Reconstruction 6.1 (Winter 2006)
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Allegorical Reductions and Social Reconstructions: An Introduction to Games, Gamers, and Gaming Cultures / Matthew Wolf-Meyer and Davin Heckman
The social bond, understood as a multiplicity of games, very different among themselves, each with its own pragmatic efficacy and is capability of positioning people in precise places in order to have them play their parts, is traversed by terror, that is, by the fear of death.
Jean-Francois Lyotard, Just Gaming (1985 [1979]:99)
<1> Games have become a central metaphor in representations of society, and most people are familiar enough with Lewis Carroll's Alice to know that when she passes through the looking glass she finds herself embroiled in a game a Chess which is also much more (Carroll 1992 [1897]) . This strange game of Chess is simultaneously a simulation and an enactment of social life in Wonderland, and Carroll plots out Alice 's narrative path as a series of tactical Chess moves, which can be understood as both an attempt to win the game and to navigate through Wonderland and her social obligations therein. It takes very little imagination or inquiry on the part of the reader to realize that Carroll was also writing about the game of contemporary British life, with all its attendant insanities and inanities, and the way in which tactics had become a central concern of daily social interaction, as if life could be construed as a series of "if...then" statements and be rendered as logical as a game of Chess. The attempt to metaphorically render life as a game [1], and reflexively to render a game as life, is a vital aspect of the sociality of games, of what they allow players to do with them, but this is to issue separate realities -- that of the game and that of life -- which are too intimate to be divorced from one another. Games are much more than games; they are ways of seeing, of socializing, of subjectivizing: They are life itself. Moving beyond Alice's adventures, games have appeared in a number of other literary, cinematic and musical representations of contemporary life, from Michael Douglas in The Game (1997), to Ice-T in Surviving the Game (1994), to Iain Banks' The Player of Games (1992), to Steve Martin in The Spanish Prisoner (1997), to The Who's Tommy (1969) [2]. Interestingly, these representations make Lyotard's statement all the more apparent: The games represented in film and song are all games of life and death, of terror at the fringes of the social. In games, players can restart endlessly (or at least until their attention runs dry), but in life -- and this is the critical difference -- there is no restart button, there is no reshuffling of the deck or clearing of the board (despite what self-help programs might profess to offer their adherents): Games are vital in that they provide players with a sort of immortality, a way to endlessly begin again, a way to find within life a reprieve, a restarting. Is it any wonder then that they are such powerful and persistent metaphors? This introduction is meant to address the use of games as metaphors and the ways in which life has become understood as a kind of game, as well as how life and games -- and games of life -- are intrinsically irreducible. In so doing, we also address the material collected herein, providing ways into the articles, and also a (by no means definitive) way of understanding these articles. Allow us our diversions, knowing that we will reach an amenable end ; and, by way of conclusion, we will offer yet further reading strategies, of ways the articles in this issue may be reorganized to produce alternate effects. This issue, like all writing, is a game itself: The reader is encouraged to reorder the articles, to read them differently, to tactically engage not in the strategy presupposed by the editors (as we surely have designs of our own), but in a libratory strategy of their own. Life is ordered enough already.
<2> When games are dismissed as mere games, their "magical" potency is limited. The changes they affect can be easily swept under the rug. A sore loser or an overzealous player can be retrieved from an impassioned (and potentially dangerous) emotional state with the refrain, "It's only a game." Similarly, offensive words or actions can be smoothed over with a comment like, "I was only playing," taken to new limits in vernacular American speech. In their lack of seriousness, games lose their power as a form of secular magic and assume a different power as they are folded back into social life. They cease to be a time-space where being is discovered as such and become a part of Being proper. Ignored, marginalized, forgotten or otherwise subsumed into a lower stratum of existence, games in social life become one of many equally important activities that one pursues in the process of being in the world -- the active forgetting that makes life manageable, the process of producing the everyday. And while we are explicitly concerned in this introduction with those games that have a "board," or an otherwise definable locus of interest, the games played in social life are generally boardless -- they are social games played in the workplace, the classroom, and the bedroom. Sitting around a board game, playing a game with friends, is the territorialization of an otherwise deterritorialized aspect of social life. If there is a foil to the essays collected herein, it would be the two awesome, fallacious reductions of games, that: 1) life itself is like a game; and 2) that games themselves reproduce life. These form the foundation for rational choice theories, foreign relations and for modern warfare. Expressed throughout this collection of articles in opposition to this is the understanding of the game as assembling relations and discourse drawn from disparate areas of social life for play, certainly, and for indoctrination, definitely, but also for critique. Games are life, and life is gaming.
<3> Just as in Alice 's adventures, it is generally acknowledged that the game of Chess is in many ways a representation of social life, of courtly political maneuvering in the abstract. The role of the king is assumed by the player for the duration of the game -- to wit, the game ends when the king is rendered out of play, as is the player controlling his moves. Similarly, across media, the player often takes the place of the king, the god, the puppet master behind the scenes, orchestrating the lives of others; or the super-spy, the hero or heroine of renown, who influences the fates of others. But while games may appear to be concerned with these great men and women, whom the players don the identity of momentarily, we would suggest to broaden the scope of attention and to examine those other pieces in the game -- the pawns, the henchmen, and the Sims with their logarithmic programming. These minor pieces are also the subject matter of games, especially in their interaction with the kings, superheroes and puppet masters; games help to organize the lives of players, to help them make sense of society, to conceive their roles as kings or pawns, to produce subjectivity. Games offer players particular material practices, a variety of habituses that players may assume according to their taste (Bourdieu 1977 [1972]), from family board games to individuating massive multi-user online role-playing games (MMORPGs), but these various games should be understood as sharing critical elements. It may be construed that games are simply the molecular representation of social life, helping to assuage feelings of immediate "kinglessness" or lack of order by offering players a world of rules and fairness; they provide players with a map -- the board -- on which life is organized and reduced -- in this they may be read as a particularly postmodern medium. But as often as games teach players their social roles, they also offer lawlessness -- ways to get off the board, ways to think around the rules, ways of breaking the rules, of cheating. Games, it may be said, exist beyond their medium, but depend on their various "boards" and rules to produce starting points, of producing origins; they engender a reciprocal relationship between players and their pastimes; they contaminate and constitute social life. Moreover, regardless of medium, games have played a critical role in social life since their invention, acting as an extension of players' social lives, a metonymic and mimetic expression of the social and subjectivity. The concern of this issue, as addressed by the many authors included herein, is not the ontology of games, nor their aesthetics, but their telos, their manifest and implicit purposes and the purposes that players bring to their games of choice and their uses in producing sociality (which may lead to contradictions and the breaking of rules). That games are vital to social life, and throughout history, is evidenced in their persistence -- media might change (from cards to boards to computers), but their social effects remain consistent, and it is increasingly important to recognize the complex role that games play in social life, their role of integrating the subject into the web of the social and of revealing the web and its manifestations.
