08/13: Games and Anarchy: Introductory Remarks
No claims will be made that any particular game (chess or go or bowling) is somehow inherently related to anarchism or to revolution. However, as a ubiquitous cultural phenomenon in human societies, games are a worthy and important subject for critical inquiry. The principal axis along which games connect to anarchy is the ludic principle itself. If there is a human essence, the world of play seems to embody it better than anything else I can think of, and its utopian, joyful, and creative aspects do in fact seem inherently anarchical even if they are rule bound. Time devoted to play is time not suffered in production or other stressful and unwelcome activities. Indeed, during absorption in play people tend to suspend their awareness of the passage of time itself. Play brings out the best of the natural self and provides a glimpse of what the world could be.At the same time, however, games are subject to pressures of the marketplace and hierarchical institutions, and can serve the interests of the rich and powerful. Just think of the Olympics and the gigantic industries of organized sports, with teams of nearly cyborg professionals performing for millions of passive spectators. As situationists and others have shown, modern society is domination in the mode of leisure as well as in the mode of work.
We are concerned primarily with traditional games (mostly board games, but also playing cards, dominoes, and such) in the "public domain," and not so much with modern proprietary games, which in most cases are derivatives of very old prototypes. Board games fall into several broad categories: alignment games, hunting games, war games, racing games, and mancala games. Many of them have a fascinating history in themselves, while touching on many other aspects of the history and culture of the countries or regions from which they sprung or through which they passed, calling forth associations with folklore, mythology, mystery, and romance, and working their way into poetry, literature, and visual arts. Some games are of remote enough antiquity, or are disconnected enough from modern industrialized culture, as to be of anthropological interest. A seeming paradox is that games in the specific forms they have come down to us are products of civilization, yet they function as expressions of the primal activity of play.
Three games, or families of games, in particular, hold our interest: chess, go, and kriegspiels. The common denominator is the enactment of war and strategy in the form of games, which these three groups represent in greatest depth and complexity. Is not war the antithesis of what we, as the negators of the existing world, want to achieve? Clearly, it's another paradox, for although our goal may be a society in which war has become a thing of the past, yet the path to its achievement is a fight in many dimensions. And so, a facile antiwar position will not do. "Neither your war nor your peace," as the surrealists put it. The problem of war is an ancient one, even predating civilization. In some cases, primitive war even works against the emergence of the civilized state, with its far more devastating wars (Clastres, *Society Against the State*). Our play is serious, a struggle to vanquish real war through the art of the social war, both on and off the board.
A BRIEF LIST OF RESOURCES
Bibliography:
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Bell, R.C. *Board and Table Games from Many Civilizations*, revised ed., two vols. bound as one. New York: Dover Publications, 1979.
Caillois, Roger. *Man, Play, and Games*. University of Illinois Press, 2001 [1961].
Huizinga, Johan. *Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture*. Boston: Beacon Press, 1971 [1955].
Murray, H.J.R. *A History of Board Games Other Than Chess*. London: Oxford University Press, 1952.
Schmittberger, R. Wayne. *New Rules for Classic Games*. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1992.
Websites:
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Board Games Studies magazine --- http://www.boardgamesstudies.org/
Elliott Avedon Museum & Archive of Games --- http:www.gamesmuseum.uwaterloo.ca/
The Online Guide to Traditional Games --- http://www tradgames.org.uk/index.html
The World of Abstract Games --- http://www.di.fc.ul.pt/~jpn/gv/
Game servers:
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Kriegspiel --- http://r-s-g.org/kriegspiel/index.php
Brainking --- http://brainking.com
Kurnik Online Games --- http://www.kurnik.org/
Ludoteka --- http://www.ludoteka.com/juegos.html?hizk=en
Richard's Play-By-Email Server --- http://www.gamerz.net/pbmserv/
Free Internet Chess Server --- http://www.freechess.org/
Shogi Club 24 --- http://www.shogidojo.com/eng/engindex.htm
Thai Chess Online --- http://www.thaibg.com/TSOnline/index.php
Club Xiangqi (Chinese Chess) --- http://www.clubxiangqi.com
Category: Games and Anarchy: Introductory Remarks | Posted by: simurgh
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