Nations, Spaces, and Ruling Serious Games

Nations,
Places,
and
Ruling Serious Games
Bruce Caron
Winter 1992
Frontispiece
Eudoxia
In Eudoxia, which spreads both upward and
down, with winding alleys, steps, dead ends, hovels, a
carpet is preserved in which you can observe the
city’s true form. At first sight nothing seems to
resemble Eudoxia less than the design of that carpet,
laid out in symmetrical motives whose patterns are
repeated along straight and circular lines, interwoven
with brilliantly colored spires, in a repetition that can
be followed throughout the whole woof. But if you
pause and examine it carefully, you become
convinced that each place in the carpet corresponds
to a place in the city and all the things contained in
the city are included in the design, arranged
according to their true relationship, which escapes
your eye distracted by the bustle, the throngs, the
shoving. All of Eudoxia’s confusion, the mules’
braying, the lampblack stains, the fish smell is what is
evident in the incomplete perspective you grasp; but
the carpet proves that there is a point from which the
city shows its true proportions, the geometrical
scheme implicit in its every, tiniest detail.
It is easy to get lost in Eudoxia: but when you
concentrate and stare at the carpet, you recognize
the street you were seeking in a crimson or indigo or
magenta thread which, in a wide loop, brings you to
the purple enclosure that is your real destination.
Every inhabitant of Eudoxia compares the carpet’s
immobile order with his own image of the city, an
anguish of his own, and each can find, concealed
among the arabesques, an answer, the story of his
life, the twists of fate.
An oracle was questioned about the mysterious
bond between two objects so dissimilar as the carpet
and the city. One of the two objects—the oracle
replied—has the form the gods gave the starry sky
and the orbits in which the worlds revolve; the other
is an approximate reflection, like every human
creation.
For some time the augurs had been sure that
the carpet’s harmonious pattern was of divine origin.
The oracle was interpreted in this sense, arousing no
controversy. But you could, similarly, come to the
opposite conclusion: that the true map of the
universe is the city of Eudoxia, just as it is, a stain
that spreads out shapelessly, with crooked streets,
houses that crumble one upon the other amid clouds
of dust, fires, screams in the darkness.
Italo Calvino Invisible Cities
Nations, Places, and Ruling Serious Games I—1
This bias towards the temporal ... is an instance

of what Soja (1989) has termed “the suppression
of space in social theory.” As he demonstrates,
both positivist and Marxist historians and
sociologists—with the exception of Canadian
economic historian and communication theorist
Harold Innis, who is not mentioned in his
account, and subsequent thinkers influenced by
him—have tended to privilege historical
determinations in the interpretation of society
and culture, and to render spatial determinants
as both static and secondary. (Berland, 39)
Part One: The Problem of Place
The Problem of not Problematizing Place
The human sciences have not problematized space sufficiently.
We lack a fundamental understanding of the spatial qualities of action,
and of the historical processes that produce places we call “nations.” I
find it curious that even theorists, such as Foucault, Bourdieu, and
Giddens, whose work rests directly upon the spatial order of actions
and institutions, have failed to significantly address the
epistemological and historical processes that underlie our concept of
space.
The modernist notion of “space,” of a vacuous undifferentiated
universe where physical and metaphysical laws apply uniformly—the
space of experimental reason that defies local aberration; the space of
truth—still underpins critical social theories long after these have
problematized space’s younger sister: time. At the drawing boards of
national histories, time is the chalk, but space is the board itself—all
histories “take place” and “make time”; these are the body and the
life-narrative of nations.
To speak of a modernist notion of “space” suggests alternative
notions. “Pre-modern” and “extra-modern” come to mind, if one
wishes to again to temporalize modernity. But then that which is
extra-modern not only exists outside the “time” of modernity, but also
outside its “space.” In it universalizing narrative of (evolutionary)
development, modernity has defined itself as a time in advance of
other times. So we find stone-age peoples in the Philippines, and a
pre-industrial third-world advancing (or not) upon the atomic clock that
has passed now from London to New York to Tokyo. All this talk of
time, and silence on space. The post-modern historicization of
modernity problematizes its control over the clock, but we have yet to
address modernity’s death grip on space.
In The Order of Things, Foucault reminds us of a place in time
where all things existed in a patterned order somewhat like the carpet
of Eudoxia. I am not simply saying that people conceived of time and
space in this fashion, although this is so—what I wish to show is that a
universe so conceived allowed people to live in places (also imagined)
that were astoundingly different from the spaces of modern nations,
and that the process of nation formation was necessarily preceded by
the epistemological shift which Foucault described (although again not
sufficiently in it spatial nature).
The co+incidence of this epistemological shift with the early
reformation in Europe and the initial opening up of the New World; with
the founding of universities in Paris and Oxford, and, subsequently, the
particularist speculations of Ockham at Paris and the vernacular de-
ritualization of praxis by Wycliff at Oxford; with the musings of
Copernicus and the decentering of the Earth; with the invention of