<4> The question of the historical development of games is addressed by a number of authors herein, although most forcefully by Joyce Goggin, Claudia Mesch, Anna N. Kushkova and Karen J. Hall, who each focus on a particular aspect of the transnational, locally-inflected interpretation and contestation of games in social life. Goggin follows the "progress" of playing cards, from their Middle Eastern origins to their deployment in Europe, charting the strange evolution of not only how they were used, but what was represented on them and how they acted socially. Kushkova investigates -- drawing on ethnographic data collected during the 19 th century -- a specific instance of the role that cards played among Russian peasantry in St. Petersburg, Russia, and the moral panics that were associated with them. Approaching games through their use in art (particularly that of Marcel Duchamp and the Fluxus group), Mesch explores the way in which games were used to represent Cold War politics -- a particular extrapolation from the reductive figuration already implied in the Chess board. Hall situates the development of video games alongside their history of the computer, with attention paid to the complicit role of the American military-industrial complex in fostering a culture of violence, made persistently evident in contemporary video games. We will make out own observations about the history of games, and particularly evocative movements therein, but first let us outline the critical vocabulary that we will be addressing throughout this introduction (and the authors will be addressing in their own ways throughout this issue).
<5> We take "strategy" to refer to broad theories of linearity, i.e. all strategies are meant to propel the movement of the player forward towards the completion of the game, and a victory. They have a singular end in mind, and rely on tactics to achieve such. "Tactics," then, are subsets of a larger strategy, and are necessarily dialectical. One player makes a move which his or her opponent must respond to; in so doing, the board (whatever its form) is remade until another move is made. Games are a dialectical process, working towards a synthesis which is to the advantage of their winner. The game of Poker might clarify these terms: The strategy is simple and circumscribed by the rules themselves -- to draw and exchange cards with the deck in order to create high value hands. Bluffing is a particular tactic, and one that complements a player's strategy. The tactic does not render the strategy void, but rather acts as a temporary subset in order to unsettle the strategies of others, inspiring other players to deploy tactics of their own in response. Michel de Certeau uses these terms in a related sense, with "strategy" referring to "the calculation (or manipulation) of power relationships that becomes possible as soon as a subject with will and power (a business, an army, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated" (de Certeau 1988 [1984]). It also, importantly, founds a base of operations from which the subject can launch manipulations of an "external" world. "Tactics" are responses to the strategies of others, and de Certeau clarifies them as "a calculated action determined by the absence of a proper locus...The space of the tactic is the space of the other...It operates in isolated actions, blow by blow. It takes advantages of 'opportunities' and depends on them" (de Certeau 1988 [1984]:37). Thus, while "strategies" are broad, and often rulistic (governed by rules), "tactics" insinuate themselves into the spaces (in logic, on the board, etc.) of the other (the opponent -- but let us leave aside this question of "the other" for a moment). Speed is a common and useful tactic: Most people are used to slow, contemplative games, and the mastery of a variety of tactics allows players to enact strategies at faster and faster rates [3] as Garry Kasparov's recurring competition against Deep Blue, the computer designed by IBM to defeat him, attests. Deep Blue, while it may lack the flexibility of human intelligence [4], overcompensates with its twin abilities of being able to select appropriate Chess moves almost immediately, and is unfazed by the speed -- or lack thereof -- on the part of Kasparov. Chess is meant, as the Grand Masters attest to, to be a slow, ponderous game of deliberate action and foreseeable consequences; Speed Chess, what might be thought of as a local dialect compared to the universal language of Chess, parole vs. langue (de Saussure 1986 [1972]), depends not on deliberation, but action. The strategies are always the same, but the tactics are dramatically different: They are local, and inflected with the influences of particular ideas that the players behind the pieces bring to their games, or what may be thought of as a particular gaming "culture."
<6> Strategies and tactics presume rules, as well as a "board," although this later term should be considered rather broadly. Games are often about taking an unlimited space (life) and reducing it to allegory (Milton Bradley's Life), and it is this reduction that necessitates the production and delimitation of a board, where the "infinite" space of social life is trimmed to fit a tabletop. Similarly, Life imposes a very Western, very American unfolding to the life of the individual: School, marriage, work, home ownership, insurance, children, and retirement, with monogamy presumed. And whether this is an American myth for Americans alone, games such as these are increasingly exported, helping to spread American allegorical representations of life around the globe (although, as Ben Hourigan addresses herein, this flow is not unidirectional, and Japanese cultural ideas have a decided effect on the narratives they export). A clear example is that of Monopoly, which takes the cityscape and reduces it to a portable square; rather than buildings that stretch upwards and sprawl outwards, coupled with an unpredictable economic future, space and time have been smashed into a demarcated square and the economy has only one inevitable outcome. This imposes a linearity upon the possible narrative that can unfold (there is only one end: victory for one, failure for the others), with a circularity further imposed upon this linearity: Economic progress, then -- and this may be the satire of Monopoly, especially within the American capitalistic system -- is short circuited . But to local players, the "local" Monopoly rules by its own strategy of postmodern provincialism -- everything everywhere is governed by the same set of rules and power relationships, the difference is only in the surface. The rules of traditional Monopoly persist, but are overlaid with a veneer of specific consumer tastes. However, it would be something to see all "local" Monopolies revised to include a Starbucks, Urban Outfitters, Barnes & Nobles, and other heroes of gentrification. The strange question of in-game economies is addressed herein by both Carlos Hernandez and Kushkova, albeit in quite different contexts, namely role-playing games and high stakes card playing in Russia . These "boarded" representations of life, or of systems like American capitalism and the consumerism it breeds, are nefarious in their limitation of the field: Life (the thing) is infinitely more nuanced and filled with potential than Life (the game) would have players believe; capitalism is more totalizing than Monopoly represents it as, and fraught with more dangerous pitfalls than bankruptcy. The fact that latterly Monopoly has been franchised to local areas, providing players of Monopoly versions of their hometowns, as well as their favorite hobbies, is a more accurate depiction of how American capitalism works. To make it a more accurate allegory, a series of boards would be necessary: American life, and American