arguments of Huizenga and more recently, Salen and Zimmerman, but for both Bateson and Goffman, the unseriousness of play is always to be seen as a particular accomplishment of the interaction of the actors involved. If there is a magic circle, then it is a tender and fragile social accomplishment rather than a condition given or enshrined by the state of play. This is one way out of our typically autotelic definitions of play as that which has no end other than itself. For Goffman and many other sociologists of play, just getting everyone to sit down to play a game as if there was no end other than itself is a tremendously epic feat of microsocial coordination that may in fact be quite rare. The fact that half the players at the table might be only pretending to play, faking it, cheating, or just kibbutzing (one of Goffman’s favorite terms) is simply part of the sociological puzzle.

Indeed, at this level, we have no interest in issues of psychological motivation, questions of flow or even game design, except in as much as they are deployable resources in the collective accomplishment of the activity at the table. Rhetorics of fun or pleasure, for instance, are deployable discursive resources that actors can use to cajole themselves or their fellows with statements such as “lighten up,” “isn’t this fun?” or “hey, we are just playing for fun,” and so on. To augment talk, there are game boards, rule books, hardware, software, and other paraphernalia to help the players to hedge around, and hang on to, their mutual activity; to help keep each other “in the game” or “attending to the game.” Even spectators and other nonplayers help by reminding the players of who they are, and who they are not, as players.

With Goffman, what might otherwise be ephemeral culture is concretized in the practical negotiation of what it is to play a game. Specific gameplay acts are situated in the context of social encounters of gaming which are situated in game cultures that provide material and discursive resources for maintaining the shared goals, rules, and meanings of their activity (but also for deviations, dark play, and so on). Now, however, we need to situate those game cultures and move beyond Goffman. Gameplay as a social encounter can be articulable as the social accomplishment of the unseriousness of action in the context of the much broader cultural edifice of seriousness that we sometimes refer to as modernity (or late modernity if you prefer). In this, we must break from the legacy of Bateson and other developmental theories of play and consider how games are unserious in part because modern life (or late modern life) has become gravely serious.

Back to the beginning. Why do we take games more seriously than most of the folks who play them? Drawing on Bateson and Goffman, I am not referring to the idea of playing seriously or serious play (and definitely not serious games) but rather the idea that games are to be taken as serious culture. That games can somehow be a defining feature of our contemporary moment; that they can be conservative or radical objects of art, literature, and politics at the same time as being breakthrough technology or technique in education, management, self-care, and civic participation. Understanding games as a defining feature of our contemporary moment can be seen easily in pervasive talk of living in a Ludic Century where games literacies become essential for understanding and progressively reconfiguring our systems-oriented information society (Zimmerman, 2014). Games are now a big deal it would seem.

For many people, games have always been pretty serious. They are serious for game producers and developers of course, but also for professional gamers and sportspeople, problem gamers, and most recently “gamergators.” The very existence of these groups is predicated on a kind of seriousness about games, and we could also surmise that these groups’ continued survival depends on the successful management and maintenance of their seriousness. The implication of this is that there is more than play for play’s sake going on for these groups and that the Bateson/Goffman frame of unseriousness does not apply. These people are not playing around; their games are serious business even or especially when there is no money at stake. We could certainly add game studies scholars to this list, but part of my argument is that we may be implicated in ways that these other groups are not. It is certain, however, that most people, even self-defined gamers, do not belong to these groups. For the vast majority, games are not that serious and neither their social nor individual well-being depends on staking a claim to the seriousness of games one way or the other.

It is consistent with everything we know about games as play from Huizenga, Piaget, and Caillois to Suits, Goffman, and DeKoven that many people who play like to play seriously (especially or particularly when playing games). This is a seriousness of intent as in “are we here to play or not?” It is a signal of the deep commitment to the activity of play, but crucially, that activity of play is about being committed to games as moments of intense unseriousness. Indeed, part of why we can speak of the deep commitments of players is because commitments to shared moments of intense unseriousness are especially difficult in adult society where seriousness is the norm. I have tried to suggest that there are palpable social forces at work at the game table and at the computer or console. If there is a collective sense that a game is being played (whether in groups or even alone), then there is a kind of sociomaterial pressure to keep the activity of gameplay unserious even while seriousness threatens to take over at every turn.

This is the social root of the autotelic definition we are always wrestling with; play is its own reward and for play to be play it must have no function or value. It must not be serious, for that which is serious has value, and that which has value is serious. It becomes something to fight over, something to worry about, and something to possess. This is partly what Castronova (2006) was worrying about when he argued about the dangers of real-money trade in massively multiplayer online games. The genuine possibility of playing the game for money represents a real threat to the unseriousness of the game. I will not argue about whether Castronova is correct about the threat, but his position speaks to this notion of seriousness and extractable value and goes so far as to advocate for the need for legal protection for the unseriousness of play.

