On Balinese Cockfights:Deeply Extending Play

Casey O’Donnell1

Abstract In this article, I advance three points, each in service of ‘‘extending play’’ as a criticalconceptual category. The article begins with Clifford Geertz’s essay ‘‘Deep Play,’’tracing through its lens the possibilities for ‘‘deeply extending play.’’ The essayextends Geertz’s argument that games and play are in/as/of/through culture. Gamesand play are not generative of, reflective of, just culture. Rather they are intenselyinterwoven. I argue that games and play, as conceptual categories, need to be viewedas ‘‘experimental systems,’’ and those concepts deserve to be informed by alternativeperspectives. Finally, the article returns to the notion of ‘‘meaningful play’’ asmechanism of sense making and cultural negotiations with structures. Meaningfulplay lies at the core of exploration and encourages a different kind of reading ofplay(ful) spaces. Meaningful play is part of what makes games and play so fundamentallyan aspect of the human (and nonhuman) condition.Keywordsplay, Deep Play, meaningful play, ethnography, experimental systems, cultureIntroductionI teach game design. I also teach game studies. In either case, however, I alwaysbegin with Clifford Geertz’s essay ‘‘Deep Play.’’ In this essay, Geertz analyzes hisexperiences as an ethnographer in Indonesia, where he found himself and his partnerpart of a community cockfight. He explores that ethnographic moment through1 Department of Media and Information, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USACorresponding Author:Casey O’Donnell, Department of Media and Information, Michigan State University, 404 Wilson Rd,Room 409, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA.Email: caseyod@msu.eduGames and Culture1-11ª The Author(s) 2014Reprints and permission:sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navDOI: 10.1177/1555412014545783gac.sagepub.comDownloaded from gac.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 18, 2016a culturally interpretive lens, exploring what he terms ‘‘Deep Play,’’ reading Balineseculture through the cockfight. I spare my undergraduates the follow-up, butgraduate students continue by next reading Claude Levi-Strauss’ analysis of thedifference between games and ritual (Le´vy-Strauss, 1962, p. 32). I do this for avariety of reasons but primarily because the program I work within is rooted inan overarching interest in ‘‘meaningfulness.’’ Geertz has become my antidote toa kind of theoretically reductive thinking that dominates ruminations on games andplay. For many in game studies, Sutton-Smith (1998) and Huizinga (1971) sufficefor theorizing about games and play.1 Yet, the reactions that I receive to Geertz andLe´vy-Strauss’ work demonstrates that there are important ways in which we canmore deeply explore and extend our understanding of play.There is a reason that game studies’ scholars are often the first to scoff when agame 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 lookcool. 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 implicatedby and reflect back a broader cultural system that surrounds it. Games, play, and cultureare enmeshed and entwined in ways that intimately implicate one another.Games produce culture. They reflect it back. They shift it. Mainstream games in particularcontribute to and reinforce hegemonic cultural projects. It is its rules and systemsand controllers and all of those things in conversation with a played context andbroader world system and lens through which it will be read and interpreted. Gameseven at their worst are deep.2 If a single student of mine ever utters the phrase ‘‘It’sjust a game,’’ I would have failed.More than anything, Geertz and Le´vy-Strauss offer a vision of play deeplyimbricated within/of/as culture. Put another way, both of these texts capture theempirical 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 thosemoments.3 Above all, play is not ‘‘primary’’ as Huizinga (1971, p. 46) states, itis striated and it is not smooth in a Deleuzian sense (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987,p. 351–423). Geertz and Le´vy-Strauss offer an instantiation of the tension betweenthe beautifully messy theories of play like those of Bernard Suits (Suits, 1978) andBernard De Koven (De Koven, 1978) and the relatively clean, accessible, and mobilizabletheories of Huizinga (1971) and Sutton-Smith (1998). To unpack this a bitmore, Huizinga and Sutton-Smith’s formulations have traveled so well, preciselybecause of their relative clarity, which play isn’t always. Suits and De Koven’s conceptionsof play have proven more difficult to appropriate, precisely because they capturequite well the striated space of play. Geertz and Le´vy-Strauss pull at and play withthat tension, demonstrating it; putting it into play. All of that isn’t to say that thesethings are antithetical, rather that they are always in tension, and as such, how do Iin my function as a teacher of such things ensure that my students and my own theorizingmaintains that tension, rather than writing it out?2 Games and CultureDownloaded from gac.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 18, 2016In this article, I explore a variety of ethnographic/anthropological literature bothconnected to and disconnected from ‘‘play.’’ I begin by exploring Geertz’s essay inparticular as well as Le´vy-Strauss’ and the role that Deep Play has for thinking aboutextending our understandings of play. The article then turns to ethnographic workexploring the role of ethnography in/of/as a system in context and the implicationsthat hold for teaching and theorizing on play. This is not new territory for Games andCulture. For example, Celia Pearce’s call for rooting play in a productive capacityopened up new analytic perspectives in her work (Pearce, 2006). In that case, shebegan 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 conceptualpastures, the more orthodox versions persist. In the examination of games,mechanics, designs, rules, platforms, aesthetics, narrative, and so on, the depth andmeaning(ful-ness) of a game can be drowned out.Let us try again.Games and Deep PlayThere are many things that game researchers could take from Deep Play. In thissection, I explore only the three most salient that I encourage my students to gleanfrom 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 tothe 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 andsystematize the world around them. Yet, games are always played and spectated,an experience that is always subjective. Thus, as we analyze games and play, wemust 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 andCharybdis play debates that periodically move through game studies. One suchdebate could be the often mentioned ludology versus narrative debates.5Games in/as/of/through culture is an alternative framework for understandingthe various forms and structures that games offer as meaning-making systems.(1) They are designed often reflecting/dubbing various cultural forms that they areembedded. (2) In doing so, they objectify the world around them; games renderthe world in systems. (3) Games are played and spectators observe the players;these experiences are always subjective. (4) Players and observers may tell thesesubjective experiences to others or use them as inspiration for games of their owncreation. (5) Thus, games in/as/of/through culture shift and move, although theycan be analytically untangled.Perhaps most importantly, Geertz’s attendance of a cockfight during his fieldworkin Bali didn’t make him a player. The Balinese cockfight inverts our thoughtsabout games by not focusing explicitly on the game’s design or its mechanics or itsplayers, all a critical component of the game. Rather, the text focuses on theO’Donnell 3Downloaded from gac.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 18, 2016observer. The spectator and the ‘‘superorganism’’ (Geertz, 1973, p. 414) that surroundthe game are the focus. Deep Play is as much about the field that surroundsthe game and its broader context. What also emerges is the importance of havingbeen involved in the game. Deep Play is always implicated in the game itself. Onecannot hold the play at arm’s length as a kind of passive observer. Because gamesalways require and involve the player, they must be experienced in one form oranother. This will always, and perhaps uncomfortably, position the analyst in interestingways. 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 thingthat 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, byvarious other mechanisms. Put another way, there is an outside to a game, but itis 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 thatschool are fair game for analysis. Geertz includes in his analysis the official rulesof 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 ofanime production (Condry, 2013) are different from AAA (‘‘triple-A’’) gamedevelopment (O’Donnell, 2014a), which is also distinct from thermonuclear wargames (Ghamari-Tabrizi, 2005).Which leads to the role of ‘‘meaningfulness’’ in both the design of games and therole that games play. Cockfights matter not just to the cocks.4Like any art form—for that, finally, is what we are dealing with—the cockfightrenders ordinary, everyday experience comprehensible by presenting it in terms ofacts and objects which have had their practical consequences removed and beenreduced (or, if you prefer, raised) to the level of sheer appearances, where their meaningcan 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 anyoneto animal status, alter the hierarchical relations among people, or refashion thehierarchy; it does not even redistribute income in any significant way. What it doesis what, for other peoples with other temperaments and other conventions, Lear andCrime 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 essentialnature. It puts a construction on them, makes them, to those historically positioned toappreciate the construction, meaningful—visible, tangible, graspable—‘‘real,’’ in anideational sense. An image, fiction, a model, a metaphor, the cockfight is a means ofexpression; 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 offeathers, blood, crowds, and money, to display them. (Geertz, 1973, pp. 443–444)4 Games and CultureDownloaded from gac.