capitalism, might be more appropriately represented by stringing a series of "local" Monopoly boards together in a close approximation of their geographical or topical proximity, and then having players spring from one board to another in an attempt to monopolize everything. Some games are more confining in this respect than others, and others provide very little board at all: Live Action Role-Playing Games (referred to lovingly as LARPs by their adherents), like Vampire: The Masquerade and its ilk, provide players with a loose system of prescribed relationships, and from there they are left to graft these relations upon their social world. Is this any different than "real" life, its separate spheres, and its social intimacies? Massively multi-player online role-playing games -- EverQuest, Asheron's Call, Ultima Online, City of Heroes, etc. -- strike a compromise in structuring and widening the board, showing the encroachment that games, and their strategies and tactics, can effect in the lives of their players. Compromises are made by players, within the game and within their social lives, in order to bring the one in line with the other; EverQuest has been renamed by its players "EverCrack" -- 8 hours each day of work, sleep, and EverQuest, although the last term is most likely to encroach upon the other two. And it was inevitable: Unlike the boards of earlier games, contemporary computer games have reality-like (virtuality in its most realistic sense) worlds for the players to navigate, sometimes seeming more real (due to subjective and subjectivizing investments made by the players) than the "real" world. Monopoly might be an allegory for real life, with its capitalist ways, but, for some, EverQuest is real life. Various aspects of the internet phenomena of MMORPGs are addressed by a number of the authors included herein: C. Jason Smith discusses the ways in which MMORPGs facilitate and reify body and gender politics, as does Natasha Chen Christensen, although in quite different contexts; Melanie Swalwell alters the context from the individual, home-based MMORPGs to the LAN party -- an imposed sociality on an otherwise "solitary" experience. MMORPGs are particularly interesting for their dissolution of the strictly material board in favor of internet mediation, which allows the content of the game to be quite diverse -- beyond social interaction, the variety of quests and character-improvement techniques (something else Smith addresses), MMORPGs include other kinds of games within their virtual realities. This might seem a technique facilitated by computers -- a particularly "new" media -- but it need not be so [5].
<7> A recent series of board games, GIPF, attempts to expand the board in interesting ways, foregoing Chess-like representation for greater ambiguity. GIPF is a series of six board games, the first one in the series being named eponymously with DVONN, TAMSK, ZERTZ and YIMSH having since been released, each using components different from the others. GIPF, being that which binds the other boards together, does so in both rule-based -- rulistic -- and figurative means. In playing any game of GIPF, players load their pieces with other pieces which refer to other games in the series (called "potentials"), i.e. there are DVONN potentials, TAMSK potentials, etc. Each of these pieces has abilities that affect the game of GIPF in predictable, yet powerful ways, as outlined in GIPF's rules. Playing GIPF straight means using only the basic pieces, which make GIPF look like a combination of Connect Four and Checkers -- winning the other games allows the potentials to become actual, to affect the game of GIPF. The GIPF board becomes unsettled by the presence of other boards, other games, and yet relies upon them. The rules ultimately bind them together in a cohesive whole, facilitating movement across "infinite" space as produced by the presence of other games and rulistic conventions that provide expandable space. The creators of GIPF write that "The essence of this system (certainly when played with several potentials) is that you and your opponent have a number of pieces on the board, loaded with particular possibilities...however you are not sure that you will be allowed to execute them" (Burm 1996:30) . GIPF, maybe more so than any other game discussed here, binds together questions of doubt and of the terror (of losing one in a series of games) that binds the social together. The makers of GIPF go on to explain that
GIPF can be combined with every existing two-person game, depending on how much time you have and on what you feel like playing. If you have a game of GIPF and at least one set of potentials, you can start combining the games you already have somewhere on a shelf, no matter what: Dominos, Ludo, or even just a deck of cards or an ordinary die. All you have to do is connect the use of a certain potential to a certain game, or cards or dice or whatever, and start playing. (Burm 1996:31)
GIPF is the perfect characterization of postmodern, postindustrial life, loaded as it is with unlimited "potentials," with an interconnected web of relations, with greater and lesser flows, and with surprising alterations. Yet the potential surprises are outlined ahead of time, providing a kind of predetermination of the course which may unfold [6]; but, because no two games of GIPF need rely on the same prescribed path -- whose effects are surely somewhat unpredictable as well -- no two games of GIPF will ever be the same, encouraging players to return to the game again and again to alter its potential (and potentials) and to see them actualize themselves in different combinations and to different effects. This toying with what might be construed as particular futures is a key selling point in contemporary games, exemplified in collectible card games.
<8> In their potentially endless proliferation of new material, collectible card games (CCGs) similarly subvert the board in a number of ways, dependant upon players' interests in tailoring particular possible futures. The most popular of CCGs, Magic: The Gathering, has released thousands of different cards, and will continue to do so endlessly (at least until the market disappears). New rules and addendums are introduced in each of the "expansions," thereby expanding the game's rulistic conventions, inasmuch as they expand the possible variations of cards used. Magic: The Gathering employs only a limited number of types of cards: Spells (further subdivided into Interrupts, Instants, Sorceries and Enchantments), Creatures, Artifacts and Land, which differ, primarily, only in their length of effect, i.e. some remain on the board longer than others (recall our previous discussion of speed and tactics). There is no board, but rather constellations of cards that players place on the table, thereby creating a modular and ever-changing board. Cards are placed in tailored decks, usually of a regulated 60 cards, but of a variation decided by the player. The fusion of any two decks -- a "duel" between players -- means that the board will necessarily be varied as well. And tactics necessitate different relationships and interactions between decks. Like snowflakes, Magic: The Gathering games are "infinitely" varied, but circumscribed by their media. The game, like many CCGs, offer players a variety of "victory conditions," and so strategies can vary greatly between players. And, in order for players to defeat their opponents, they necessarily must draw upon a variety of tactics to affect their strategic ends. The board is unpredictable: Not only does it shift within a theme (like Settlers of Catan [7]), but its variations are so dramatic as to make no two games exactly the same, especially when the subjectivity of the players, and their relations to each other as mediated through the game, are taken into account.