That game studies itself can be understood in terms of the extraction of value, and therefore seriousness, from the play of games is something we, in game studies, have to face more than any of kind of scholar. Our vocation, it would seem, is to make games more serious than they are otherwise meant to be, but unlike the objects of other disciplines, ours is also rooted in a kind of culturally mandated unseriousness that keeps slapping us in the face in spite of our best efforts at legitimation (and indeed, gamification). We “experts” say games are for this and games are for that, but there is a matching cultural imperative that says games are for none of this or that. Play, we tell ourselves, is its own reward. Note that this is not the same anti-intellectual notion that studying literature or art somehow lessons its beauty or aesthetic impact. Games in the Batesonian/Goffmanian sense are necessarily unserious, so to make games serious is to destroy the object completely. To talk of games as being serious is to not talk of games at all (another reason why perhaps that games are not media).

“It’s just a game, after all.” In the wake of gamergate, it is amazing how much that phrase now stings. In one sense, it has never been just a game, and there is a solid strain of feminist and neo-Marxian criticism in game studies that has closely considered the cultural legacy of the “just a gameness” of our current game cultures. As Katherine Cross (2015), among others, has argued, we need to be wary of the kinds of social and moral exclusions of what is performed under the cover of play as “just for fun.” We know that playing games is not just about having fun. Playing games is a social activity (even solo play) and like all social activities, play makes, unmakes, and remakes, identities, relationships, groups, and imaginaries. This is why we have come to care deeply about who gets to play what games, when and how they play, and with whom. We rightly started to become worried about what was happening under the cover of play as unseriousness, and we made correlations between the operations of late capitalism or neoliberalism, technocracy, and patriarchy and the actual, rather than imagined, state of play in our contemporary world.

We could say that we have already set about deconstructing the unseriousness of play in this sense. This is interesting because some of the criticisms of game studies from media studies scholars focus on how oblivious we seem to be about these processes. Game studies is often accused of being both myopic about its object and ignorant or dismissive of the larger social, economic, and cultural forces that shape it. For many scholars in older and more battle hardened disciplines, game studies comes off as being; how can I put this? Less serious if not downright flakey. And so we are placed in the predicament of fighting for the seriousness of our scholarship (and therefore our careers), and in so doing, we begin to lay our bets on the seriousness of our object: a critical and political seriousness, an economic seriousness, an aesthetic seriousness, an educational seriousness, and more.

There is nothing profane about this process. If I study games and I can help show that the games I study are as worthy and as legitimate as other cultural objects like literature, film, education, art, or even software, is this not a good thing for my career prospects as well as the larger cultural significance of my work and that of my game studies friends and colleagues? The normal dynamics of knowledge construction begin from this as I legitimate my games as much as I can and then proceed to cut down your games in order to make my games look even better (i.e., more serious). Then we fight it out over some dribs and drabs of grant money, a few tenure-track positions, and some peer-reviewed publications and books. Whether we are in favor of shared definitions of our object or against them it amounts to the same thing. Those who hold the high ground of seriousness win. Has it not always been thus?

And yet perhaps there is another way. Players and gamers still use the language we all but abandoned pretty quickly when we started this game studies business. Playing games are perceived as fun, as an escape, they pass the time, or they are something different to do. Games might be seen as a challenge, a break, a chance to relax, or a way to zone out. More often than not, this language speaks to the spaces and times of play (digital games or otherwise) over and against some other more serious, important, or pressing activity. That play takes its cue from the seriousness of work is well known. This idea of playing games as a respite from work continues to be salient and is evidenced in all our skipped workdays, procrastinations, breaks, and “me” times. This framing is consistent with what we have already taken from Bateson and Goffman. Gameplay is to the nip as work is to the bite. Games may look like work just as the nip looks like a bite, but players know better.

Should we pause briefly to consider a neo-Marxist counterargument? We might suggest that players only think they know better, but really they are dupes of a capitalist ideology (false consciousness) which would have them continue to work (often for free) while they believe that they are playing. These theorizations of the happily playbouring subjects of late capitalism are compelling, and while we have made some attempts at a nuanced critique of this position, we will be better served if we let this particular specter of Marx continue to haunt us for a while (Robinson & Simon, 2015; Silverman & Simon, 2009). Suffice it to say that while the game industry is both complicit and generative of new processes of capital accumulation under the guise of entertainment or leisure, it will be consistent with my argument thus far that entertainment and leisure are rather serious business, and therefore are not equivalent to play. One can be unserious about one’s entertainment, but entertainment is not unserious out of the box. Indeed, we might suggest that entertainment is quite serious at least until the point of purchase.

