Roger Caillois and E-Sports: On the Problems of Treating Play as Work:
Summary (2 min read)
Introduction
- This is evidenced in the instrumental decision-making that accompanies competitive gameplay as well as the ‘survival’ strategies that e-Sports players deploy to endure its precarious working environment(s).
- This context may be represented through the large sums of money that now circulate through eSports competitions.
- The games played at this level cover a range of genres, including real-time strategies, such as, Starcraft: Brood War and Starcraft II, first-person shooters, such as Counter-Strike and Halo, and multiplayer online battle arena games, such as League of Legends and DOTA 2.
Play, Games and Human Practices
- To appreciate Caillois’ concern that working life ‘rationalises’ play, one must reflect on the manner in which he critiques the social construction of ruled-games.
- And yet, Caillois argues that these instincts are circumscribed through the construction of rules into a typology of games based on four categories: agôn , alea , mimicry , and ilinx .
- For the Romans, Caillois argued that the gladiatorial games were evidence of the Empire’s agôn-alea character, captured in the Roman adage: ‘Ubi societas ibi ius’ – ‘Where there is society, there is law’ (2001a, p. 126).
- A student of the structural anthropologist Marcel Mauss and functionalist philosopher Georges Dumézil, Caillois studied at the École pratique des Hautes Etudes in the early 1930s, where he founded the Collège de Sociologie alongside the surrealist writers Georges Page 7 of 30 http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/sage/games.
Contaminating Play
- Yet, Caillois (2001a, p.44, 48) argues that these very qualities may be ‘contaminated’ (and social stability threatened) as the line between play and reality blurs, particularly as the formal qualities of play become institutionalised in working life.
- Here, the ludic conventions of games are seen to have a negative impact on people and society as subjects take on the character of the games that they come to master.
- ‘Transposed to reality’, he suggests, ‘the only goal of agôn is success’ as ‘[i]mplacable competition becomes the rule’, and culture(s) comes to value rivalry, violence and cheating.
- It is worth noting, as Henricks (2011, p.175-176) does, that Caillois’ main political contention with these games emerges in juxtaposition to his anxieties with fascist ideology.
- The same was also said of sports heroes and celebrities.
Intrinsic/Extrinsic Rewards
- Research in social psychology distinguishes between the ‘intrinsic’ and ‘extrinsic’ rewards associated with play (see Ryan and Deci, 2000; Ryan, et. al. 2006).
- It is commonly associated with a strong sense of personal autonomy based on an internal locus of control; that is to say, people feel that they have control over their life (Gray, 2011).
- Caillois (2001a, p.65) presents an image of play as containing elements of both intrinsic and extrinsic rewards.
- The issue is that under the rationalising conditions of modernity (that is, the drive to turn play into an obligation) societies tends to value games of agôn and the extrinsic rewards that they bring.
- First, it ‘elides’ (Archer, 1995) structure and agency together.
Human reflexivity
- Margaret Archer (1995, 2007, 2012) has spent much of her academic career devoted to tackling the problem of structure and agency in social theory, and one of her most well developed concepts, ‘human reflexivity’, is often cited as a means of bridging the relationship between the two.
- It is defined as ‘…the regular exercise of the mental ability to consider their selves in relation to their circumstances and vice versa’ (Archer, 2007, p.5).
- Archer argues that human reflexivity underwrites the kinds of choices that people make as they negotiate the contextual circumstances within which they are situated (including the rules of games).
- Archer does not seek to reduce social action to these internal deliberations; on the contrary, she underwrites their significance precisely to preclude attempts (by other social theorists) to render agency in the third-person by way of structural or cultural properties.
- The overarching point is that reflexivity is considered key to explaining the kinds of choices that a person makes and how their inner thoughts inform their actions.
Competitive Gameplay and Autonomous Reflexivity
- Mauricio, et al., (2015) suggest that the appeal of playing Multiplayer Online Battle Areas, such as DOTA 2,3 may be explained in terms of the challenges that ‘hypothetico-deductive reasoning’ brings.
- In other words, when play becomes intractably tied to winning, whether for money, prizes or peer-gratification, self-control and poise are lost –players can no longer detach themselves from the game when their livelihoods are dependent on the extrinsic rewards it grants.
- Woodcock and Johnson (2016) argue that the professionalised context of competitive gaming needs to be understood as a form of precarious work.
- This is said to leave professional gamers in a state of career anxiety similar to that of physical sports but without the stable career opportunities (in TV, radio, and so on) available to them.
- Like many young men in South Korea today, Min-Ki was introduced to the world of competitive video gaming out of necessity.
Alienation
- Viewed in this way, Caillois’ warning about the rationalization of play in modern life appears prophetic: professional players are seen to be participating in a neoliberal system or ‘game’ where the odds are often stacked against them.