<9> Video games, in their apparent boardlessness, reify the board in interesting, and subtle ways. Whenever a narrative is imposed upon a video game, a "board" is necessarily put into place. While some games seem to have limitless possibilities, and advertise themselves as such, most games other than simplistic action games rely upon narrative conventions to link levels (or scenes) to one another -- something that both Jay McRoy and Hourigan address in this issue, namely the genre of horror video games and the Japanese Final Fantasy series, respectively -- and in so doing construct a board that seemingly privileges time over space. But this is to overlook the spatial boards upon which video games rely: The area of the screen defines most video games, and, doing so, imposes a perspectival board upon the game. Even games with customizable space (SimCity being the most famous) impose specific structures upon these spaces, and thereby construct a board from predetermined components, not unlike GIPF or Magic: The Gathering. No game is truly boardless -- all games, all representations, depend upon a foundation to represent players to themselves (Cf. Geertz 1973). This question of representation and its relation to culture is taken up by Samuel Collins and Shawn Thomson in, who address the Sim series of games, SimCity and The Sims, respectively. In both cases, what the authors show is that even though players are provided with virtually unlimited latitude in how they may construct their cities and the lives of their Sims, players end up relying upon dominant cultural narratives of American expectations of how cities should be and how interpersonal relationships should develop. Moreover, John Miller questions the "interactivity" in computer games and role-playing, situating them historically in relation to the rise of the novel and experimental narrative traditions, recently producing a glut of hyperfiction, arguing that technology might not be quite as liberating as it may initially seem. The fault may lie in the designers of the games, but, as Collins points out, it is more often a fault in the strategy of the players themselves.
<10> Strategies impose ways of seeing and acting on boards within sets of rulistic conventions, thereby grafting further limitations upon already limited possibilities. Strategy might seem unlimited -- there are any number of ways to play a given game, within the time and space that the rules allow, but any great Chess player, or Magic: The Gathering player, will happily acknowledge that inventive new players of the game are quickly beaten through tried and true methods. There may be the element of surprise in some new players' strategies, but they are usually, if not always, subverted and used against the player, like judo or aikido using an opponent's weight against him or her. Because of the finite spaces of games, even a game lauded as highly variable, like Chess or Settlers of Catan, will ultimately be subverted by the tradition of playing the game. Tradition then, like rules, limits the possible realizations of a game. There is a strength in tradition, much like the strength of a proven strategy, and game players, because so much rests on winning games, are often more likely to resort to traditional strategies than creativity and innovative tactics. Think here of Eric Hobsbawm's discussion of "invented traditions" (1983): Games, themselves created, carry with them strategies and tactics as developed by the communities who invest in the games, and while there may be positivistic trends across communities (there are clearly more and less efficient ways to play many games), there are always local inflections, and a process of capture that is effected by communities over their individual players. If it is true that no two games of Magic: The Gathering are the same, then it is equally true that no two communities of players are the same, and no two communities follow the same positivistic development of tactics and strategies. These traditions are mediated by and through the presence of others, of other players and their idiosyncratic tactics and interpretations of community traditions; how might an imagined other -- as video games facilitate -- alter this development? This question of tradition and innovation is dealt with in the present issue by Terri Toles-Patkin who addresses children and their local interpretation of transnational games, namely Harry Potter's Quidditch. In the case of Quidditch, children find themselves enamored with the world of Harry Potter and seek to emulate what they esteem as a vital part of this fantastic world, the game of Quidditch. But Quidditch relies on magic, and so children are left to interpret and innovate a passable and playable version with the tools at hand, imbuing their reality with a magic borrowed from fantasy. For some, this might be construed as a form of cheating; or, conversely, as a way to render one set of rules (reality) inert for the sake of another (fantasy).
<11> One cannot discuss games without discussing the concept of "cheating," or breaking the rules. At once the cheater forsakes the game by abandoning it rules and honors the game by elevating its objectives beyond the mundane limitations of its rules. In short, the cheater is so invested in the outcome that he or she is willing to sacrifice principle to the honor, however trivial, that such an impoverished victory will confer. As mentioned above, it might be said that the cheater simply replaces one game with another, that the "official" game is replaced by a social game of deception by which the cheater succeeds in convincing an opponent that he or she was fairly beaten in the official game. If one wishes to accept the common sense assertion that the activity of play is universal, the political position might be held that cheating occurs at the point of sale. As electoral politics demonstrate so well, the perception of cheating and integrity matters more for the professional politician than what actually happens. As postmodern citizens, one might accept the Machiavellian notion that as long as one remains entertained, contented, and diverted, no cheating has occurred. One might also accept its inverse: Everyone cheats and that invocation of the "rules" is the biggest cheat of all.
<12> To be fair, not all cheating is equal. There are contexts where cheating is consensual, such as playing a game with someone you suspect will cheat, or when playing a game like Three Card Monty which is known as a hustle. There is play cheating where the rules explicitly permit and encourage cheating, such as Cosmic Encounter which permits players to select and break one rule consistently, Illuminati which suggests that rules be broken whenever possible, and The Great Kahn game, which in its attempt to mimic political conspiracies, allows players to break whatever rules they can get away with and offers no punishment for those caught doing so. There is cheating in exchange for penalties, such as basketball which "permits" players to commit a number of fouls before they are removed from play. In addition, there are softer types of "cheating," such as the invocation of "house rules" that deviate from accepted norms of play, with the peculiar example of players paying into the Free Parking space on the Monopoly board and gifting the player who lands on that space with the accumulated money, which has slowly become an accepted rule. One might also think of baseball, bike racing and golf, and the way in which technological changes have allowed dramatic advantages for players willing to pay for them; from one perspective, technology certainly allows a kind of bending in the rules, from another it is simply the positivistic development of the game, facilitated and facilitating consumerism.
<13> Conflicting social expectations about the intensity of play can also influence the perception of cheating. Debates over "sportsmanship" and "gentle manners" imply that seeking advantages beyond skill and talent in the course of play is a social form of cheating, not explicitly forbidden, but presumed from a position of genteel aloofness. Depending on the context and the players, disruptive behaviors that distract one from game play, like heckling, can be considered the sign of a great competitive spirit or of infantile weakness. Among these questionable behaviors are the various forms of peer pressure like rushing, mockery, whining, and even false accusations of cheating. Implicit in the social norms of acceptable play are important lessons about society. In a society that is theoretically a meritocracy, the shades of social cheating are a reflection of larger concerns: Play like a gentleman for you will be judged by your skills, talent, and the content of your character. Or, play like a bastard because the world does not wait for a loser.