cross-ocean navigation technologies and the maps these explorations
required; and with the need for accurate survey technology to
articulate land holdings in new colonies, and the effects of cultural
decentering because of travels to new worlds (to other places)—
particularization re-places similitude in the natural sciences, and
relativization re-places cosmic order in the physical sciences—all of
this occurs centuries before the modern nation is announced, but also
happens in those very places where the nation-state is to be
conceived.
I don’t have a blow-by-blow description of the transition from the
epistemology of place-as-microcosm to that of space-as-empty-and-

uniform. But it is relatively evident that the latter formed the
epistemology upon which the nation rests. The task becomes that of
critically revaluing our theories to uncover these spatial
epistemological assumptions, and then forging a spatially self-
reflective critical theory that will allow for the problemization of place
in ethnographic work.
From Places to Nation Spaces
Turning now to the uniform space of nations1, two spatial
processes seem to be working in the creation of nations. The first
process in the spatial consummation of the nation is a process I will
call “interiorization.” This is the emptying out of pre-existing places
within the nation’s borders—the absolute destruction in place and
memory of the sui-generis distinctions that formerly articulated
localities. These distinctions are elided together with the verbal
(dialectical) distinctions that once marked them. National languages,
enforced through national education systems, erase local knowledges
1Nations are always plural. They were and are created within a spatial grammar of
contraposition.
and those pre-existing customs formerly used to distinguish among
locales—locally exclusive festivals, for one example, local laws for
another.
A totalizing uniformity of space is created within the borders of
the nation. Transportation and communication links are established.
Internal boundaries are suppressed and interior-travel—the new
pilgrimage which Anderson describes—is promoted. Centralized
military and legal control is applied across the map of the nation.
Local disturbances are now a matter of national concern. The national
boundaries create a uniform power container that subjugates all
citizens in a relatively equal fashion (before this time, as we learned

from Discipline and Punish, the monarch’s gaze was focused narrowly:
after this we are all guilty, and await the gendarme’s hail).
National maps provide a visual mandala of the national space,
reinforcing the boundedness and internal connectivity of the nation.
Previously locatable local boundaries disappear from maps and from
the landscape. Boundary markers are torn down or simply cease to
have their semiotic effect.
Space and the History of the Nation Notion
In Western Europe much of this interiorization had already taken
place in advance of the formation of nations—it informed the style of
the modern nation-state. But in the colonies of Europe, those sub-
altern nations created by the European nations, the process of
interiorization is pro-active and more evident as a feature in the
creation of the nation. The infrastructure development of India, its
survey, and the complete re-naming of its places to fit an English
tongue, and to fill an English notion of exotic nostalgia. Coromandel,
Malabar, Calcutta, Darjeeling: English names on English maps and

railroad schedules. A subsequent renaming of places occurred when
India became independent. The new names were announced to reflect
the deep and hoary history of the Nation of India, a space that, in fact,
never existed in anyone’s imagination before the British arrived.
It might be instructive to consider the nation as a necessarily
post-colonial phenomenon (in terms of space/place). By this I mean to
suggest that much of Western Europe (Germany, Benelux, the British
Isles, Normandy) was itself a “colonized” space due to centuries of
spatial reconfiguration: originally by Rome, and later by internal and
external nomadic incursions and by Christian polities (Christianity was
as foreign to these lands as it was to India). The indigenous aboriginal

populations (their own “Indians”) of Western Europe were, over several
hundred years, replaced and replenished by outside rulers including, at
least peripherally, Turks, Moors, and Huns, and internally, by Saxon,
Norse and Norman conquests. The ultimate conquest was that
perpetrated by institutions of the church. By 1500, the sui generis
place attachments of Western Europe had long been severed and re-
instituted under the auspices of the church. And by 1800 the church’s
hold over its “hierogenous zones2” in Western Europe had been
effectively severed again by the Reformation. At the time of the
blossoming of the modern nation and in terms of space and language (I
do not wish to press this analogy in terms of politics or economics),
Western European states already fit a post-colonial description3.