- The contamination or corruption of play of which Caillois (2001a, 2001b) writes is seen in examples where the demands of work operate to breakdown the equanimity with which players treat gameplay.
- The Morphogenetic Approach, also known as Realist Social Theory.
- Source: http://kotaku.com/league-of-legends-pro-attempted-suicide-aftertournamen-1542880793 - accessed 1st September 2016.
- Henderson, A.M., Parsons, T. Oxford University Press: Oxford.
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...Within the existing literature of eSports, qualitative studies have been prevalent (Brock, 2017; Conway, 2010; Taylor, 2016). Hamilton, Garretson, and Kerne (2014) conducted an ethnographic investigation on why Twitch viewers watch the gameplay of the others. According to the study, Twitch viewers regard the streaming platform as the “virtual third place” where they socialize and exchange information with other fans of the game who share a similar social identity (Hamilton, Garretson, & Kerne, 2014). On the other hand, Cheung and Huang (2011) analyzed the comments from viewers of a StarCraft (a real-time strategic eSports game) live event....
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...Within the existing literature of eSports, qualitative studies have been prevalent (Brock, 2017; Conway, 2010; Taylor, 2016)....
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...Within the existing literature of eSports, qualitative studies have been prevalent (Brock, 2017; Conway, 2010; Taylor, 2016). Hamilton, Garretson, and Kerne (2014) conducted an ethnographic investigation on why Twitch viewers watch the gameplay of the others....
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References
148 citations
"Roger Caillois and E-Sports: On the..." refers background in this paper
...Although critics such as Taylor (2012) and Seo and Jung (2014) have cast doubts over Caillois’ distinction between ‘‘play’’ and work, I will defend Caillois by arguing that e-Sports leads to the development of a highly rational mode of human ‘‘reflexivity’’ (Archer, 2007), one which is oriented…...
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...As Seo and Jung (2014) argue, South Korea is one of the major e-Sports hubs in the world, where competitive gaming has become a way of life for many young Korean men....
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99 citations
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80 citations
"Roger Caillois and E-Sports: On the..." refers background in this paper
...Here, Caillois (2001b) argues that that those who sufficiently ‘‘confuse’’ the domains of play and working life cannot hope to be considered a ‘‘good player.’’...
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...(Caillois, 2001a, p. 83) For example, when talking about Rome and its gladiators, Caillois suggests that their games lead to certain habits and reflexes that came to be characteristic of the aggressive nature of its empire....
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...(Caillois, 2001a, p. 45) In Man, Play and Games, Roger Caillois’ warns against the ‘‘rationalization’’ of play by daily life and argues that when play becomes an obligation, like work, it can have a detrimental impact on people’s autonomy and society’s moral character....
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...‘‘Games,’’ he suggests, ‘‘cause certain kinds of reaction to be anticipated,’’ ‘‘They necessarily reflect its culture pattern and provide useful indications as to the preferences . . . of a given society at a particular stage of its evolution’’ (Caillois, 2001a, p. 83)....
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...The contamination or corruption of play of which Caillois (2001a, 2001b) writes is seen in examples where the demands of work operate to break down the equanimity with which players treat gameplay....
[...]
69 citations
"Roger Caillois and E-Sports: On the..." refers background in this paper
...Play is said to be concerned with intrinsic rewards: it is a free activity that is motivated for its inherent satisfactions, such as ‘‘fun’’ (Lewis, 1982) or the ‘‘challenge’’ of completing puzzles (Danesi, 2002)....
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61 citations
"Roger Caillois and E-Sports: On the..." refers background in this paper
...Roger Caillois appears to use the phrase to refer to ‘‘function,’’ which reflects the social order of Marcel Mauss’ ‘‘total social fact’’ (see Frank, 2003, p. 110)....
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...Frank (2003) also suggests that much of Caillois’ writing at this time moves away from his early embrace of surrealism to find a more stable source of the imagination: the cultural and material structures and patterns that animate collective life....
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...Of course, such an understanding is in keeping with Caillois’ realist perspective.1 A student of the structural anthropologist Marcel Mauss and functionalist philosopher Georges Dumézil, Caillois studied at the École pratique des Hautes Etudes in the early 1930s, where he founded the Collège de Sociologie alongside the surrealist writers Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris (Frank, 2003)....
[...]
...A student of the structural anthropologist Marcel Mauss and functionalist philosopher Georges Dumézil, Caillois studied at the École pratique des Hautes Etudes in the early 1930s, where he founded the Collège de Sociologie alongside the surrealist writers Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris (Frank, 2003)....
[...]
...…of the structural anthropologist Marcel Mauss and functionalist philosopher Georges Dumézil, Caillois studied at the École pratique des Hautes Etudes in the early 1930s, where he founded the Collège de Sociologie alongside the surrealist writers Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris (Frank, 2003)....
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