With this in mind, let us consider the possibility that despite the collapse of the magic circle for scholars (Consalvo, 2009), there is still widespread cultural salience to the idea that playing games is the opposite of work, and when we want someone to be serious and start working, we say things like “quit playing around” or “stop playing games.” I would like to suggest that it is the tension between the culturally mandated unseriousness of play and the equally mandated seriousness of work (an inheritance of the Protestant ethic among other things) that gives rise to our somewhat idealistic notion that play has or should have no purpose or function. There is no biological, developmental, or civilizational imperative for this. There is a cultural imperative that is latent within the structures of Western modernity itself.

My shorthand approach to thinking about this is drawn directly from Steven Conner’s wonderful keynote address for the European Summer School on “Playtime! The cultures of play, gaming and sport” (Connor, 2005). Conner deftly traces some of the core articulations of play in the context of modernity arriving at the key bifurcation of the fields of work and play due to the rationalization of the lifeworld brought on by the political, technological, and economic transformations developed since the 17th century. As Conner (2005) writes, “It was precisely because of the seemingly universal expansion of the conditions of work that play for the first time began to seem, not just irresponsible, but incongruous or enigmatic, and therefore to be credited with mysterious powers” (p. 6). With this, Connor is able to situate the holy fathers of game studies (take your pick) within a particular modernist mode of thought where

in one sense, the world of play was a kind of accidental by-product of the world of work. In another sense, it could begin to be seen as vestigial, all that was left of a fragile, vanishing world of spontaneous unchecked, self-delighting impulse.

Connor has the right idea here but the wrong implementation. It is not the absolute, but relative, purposelessness of play that matters from a cultural standpoint. The crucial point lies in the potential that there is an activity we can do which, from our point of view, is not serious or which is, at least, less serious than any of the other activities we have to contend with. That the forces that shaped modernity also shaped our ideas about play is simply part of the cultural edifice we have inherited for the practical social accomplishment of our games as we play them. There is no play impulse in humankind. There is only the practical deployment of the idea of play to justify unserious activity in a world overdetermined by the imperative of work.

Everyday life is so burdensome and stressful that games are arguably interesting to people today because they don’t matter so much, and maybe more importantly, because there is still cultural permission for playing games to not matter so much. Time spent playing games can still be seen to be trivial, inconsequential, and mundane, because we know (and we are told) that our time is better spent on other things. Sometimes the time spent playing is a waste, sometimes it is a revelation, and sometimes it is a respite, but there are no guarantees so all time playing games must be “no big deal,” at least in the face of the much bigger deals of our everyday and working lives. From this vantage, games really don’t deserve the respect and reverence we give them, because every ounce of respect they have makes them a bigger deal than they ideally should be.

For that is what game studies has done. It has helped to valorize and sanctify what used to be the most lowly and insignificant of pop cultures. Even Atari’s E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (literal trash) is high culture now, and while it is not completely our fault, we have certainly done our part in creating a legitimation apparatus for both the industry and the state (some of us have even been advisors to the U.S. president). It is amazing what people can argue playing games are good for these days. This is what happens when computer science meets the humanities; everything has a measurable function and a moral value. This is all for the better we think, either because games were bad for us before or so we could help realize the social and cultural potential we believe exists in the medium, our object.

Even my undergraduate students are singing this song now as some of them enthusiastically tell me that the right games and the right kind of play will make the world a better place. So many students want to do a study of the positive impact that playing some kinds of games can have on the lives, values, and behaviors of players. Games can make persuasive arguments, right? Solve social problems, right? Lift us to new aesthetic heights, right? Reform criminals, right? Hell yes, game designers are the new social engineers! But that wasn’t originally the point, playing games was not supposed to be that serious. At best, play is a hiatus, a blip, a break, and a fleeting moment. The idea that playing games can make you better, smarter, kinder, or the reverse, that games can make you a sociopath, increasingly stupid, or a mindless drone of the State; this is a lot to demand of hopscotch, a game of Frisbee in the park, Kingdom Rush or even Grand Theft Auto 5.

It is worth pointing out that within traditions of cultural studies, the unseriousness, baseness, and pointlessness of so-called low cultures has often been somewhat critical for the political mobilization and resistant practices of disenfranchised subjects. It can be the unseriousness associated with, and appropriated by, these subjects that provides them with the freedom of motion in which to act within (and against) a dominant system. This does not have to do with any characteristics of essential unseriousness, but it is rather because the dominant culture couldn’t care less as long as it’s just a game. Unserious culture has always been important because it has been more difficult for the logic of capital to colonize that which has no desirable or definable, and therefore extractable, value. Can we just pause on that thought for a moment? Can an unserious game studies be the final hope for a postcapitalist social world?