<14> But cheating is not simply about who sees which rules. Cheating is about the rules themselves and whom they govern. Just as there are many kinds of cheating, there are many kinds of cheaters. To rely on popular American stereotypes, the types of cheaters who are most reviled seem to be those individuals who exemplify petty iniquities. There are criminal cheats like welfare queens, drug dealers, and thieves. There are underclass cheats like telemarketers, used car salesmen, and auto mechanics. In the wake of the 2001 Al-Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center buildings and the Pentagon, increasingly, there are characterized ethnic cheats like the cheese-eating French coward who hides behind American might, the suspicious Muslim trained to dissemble, and the border-jumping Mexican. There are authorities who cheat like dirty cops, predatory priests, and lying politicians. There are also high-end cheats like class-action lawyers, doped-up athletes, and hedonistic popstars. And finally, there are those individuals who violate the trust implied in monogamous relationships and subvert the stability of the family, those who are simply known as "cheaters." Taken together, these cheats represent everything which conspires to subvert middle-class opportunity in the American context, itself dependent upon an expectation of the rules (the law) and what they are meant to facilitate and protect. It might be most appropriate to recognize the expectation for people to obey the law, to play by the rules, as the exception which produces a double set of rules (Cf. Derrida 1990; Benjamin 1978 [1955]). Related to this, Douglas Hofstadter recounts Peter Suber's game of Nomic in Metamagical Themas (1982), which is dependant upon rules that are meant to be broken, although through an active democracy, popularized and simplified as the card game Fluxx. Nomic has since established a presence on the internet, and a brief search for Suber and his game will produce a number of links. Nomic is a simple, albeit elegant game: The game begins with a series of initial rules, and on each player's turn he or she proposes an amendment to an earlier rule or a new rule altogether. The other players vote on the approval of the new rule, and if it is voted into play the proposing player receives points. Beyond this simple accretion of points, this creation of rules allows players to alter the game entirely, to effectively vote other players out of the game, and to create new ways of winning. Nomic, then, is a strangely transparent interaction between sociality and play, and shows how the latter is dependent upon mediating the former with the production of laws, of rules, and how these rules reward the cunning and popular player. Nomic shows how the code surrounding cheating, what rules are to be followed, and what is an acceptable rule seems to carry with it a certain sense of entitlement that colors the way society perceives transgressions of the rules. In a certain context, one can interpret cheating as the act of a visionary reformer or a spunky rebel. In another, it is the act of the most insidious subversive or sleazy opportunist. However, in a game, the interpretation of cheating is always interpreted by an opponent who suffers through this breach in the contract of play, which dictates that players consent to the defined order before play begins. Depending on one's opponent and one's perspective, games can become a test of social domination (defined by the political, psychological, or social realities outside of the particular contest) or they can be about play (an escape from political, psychological, or social realities); in any case, they intimately produce society and subjectivity.
<15> The question of what one brings to the game and what the game itself contains is where the rubber meets the road in this regard. In Magic: The Gathering, for example, a wealthy player who can afford the most expensive cards plays has a distinct advantage over someone who must rely on "commons," or the cheapest, most readily available (and weak) cards. An athlete who can afford personal training, good equipment, and the leisure time necessary to practice has certain advantages over those who do not. A nimble mind is indispensable for intellectual games like Chess. Any of these advantages can be the site of an "unfair" edge, especially if they are concealed as the part of a hustle or used to exploit the disadvantaged player. The threshold of the inside and outside of the game is precisely where external realities can subvert the consensual world of the game and where cheating comes about. As de Certeau suggests, the rules of the game are a mere framework for a larger storytelling (1988 [1984]:22). The sterile mastery of the rules of play is the pleasure of the novice, but the true player emerges once the rules are internalized and surpassed [8]. As experienced is gained, the principles that were learned through practice in each period of advancement become internalized, and then vanish that they may be surpassed, skirted and manipulated. This dullness of a system that breaks the game down into brute statistical analysis is described by Douglas Hofstadter:
It was a humiliating experience for me to watch my program, with all its "intelligence", struggle in vain to overcome the blind randomness of Jon's program. But there was no way out. I was disappointed to learn that, in some sense, the most "intelligent" strategy of all not only was dumb -- it even paid no attention to the enemy's moves! Something about it seemed directly opposite to the original aim of Undercut, which was to have players trying to psych each other out to ever deeper levels....When I saw the game so completely demolished by game theory, I completely abandoned it. (Hofstadter 1985:704)
As Hubert L. Dreyfus and Stuart E. Dreyfus explain, "When we speak of intuition or know-how, we are referring to the understanding that effortlessly occurs upon seeing similarities with previous experience" (Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1986: 28). What is known to be intelligence is not that of the rule-based expert system, but rather that intelligence is a process of intuitive knowing. To return to de Certeau, games are satisfying because they offer players the opportunity to find wiggle room within the grid of rules because they provide demarcated spaces and repercussions for cheating.
<16> A number of developments in handheld electronic games from the 1970s and 1980s generated a shift in the history of Chess, and gaming in general. Technology advertisements came to boast, especially circa 1980, that machines were "intelligent" and could "think" or "speak." In 1979, Chafitz Incorporated advertised electronic Chess and Backgammon games with the following slogan, "These games think" [9]. That same year, Fidelity Electronics advertised the Voice Chess Challenger as "The first thinking game that speaks to you" [10]. Camelot Direct advertised the "Genius Offspring" chess computer, which, notably, has beaten other chess computers at a "microchess" tournament [11]. And Parker Brothers advertised the "game with a mind of its own," Code Name: Sector, asking the question, "Can you outsmart our computer?" [12]. The 1979 explosion in electronic games marked a fascination with thinking machines and signaled a general shift to the use of processors, which was not the case only a couple years earlier. Other noteworthy advertisements include the Voice Sensory Chess Challenger [13], the Contender [14], and Executive Chess [15]. The Voice Sensory Chess Challenger, could "see" the player's moves, remember them with its "brain," and "speak" to its human user; the Contender, a "he," which could "force" the user to try new strategies; and finally, "Executive Chess" which was "smart," were all expressions of an emerging discourse which increasingly saw a "human" face in the ability to perform specific functions (in this case, to challenge humans at games). Interestingly, the strong tendency to anthropomorphize the electronic "opponent" in a game which pits a human user against a computer in a rule-governed realm which is contained within that same computer conveniently sidesteps the very human elements of gameplay in favor of relatively simple rules. For electronic games, the focus on intelligent play is shifted away from pleasure, community, intimidation, talk, duration, and psychology -- from subjection in a social sense -- and onto the most basic elements of play, to subjection in the intra-subjective sense. And users must interface with the machine in very narrow terms, pushing only one of several buttons in any given situation, and with no attention paid to manner, motion, or expression. In these early advertisements, for a computer to be "human," it simply must be able to win against a human opponent, proving, in a sense, that it is more than capable of humanity. Since the early days of computing, the pioneers of Artificial Intelligence had tried to figure out ways to program machines that can play "games" against human opponents [16]. But it was not until these games and the "intelligence" they represented became mass market commodities that their importance came into relief against the backdrop of social life. The actual endowments of these various machines in relation to their abilities represented a meeting of the minds that have been a long time coming. Regardless of its ontological validity, the computer persists as a popular culture metaphor for the mind: The brain as CPU, neurons as circuits, stimulus as data, and understanding as a function of programming [17]. Human beings have increasingly come to be considered as very sophisticated, but ultimately limited, biological robots.