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 18, 2016This passage, perhaps more than any other sums up why I care about games. Itis whatgames can (or ought) strive to be. To push the point further, it is what I hope my studentsstriveto make. To make sense ofthe world and putit back on displayin waysthat engagepeople deeply and from which they can tell meaningful stories to othersthat encourage anewfound interest or engagement with the world around them. Geertz’s vision of whatDeep 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 andplay from a variety of fields can only increase game studies’ ability to explore andthink through the complex issues that many now find themselves attempting to pullapart. Much like anthropology found itself at a crisis moment the early to mid-1980sand 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 reflectiveways proved a productive exercise (Marcus & Fischer, 1999). In a similar move,now turn to games and play as a kind of theoretical experimental apparatus, whichanalysts 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 criticalto our understanding of them. Games ‘‘produce events by means of a structure’’(Le´vy-Strauss, 1962, p. 32) but must be viewed based on context. The ‘‘disjunctiveeffect’’ of games is that ‘‘they end in the establishment of a difference between individualplayers or teams where originally there was no indication of inequality.’’ That‘‘asymmetry’’ is established ‘‘by means of events, the nature of which is genuinelystructural.’’ In a sense, this interpretation puts a great deal of emphasis then on agame’s mechanics and rules yet simultaneously indicates that such an interpretationmust simultaneously examine the contex, ‘‘we can therefore understand why competitivegames should flourish in our industrial societies’’ (Le´vy-Strauss, 1962, p.32). However, such a perspective on games is also rooted in its time and place, butit is part of what is at play when we explore games in/of/as culture.Games and Play in/of/as CultureIn the 1990s, the subfields within anthropology that had made the critical turn foundthemselves, empirically and conceptually at a crossroads. Existing methods andways of thinking about inquiry and conceptual analysis were at a crossroads. Theidea that single-sited ethnography and a reticence to engage with a shifting worldsystem was broadly recognized, yet how to make that turn remained problematic.Call for accounts of ‘‘dissolution and fragmentation, as well as new processes—capturedin concepts like post-Fordism, time-space compression, flexible specialization,the end of organized capitalism, and most recently, globalization and transnationalism—noneof which could be fully understood in terms of earlier macro models ofthe capitalist world system’’ (Marcus, 1995, p. 98) were deemed critical in import. Inshort, there was a call for ethnography to move in/of emerging world systems inorder to make sense of them. Anthropologists answered this call enthusiastically,O’Donnell 5Downloaded from gac.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 18, 2016extending their analysis into the same kinds of complex realms that games findthemselves embedded in. There is no reason to not consider the contexts of gamesas complex and intertwined as those of anthropology: financial markets and algorithmictrading, 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 attimes 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. Muchlike ethnography needed to be pushed to look at its entanglements with broadersystems, so too must games and play look at the ways they are rife with connectivitybeyond a single given ‘‘game.’’ As others have noted, these are now games withoutfrontiers, they are ‘‘thoroughly digitized and inhabit the global communicationsnetwork,’’ 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, Iam pushing them to think of games and play broadly rather than narrowly. Gamesneed to be seen at the outset as already knotted up in culture. As anthropologistsworked to think differently about the ethnographic endeavor so too should analystsof 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 pushto see games and play as thoroughly imbricated in/of/as culture ought to be seen asGeertz so eloquently put it, ‘‘like any art form.’’ Play needs to not be seen as a staticconceptual category, but one that can be pushed/prodded/developed over timein conversation with emergent forms of games and play.A different start: After their first foray into the world of Geertz, I ask my studentsto take the weekend following that introductory class and go out into theworld. ‘‘Find a game. You’ll be surprised where you find them. Watch an interchangeat 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 youwill 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 ofothers, including one which points out the difficult ethical dilemma that providingmeaningful feedback creates, often making game designers the limit betweenmeaningful play and addiction-friendly Auto-Play (Schu¨ll, 2012). When games arein/and/of/through culture, a designer’s responsibility changes.Much like thinking about a core concept like ‘‘culture’’ as an experimentalsystem can prove fruitful for making sense of a conceptual category and pushingit further (Fischer, 2007), seeing play as an experimental system allows for thegeneration of ‘‘surprise.’’ Perhaps most importantly, it allows for ‘‘differential6 Games and CultureDownloaded from gac.