The cultural historian Roy Rosenzweig (1983) famously wrote about the leisure culture of the working-class Irish saloons in Boston in the late 1800s. Their drunken bar games serving, in a sense, to sequester time and space from the control of factory owners on the one hand and the temperance movement on the other. Saloon games were played by unruly workers, and their play spaces became focal points for unintended (and therefore unsurveilled and uncontrollable) political mobilizations. Erkki Huhtamo (2005) wrote similarly about the first public arcade machines as being an almost carnivalesque instance where factory workers could exert some control over machines rather than the other way around. And in one of our very first projects, Shanly Dixon and I (2005) observed how a group of tween boys used sequestered time around their playstation games to manage issues of heteronormativity and masculinity away from the prying eyes of adults. The games they played were a kind of cover for unsanctioned interaction in their otherwise highly regulated upper-middle-class lives (Dixon, 2011).

If the games are too serious, then the cultural cover of pointlessness is blown and the activity of play becomes amenable to the dominant neoliberal discourses of use value, progress, rationality, and morality. It hardly matters whether these games are good or bad, they simply need to matter one way or the other. Strangely, all children seem to know this intuitively (perhaps because they are subaltern), and if you think an activity is good or bad for them, then they suspect that there is something wrong; woe to the social scientist who tries to dupe a kid with sugar coated gamification, and yet isn’t this the state of educational games today? Especially the good ones? These games work best if their putative unseriousness hides a secret seriousness and educational value; it is another form of false consciousness.

Critics like Henri Lefebvre and Jean Baudrillard wrote about this also as they feared the colonization and rationalization of play by capital. The unseriousness of play, its triviality, and mundaneness was a source of resistance. For Lefebvre, part of the key was the indefinability and ephemerality of play; a trait echoed by Jacques Derrida among others in the discussions of the play of signification. As long as no one could figure out what play was for, or why it was happening, the players were safe. Play was nothing but a waste of time, something to grow out of, and be admonished for, but otherwise no big deal. The first to fall, of course, were the children at the hands of the behavioral psychologists, and we are still living with the consequences of that in education and parenting guides to this day. Game studies comes along much, much later and roots everyone out of their hidey holes. No game is too minor for us now. There is no safe place.

Let us be clear that there may not have ever been a safe place. The social worlds of Rosenzweig’s saloon drinking games were not utopias and were arguably sites for collectively rarifying gender distinctions, as the mainly male player–drinkers avoided their wives and families no less than their bosses. The same might be said for the tween boys of our old study who were certainly “working through” aspects of their own masculinity through physical and symbolic exclusions. We could posit that introverted masculine idiocultures like these could be a source for later gamergate sentiments about how women and/or feminists might be ruining men’s fun, and yet gamergaters were never really playing games to begin with. It matters too much to them. In our study, the boys had used their game time as a kind of veil to help deflate the possibility of injurious judgments and remind themselves that what they were saying was in the context of play and therefore unserious. Only through the mutual recognition of the unseriousness of their action could the boys feel free to speak. Yet this condition of unserious sociality was a fragile thing, and seriousness always threatened, and often succeeded, in shutting them down. Unserious games in this sense are the condition of possibility of radical tolerance, mutual acceptance, and shared understanding not the reverse. As games become more serious, the cover story and the veneer of pointlessness and triviality are no longer able to function. A consequence of this may be gamergate.

Critical theorists like Lefebvre differ from our inherited Kantian–Huizengian idealistic play theory tradition in that they are also wary of reifying play as essentially unserious. Such essentialisms, well embodied by both Zimmerman-esque manifestos on the one hand and gamification pundits on the other, are simply too serious and it makes the stakes of playing too high despite our best intentions. With this neoromantic move, we have no choice but to play games since clearly, our future depends on it. It is a bit like being at one of Bernie DeKoven’s play workshops. You feel angst and guilt if you don’t want to play, even though DeKoven’s notion of play is premised on pure volunteerism. This romantic notion of play is far too noble for the average League of Legends, Counter-Strike or Angry Birds player. Play, and maybe especially computer gameplay, seems baser then we give it credit for; it is an ugly gutter culture. It is dirty, smelly, crass, stupid, pointless, icky, and banal. It is not noble, it is the culture of last resort.

Of course that makes it a perfect zero point from which to rearticulate the world. I didn’t say the gutter was without romance. The Kantian impulse might still do some “unessential” work. What might be imagined and performed under a condition where what one imagines and performs doesn’t matter? This is the starting point for the discussion that must come next. Let the social construction of academic knowledge proceed in the normal disciplines as it always has. After all, the stakes of those games are pretty damn serious and there is little anyone can do about it. In game studies, we have little else yet but our object (a few journals, some book series, conferences, and a clump of tenure-track positions) but perhaps we can find in a shared unseriousness a new modality for imagining the world that none of the other disciplines can touch. Games might yet be special that way, that is, if we can remember to take our object a little more unseriously.