<17> As games become limited and their play is reduced to probability, the only games that truly survive are those which can escape the rhetorical trap of "intelligent" competition and establish themselves as links to a "higher" reality. As with slot machines, wheels of fortune, and lotteries before them, a human encounter with simple probability is no longer a matter of skill, and it instead becomes an encounter with luck. Games that require one to beat the odds reflect a basic reality—the player will probably lose regardless of how the machine is set into motion. However, on a "cosmic" level, the game of chance surpassed the mundane realities of its physical operations to be influenced by powers that offer order amidst chaos. The fun that comes from such games is in the idea that although an institution may establish a set of rules that are oppressive and systematic, the player can attempt to subvert the system through the grace of luck. Although they offer little or no room for creativity or skill (like the quotidian world), these games (which often involve gambling) express a desire to see the absolute opposite of the mundane nestled within the formalities of daily life. At this critical point of interaction, the automated self that posthumanists envision comes face to face with the overstated "being" of the electronic game. A meeting of the "minds" can occur precisely where the human mind is diminished in capacity, and the computer processor is reified as "mind." And although games may have as their substance a set of rules, their play is ultimately something much more than a process of rote memorization and regurgitation of narrowly defined variables. For example, Chess is much more than simply brute force and number crunching. Its essence lies in touching the pieces, the materiality of the board, in monitoring the face of the other, and in the monitoring of one's own face. It is in the panic and exhilaration that come when a dire situation becomes an advantageous one; it is becoming absorbed into the world of the game, and feeling social life mirrored; it is the feeling that comes in victory and defeat, and the social discursivities such feelings produce. Perhaps the humbled game programmer Steve Woodcock, commenting on Kasparov's defeat by IBM's Deep Blue, " Deep Blue didn't even know that it won the game. It didn't celebrate. It wasn't playing for the money. It's just a machine, like an egg-beater, doing its job" (Eisenberg 1997).
<18> Evading capture, escaping limits, ditching power as a power itself—these elements of play are instances of what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari call "lines of flight": "When the man of war disguises himself as a woman, flees disguised as a girl, hides as a girl, it is not a shameful, transitory incident in his life. To hide, to camouflage oneself, is a warrior function, and the line of flight attracts the enemy, traverses something and puts what it traverses to flight; the warrior arises in the infinity of the line of flight" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987 [1980]:277). In other words, the importance of the game materializes in the places where the rules are made dull by the emergence of a singularity, an excursion into other worlds. The game is actually played when the player loses consciousness of the quotidian matter-of-factness of the game's playing pieces and rulebook, and focuses instead upon operating as though the fantasy had some gravity of its own. Just as one's being is capable of operating (and perhaps work best) when not fixated on the mechanics of flesh and bone, games are about Being. Martin Heidegger writes of this process of Being:
Just as expectation is possible only on the basis of awaiting, remembering is possible only on the basis of forgetting, and not the other way around. In the mode of forgottenness, having-been primarily "discloses" Da-sein, lost in the "superficiality" of what is taken care of, can remember. Awaiting that forgets and makes present is an ecstatic unity in its own right, in accordance with which inauthentic understanding temporalizes itself with regard to its temporality. (§339)
Play involves "re-membering" in order that it can be forgotten who one was before the game and become agents in the world of the game. Playing a game is a process of becoming-other (Deleuze and Guattari 1987 [1980]). Intuition is learned; consciousness comes to be a function of the game rather than of "real" life.
<19> In this light, games offer a significant upgrade to the model of consciousness offered up by those who imagine that the human being has been supplanted by the posthuman subject. Instead of life as a linear root-tree model that Deleuze and Guattari are so critical of (1987 [1980]:5), the mind jumps out of the simplicity of binary, linear causality (the way in which Deep Blue is programmed) and into the realm of the metaphysical, mystical, and religious. In the most basic sense, games are a sort of magic which permit one to manipulate her or his cognition at arm's length, while putting consciousness in one's own hands, rather than at the hands of the faceless tyranny of social life (Cf. Taussig 1993). As symbols are manipulated, so are the parameters of the game's world. As the player becomes immersed in the world of the game through this play, these parameters come to circumscribe the reality of the player. It is precisely this change in realities which animates social situations and becomes a context of complex interactions. Clifford Geertz describes this reality perfectly, in his discussion of the Balinese cockfight (something that Toles-Patkin addresses as well): "Deep play" is that particular state where the game becomes a totalizing reality, it becomes an end unto itself, and while it may act allegorically, it has moved over into the realm of pure metonymy, with the outside social world being meted out through the workings of the game itself, and, in a sense, the outside world (of non-play) is produced through this devotion to the inside reality of deep play (Geertz 1973 [1972]).
<20> It is this mobility that makes games especially interesting to scholars -- precisely the migrating sense of reality, attention, and Being that can exist in multiple relationships to the self. Games might tell players a bit about who one is as him- or her-"selves" because they play at deeper issues, but they express much more about whom one is as a creature in the flux of Being. As games turn attention to the manipulation of a fetish for the remote manipulation of the world of the game, they offer the possibility of remotely manipulating the inhabited self. Whether, as in a game of Dungeons and Dragons, a player becomes a halfling or dwarf, a paladin or bard, he or she is in a world where such conceptions matter and wherein he or she moves in order to affect him- or herself. In the space between one's social self and one's play self, Being is exposed for a moment [18]. For some, this exposure is a kind of insanity, rife with contradictions, anxieties, and riddles. But if one relaxes for a moment, and looks at this spot where the "consciousness" is lost that is normally associated with the sane pursuit of daily concerns, one may gain "consciousness" about the conscious self -- the mind is exposed in the midst of contradiction, and the complexity of the pre-intuitive mind is exposed as a flicker in the process of remembering. Without making a definitive claim about Being, in the haeccity from life to games, and games to life, play offers opportunities to perceive Being—embraced, assailed, abandoned—games expose Being as a reality. Any more than that and perhaps the system will crash and life will seem like a senseless jumble of unrelated chunks of matter and bits of information.