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 18, 2016reproduction,’’ in other words, for play to serve as a useful conceptual category, itmust allow for the ‘‘generation of difference’’ (Rheinberger, 1997, p. 287).Starting with Deep Play, the cockfight ensures that play as a category is differentfor my students and my work. Games as systems of meaning making then becomeinescapably tied to their broader contexts. It is what gives them the potential forsuch profound impact and importance.This is an important antidote for, as others have noted, the kind of wide array ofstudies that could conceivably be perceived as a kind of ‘‘cultural studies’’ or ‘‘culturalproduction’’ approach to the study of games (Shaw, 2010). In essence, I amalso arguing that there is no ‘‘games and culture’’ or ‘‘gamer culture’’ and ratherthat games are in/of/as culture. Games put culture at play and are played and areobserved and reflect back in/as/of culture. To imagine otherwise is to simplyignore the place of games and play through culture. Perhaps most importantly,drawing on ideas of cultural production, it is important to recognize that games areactively involved in producing culture. They do not simply reflect their culturalcontext, but rather they enter that system and shift it in meaningful and importantways (Shaw, 2011). Perhaps most importantly, mainstream games continue to reinforcethe more hegemonic elements of broader culture and in so doing contribute totheir entrenchment.Deep Play and games in/of/as culture is an alternative to the false dichotomyoffered (by no one, really) between proceduralism on one hand and the assemblageon 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 articlereplies, these are not new monsters that game studies should, or even ought, facealone. Other fields have braved these troubled waters previously, that is science andtechnology studies with social construction on one hand and nature on the other, andfeminist and queer studies with biological determinism and social construction. Theseare ultimately empirical questions that end up being answered in interesting new conceptualcategories 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 complexcultural interplay and intersections through the everyday worlds of game developers(O’Donnell, 2014a). Anime figurines, movie posters, game posters, game characterfigurines, game consoles, arcade cabinets and many others line the desks, walls andfree spaces within game companies. This is not something that can be extricatedfrom that context. Something (many things) is (are) always at play in the rather cleanconfines of a game’s play space.ConclusionIn all of this, I offer a simple suggestion that we look broadly and deeply for waysof shifting our conceptualizations of games and play. Start somewhere else first.What if instead of starting with a hardened category of play, one instead startedwith ‘‘dubbing’’ and the deeply cultural and contextual nature of how sexual andO’Donnell 7Downloaded from gac.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 18, 2016gendered subjectivities are coconstructed (Boellstorff, 2003)? Start with the contextual,partial, uncertain, and personal nature of DJs playing with music isenmeshed with culture and epistemological innovation (Miller, 2004). Perhaps usethis 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 Irevise this article, the World Cup is underway. Anthropologists have long notedhow deeply rooted in broader culture sports have been.5 Give play a chance at alittle oxygen. Allow it to be deeply extended.All too frequently, efforts to theorize play fall too quickly back on a very smallset of theoretical perspectives. In my offering of Deep Play as an alternative entrypoint, I only hope to bring culture back into the frame. Bringing the context of playand players back is a push for the empirical. Furthermore, I suggest that we looktoward other fields, anthropology in this case, for means through which complicatedconcepts, like culture, ethnography, and play can be more open to futurereconceptualization.Perhaps not so ironically, Donna Haraway quoted Helen Watson-Verran atbeginning of a chapter of one of her books exploring Maxis’ game SimLife. Thatquote, ‘‘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 madeof late: Don’t write this out of our frame of analysis. This is of course the manythings 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 callfor not a vast rethinking of play and games but rather an encouragement to connect itmore broadly with material that speaks to a given context. Allow play and games toconceptually reflect the contexts researcher find it embedded in. Deeply extend playwith new frontiers and old.The goal, in offering up Geertz and Le´vy-Strauss, is a call to breathe new lifeinto these experimental systems. It is also my attempt to avoid the Scylla andCharybdis between formalism and whatever is on the other side: narrative, emergence,the assemblage, and so on. It will always depend. That game is always thesame. 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 justicein our analysis. Deep Play and games in/as/of/through culture is an alternative tothe false dichotomy between proceeduralism/formalism and the assemblage. Whatmatters is how might the analyst playfully and meaningfully play with and explorethose systems. Many fields have faced these issues. Game studies need not goalone. Science and technology studies faced it with social construction and natureand 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 withDeep Play.