Slackful Thoughts
10 March, 2003:
I hope that others find the terminology of gaming as interesting as I find it. If not, I'm afraid that my recent essays are going to be crashing bores. However, since my working assumption is that anyone reading this web site probably thinks a little like me, as scary as that thought is, I'll forge forward.
Sports are one type of game that are widely acknowledged as a legitimate pastime for adults, and even provide many people with careers. This includes not only the athletes, but also all of the support personnel that make the major sports leagues happen. Two things interest me about sports, as they relate to games in general: what makes a game a sport, and why are sports accepted by society while board and card games are marginalized.
To answer the first of those questions, I'll first make the statement that I consider obvious: all sports are games. That means that they have to be activities involving at least some element of skill and luck involving more than one entity where a winner can be determined. I'm not sure that I spelled out this definition of games in my earlier essays, but we certainly did discuss the skill and luck requirements in detail. The other part of the aforementioned definition excludes solitaire activities from being games. This does not exclude computer games as games, since the definition specifies and entity, which may be non-human. As for determining a winner, without a winner, there are far too many things that fall under the umbrella. An interesting side effect of this definition is that traditional pen and paper role-playing games become an interesting case, and one that I'll probably cover at some point in the future. Back to the subject at hand, I think it's obvious that anything that is a sport is going to fulfill these criteria. Football, baseball, basketball, hockey, track and field, everything in the Olympics (oof, trampoline? Ice dancing?)—these are all clearly games.
So, part of what makes a sport a sport is that it's a game first. What is the other part of a sport, that which differentiates chess from football? I'd argue that it's large sweaty men. Or, to be more general, physical activity. But not just any physical activity, since it requires moving at least a little to play any board game. My first thought, when I first started thinking about how to define a sport, was that any time the primary skill within a game is a physical skill, it is a sport. This isn't a great definition, though, because it drags many games into the sport tent that don't belong there. Darts, Carabande, Bausack, Villa Paletti, and many other games would suddenly become sports, and the vast majority of people would look at you funny if you tried to argue seriously that Carabande was a sport. I modified my definition to be physical exertion, and I think you've got a workable definition. A sport is a game where the primary skill involves physical exertion. A simple test would be to ask if a regular person would be capable of playing the game all day without difficulty. Soccer? No. Carabande? Yes. 100 meter dash? No. Darts? Yes. Bowling? No. Pool? Yes. Sure, you can argue with those last two if you want, but I think it's a good definition, and it's my column.
Perhaps a more interesting topic than my continuing effort to define a taxonomy for all of gaming is why sports are revered in our society while other types of games are marginalized. I think the answer lies in a Puritan attitude that many people in America have retained. Games in general are seen as frivolous wastes of time that people should be spending on self-improvement. People who do spend time on games are just spinning their wheels. Sports, however, get a free pass because the requirement for physical exertion is seen as exercise, and thus beneficial. Sports allow people to engage in games while still improving themselves. This also explains how games like chess and bridge are accepted by society, since they are also viewed as improving the participants, through mental exercise. Since sports have been accepted by society for a long time, they have slowly acquired more and more structure around them, until we get the strange phenomenon of today, where viewing a game being played is more widely accepted as a normal leisure activity than participating in most other games.
How can this be changed? I believe that one step is to emphasize the benefits of gaming, and getting people to try them from that vantage point. Benefits include not only mental exercise of many forms but also social benefits. Skills including hand-eye coordination, tactical thinking, diplomacy, communication, and problem solving can be emphasized in gaming. Perhaps more importantly, if people start realizing that board and card games can be worthwhile activities, they may encourage their children to participate in them. Today, parents encourage their children to participate in sports, as a way for them to participate in a fun activity that will also hopefully improve them. There is even a precedent for parents encouraging their children to engage in mentally stimulating activities, such as music lessons. If parents took the same attitude toward other games as they do towards sports, realizing that their children are building valuable skills while entertaining themselves, the public's attitude toward games would change very quickly.
~ Joshua Buergel