<21> How players imagine their opponents is a vital aspect of the subjectivizing process of game play. In Chess, it is based on a system of shared perception -- i.e. does my opponent see what I see? -- but it is brought into starker relief in the game of Poker. In the process of bluffing, players are forced to police their bodily expressions, a peculiar Foucaultian "technology of the self" (Foucault 1988 [1984]; Rose 1990) which relies not solely on how one imagines her- or himself as a subject, but rather imagining how others imagine them as subjects, clued in to the nervous tics, smiles, and eye movements that lying or an exceptional hand might inspire. Bluffing is always intersubjective, but it is not the only example of such. In the present issue, this situation (or situatedness) of the player (Cf. Haraway 1991) is discussed by Ben Fisler, Karen J. Hall, Marc Ouellette and G. Christopher Williams, who address, respectively, the models scholars have of play, the dynamics of the first-person shooter genre (which both Hall and Ouellette address), and the figuration of ethics in "god games." What becomes apparent in each case study are the kinds of subjectivity that are produced by the medium the games depend on, fostering both a sense of self and a sense of intersubjective appearance. As Ouellette shows (as does McRoy), there is something problematic about gender in contemporary video games, raising questions about players playing and players watching (as Lara Croft and her sexy dress exemplifies) about the very situation of playing.
<22> The question of gender is raised by a number of the authors included in the present issue, showing how in quite different contexts and through quite different means, games have become dominated by men ad imbued with dubious gender politics, sexily clad heroines being only the most visible example of such. Inez Schaechterle and Rebecca Borah examine the conflicted and scandalous history of gender in Dungeons & Dragons, showing how the initial male-domination of the game became reified over time (and with the help of the game's creators) and how this has allowed the continued debasement of women within the gaming community. Ouellette, in his study of the female protagonist in recent video games, likewise shows how a male-dominated pastime has succeeded in becoming an exclusionary hobby, whereas Smith shows how, despite the predominance of men playing video games, there is still the possibility of (and a predilection for) gender drag and a subtle contestation of gender norms, thereby updating Judith Butler's thinking for the age of MMORPGs (Butler 1999 [1990]). Where Smith focuses on the images players use to represent themselves to others, Christensen focuses on the use of language in online gaming communities, showing how masculinity is discursively constructed and contested. What both Smith and Christensen show are the ways in which gender is played with, the ways in which it is produced and questioned; conversely what Ouellette and Schaechterle and Borah show are the ways in which gender is prescribed, and how little room for play there is. In this, it might be said that they address the board and the rules of gender play.
<23> In his ethnography of the African FulBe, Paul Riesman describes the playing of a board game, "dilli," which, while it bears some resemblances to Tic-Tac-Toe, varies primarily in its emphasis on community involvement in a game meant for two players. The game's components are simple: A board, six squares by five drawn on the ground and whatever counters are ready at hand (stones, sticks, coins, etc.). The players take turns placing pieces in empty spaces in an attempt to make a line of three of their pieces. When this is accomplished, the player connecting a line removes one of his or her opponent's pieces from the board. The game presumably ends when the board is full of pieces, and the winner is she or he who owns the majority of the pieces represented on the board. What Riesman sees as most exceptional is the social aspect of the game:
It is a game that appears to be for two players, but in fact all the people present participate in it, and the actual moves may be made by any number of people. However, there is only one winner and one loser. Often the game never gets to the end. Sometimes they see fairly early who the winner is going to be. Then they stop and start over again...It is very hard for one player to make the moves he would like to make. In any given turn several pieces may be moved by different people, only to be put back by the actual player so that he can make his own move...Would two people play this game by themselves? (Riesman 1992:49)
As frustrating as this interference might be, the answer is no. Riesman imagines that the ability of a player to succeed in the game despite the interference of others is one of the primary motivations in playing the game. Exception and determination are the primary components of such a game, and these only exist in relation to other people, to the non-players who insist on imposing their strategies and tactics on the playing of another person's game.
<24> Maybe the most archetypical game of subjectification is that of Sigmund Freud's grandchild, Hans. Little Hans' game of fort-da is important not because of the micro representation of the loss of his mother, but rather in the way in which it pulls him across infinite space: In throwing his mother-symbol "fort," over there/gone, Little Hans inevitably needs to move "there" to retrieve her. Before Freud "catches" Little Hans with the reel and attached thread, he observes that the boy took "any small object he could get hold of and [threw] them away from him into a corner, under the bed, and so on, so that hunting for his toys and picking them up was often quite a business" (Freud 1961 [1920]:13). Not only is Little Hans projecting his mother-symbol into unlimited space, but he is thereby providing himself with a line of flight, he is providing himself direction in the otherwise lacking world. This is not a negative lack in the traditional psychoanalytic sense, but rather a positive lack in that out of nothing (out of lack), Little Hans is able to impose an ordered direction, a need and purpose: To return his mother "da," here. And this is the purpose of all games people play -- to bring into being a purpose, to impose upon lack a positive value. To return to Alice and her Chess game, individuals may have social strategies, and complex ones at that, but they are all embarking upon fort-da games, moving from place to place with purpose and a non-sense of lack. Games are inevitably existential, but they also impose existence, they bring Being into being. Out of nothing, something; out of everything, specificity. The board, inasmuch as it limits, also allows personal representation in diverse strategies, in flights from the rules. To be only a Poker-player or Chess-player is the limitation: to be a game player is to acknowledge the nature of social life in a social world.
<25> We are all game players, but our boards are immanent and limited only by the social determination of our imaginations. Maybe this is the allure of reality game shows like "Survivor" and "Big Brother": Out of the limitless fabric of social life, a specific, ordered system is imposed with a clear winner and a gallery of losers. Before the reality show, the classic game shows served to transform the fragmented relations of the social world into light diversions, providing subjective interpretations of modern endeavors. "Let's Make a Deal" turned the cruelty of fickle fate of the middle class into an exciting game of chance -- one minute you have a new car, the next you could file for bankruptcy. "The Price is Right" elevated the mundane patterns of consumerism into ecstatic rituals. And "Jeopardy," the tragic delight of the disenfranchised egghead, turns all of the things that are supposed to matter in a meritocracy into a disconnected jumble of facts. Knowledge is reduced to trivia, with no history, no context, no hope. In the end, game shows attempt to make social life fun, making a game of subjectification, both for the viewing audience and for a lucky member of the studio audience -- someone just like you.
<26> The new wave of game shows, reality shows, also serve to order society. Their methods, however, are an inversion of their ancestors. Classic game shows sought to make the unpleasant bullshit of consumer culture into an exciting social experience. Shopping, getting screwed over, and being undervalued are just fun new games. Reality shows, on the other hand, demonstrate just how well we have internalized the social lessons of consumer culture. Screwing people over, dismissing their gifts, and remaining fixated on the shallow lessons of televisual drama are the highlights of these games. In short, the reality show has already bought what the game show once tried to sell: An exciting social life consists of petty bullshit. The winner is able to actualize this narrative in a convincingly "realistic" way. But in the end, all game shows are about winning in a world of competition that has given up on the idea of the potentiality of social life. This is why so many "adults" react, Torquemada-like, to shows like Sesame Street, Barney and Friends, and any other "politically correct" children shows where "everyone's a winner." Life isn't so mysterious when winners can be pointed to (even if they are quickly forgotten for the sake of new winners), and the losers can be exposed for their faults. So what if the Neilsen Ratings for sequels are lower than the originals? The endless proliferation of reality game shows means that it is only a matter of time before Robert Sheckley's "The Life of Anybody" (1984) becomes a precise depiction of our lived, rather than felt, experience. When the video crew knocks on your door, don't answer -- they will only replace one board with another, and have their own set of rules, which fail to be imbued with the potentiality of social life.
Alternative Reading Strategies
Narrative and New Media: Miller, Hourigan, Zaldivar, McRoy.
Hegemony and Resistance: Collins, Mesch, Hall, Ouellette, Schaechterle & Borah, Christensen.
Agency/Structure: Williams, Swalwell, Zaldivar, Schaechterle & Borah, Christensen, Smith, Ouellette, Patkin, Collins, Kushkova.
Cross-Cultural Approaches: Swalwell, Hourigan, Goggin, Mesch, Patkin, Kushkova.
Gender and Embodiment: Schaechterle & Borah, Christensen, McRoy, Smith, Ouellette, Fisler.
Notes
[1] For a discussion of metonymy and mimesis, see Michael Taussig's Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (1993) and Homi Bhabha's The Location of Culture (1994). [^]
[2] The relationship between science fiction (as a genre) and games is addressed by Marc Zaldivar (herein), who focuses on the work of Samuel Delaney, but contextualizes him alongside his genre colleagues. [^]
[3] See Paul Virilio's Speed and Politics (1986 [1977]) for a discussion of how speed is used as a political tactic. [^]
[4] See Emily Martin's Flexible Bodies (1994) for a discussion of "flexibility" more broadly construed as a keyword in advanced capitalism. Also, Stefan Helmreich's Silicon Second Nature (1998) for a discussion of artificial ife and questions of intelligence. [^]
[5] For a historical perspective on the ways that media technologies are often construed to imply transcendent realities, please see Jeffrey Sconce's Haunted Media (2000). [^]
[6] See Hayden White's The Content of the Form (1987) for a discussion of the ways in which narrative media imposes kinds of content. [^]
[7] Klaus Tueber's multiple award-winning game Settlers of Catan relies upon 19 hexes that can be arranged in any variation to produce the playing board, with the governing rule being that they comprise a greater hex (with three hexes on each side), but this too can be subverted. [^]
[8] These could be rules that exist at various levels of experience. The potential player discovers that Chess is a game to be played. The novice learns that the pieces move this way or that way. The skilled player comes to understand that in such a situation, it is a bad idea to make this move, and so on. [^]
[9] Chafitz, Inc. advertisement. Omni Dec. 1979: 105. [^]
[10] Voice Chess Challenger advertisement. Omni Dec. 1979: 124. [^]
[11] Genius Offspring advertisement. Omni Oct. 1979: 153. [^]
[12] Code Name: Sector advertisement. Omni Nov. 1979: 117. [^]
[13] Fidelity Electronics' Voice Sensory Chess Challenger advertises it in the following terms: "The Perfect Chess Opponent! It Thinks...It Talks...It 'Sees' Every Move You Make!" (Omni Dec. 1980: 149). The advertisement continues its gushing praise, exclaiming, "Voice Sensory Chess Challenger senses every move and automatically enters it into its computer 'brain.'" [^]
[14] The Contender calculator and boxing game is invested with similar agency: "Each time you land a blow, The Contender memorizes it and forces you to try another strategy. He won't fall for the same sucker punch twice" (Omni Dec. 1981: 42). [^]
[15] ExecutiveFidelity Electronics' Voice Sensory Chess Challenger advertises it in the following terms: "The Perfect Chess Opponent! It Thinks...It Talks...It 'Sees' Every Move You Make!" (Omni Oct. 1981: 201). The advertisement continues its gushing praise, exclaiming, "Voice Sensory Chess Challenger senses every move and automatically enters it into its computer 'brain.'" The Contender calculator and boxing game is invested with similar agency: "Each time you land a blow, The Contender memorizes it and forces you to try another strategy. He won't fall for the same sucker punch twice." And Executive Chess introduces the term "smart" to the discourse on electronic gaming, as it boasts, "Executive Chess, one of the Smart Sets from SciSys, the ultimate intelligent computer games." The Sensory Chess Challenger, which can "see" the player's moves, remembers them with its "brain," and "speaks" to its human user, the Contender, a "he," which can "force" the user to try new strategies, and finally, "Executive Chess" which is "smart," are all expressions of an emerging discourse which increasingly sees a "human" face in the ability to perform specific functions (in this case, to challenge humans at games). [^]
[16] In 1950 Claude Shannon published the paper "Programming a Computer for Playing Chess." [^]
[17] For background on digital metaphors for human experience, see N. Katherine Hayles' How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (1999). [^]
[18] Cf. Ben Hourigan's contribution to the present issue on the relationship between the playing and played selves. [^]
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