2 As will be seen below, the notion of “sacred space,” similarly, the notion of
“national space” are varieties of fabricated places. Because of the implied
theological meanings of “sacred space,” I propose an alternate term, “hierogenous
zone,” for places that generate hieros (the sacred, the supernatural, shades, demons,
whatever). As Bourdieu (1988) pointed out, one of the first steps towards a truly
scientific human science is made away from naturalized, scholarly commonsensical
descriptions. The hierogenous zone is a site of embodied practice embedded within
its locale, or more recently, a channel and a time on the television schedule.
3 So too, the national languages of Western Europe are themselves neo-local,
The second process, which I will call “rearticulation,” is a curious
and necessary perversion of the first. This involves the rearticulation
of locales as sites of the nation. National monuments, public buildings,
national highways and railroads, battlefields, stadiums, and also cities,
natural parks, and rural habitats: all become emblematic of the nation,
of its history, its naturalized beginnings and its future glory. A
waterfall becomes an object of national pride. Locales are presented in
their distinction as “capitals” or “body parts” of the nation: for example
the “corn (or porn) capital of America;” “the heart of American
industry.” As Jennifer Robertson (1991) points out, the notion of
furusato (the Japanese nostalgic traditional village place) applies both

to the individual reconstructed village (which offered a menu of
required furusato ingredients and a zest of reconsidered local treats)
and metonymically to Japan as a nation. Furosato is Japan.
Forgetting to Remember
The rearticulation of the nation occurs continuously. It is applied
to focus national attention, and divert the same. It informs the
national imagination. This rearticulation happens not only internally,
but provides the narrative for external perspectives—the nation
continually reinvents the spaces of other nations. Reagan’s evil
empire of communism has been replaced by Yeltsin’s inept (and
perhaps more dangerous by this) commonwealth of independent
states. Ex-colonies reinvent relationships with their ex-rulers—by
redescribing the space of the other.
The rearticulation of locales succeeds only insofar as places can
replace spaces within the modern epistemology. The places of
modernity must be reinforced by an active national ideology, or else
they will fall prey to irony and re-imagining. Before the nation, each
place was its own author, liable only to its own claims. The authority
and authenticity of each place rested upon those who made the claims
for that particular place. But these claims also were made upon
epistemological grounds that supported the idea of places. Such a
place may offer sanctuary, special powers, healing waters, youthful
reinvigoration, Epiphanies of beauty or fear: based on the story of the
place, on its natural markings, and on an epistemology that describes
knowledge as em-placed.
Because there is actually no room for “places” in the
epistemology of the modern nation, the reinvented place, the national
locale, is of a completely different epistemological order from the pre-

national (pre-modern) place or locale. As sites created by and for the
fabrication of experience, they require maintenance, particularly,
efforts to escape suspicion and doubt. So, they rely upon the
processes of naturalization for their claim to have epistemological
support. As this claim is contestable, nations must work even harder,
they must avoid even the suspicion of a doubt. Nations require
continuous performances of what Homi Bhabha termed “the
problematic totalization of the national will” (1990, 311). This time of
“forgetting to remember,” (ibid.) is a strategy for eliciting “selective
inattention” (Goffman 1961, 38): a boundary condition required for the
ruling serious game (much more about this below) to commence.
Authenticity for the national space is an expensive and
continuous proposition. The modern national place cannot violate
undifferentiated space. It cannot offer miraculous cures, it cannot
reverse the uniform unfolding of time. Ultimately, national places are
subject to one fragile authority—that of the nation: we see flags sprout
in a sudden spring of nationalist sentiment when a war is announced,
and the same flags burned when the armies return without
employment. We witnessed in a week every (well most) public
statue(s) of Lenin disappear across the former Soviet territories.
The replacement of places that are epistemologically grounded
with fabricated places that uneasily hide their epistemological
contradictions—places transformed out of space only by the force of
ideological equivocation—is actually the destruction of “place” across
the face of the planet. I do not wish to suggest that our epistemology4
is, somehow morally deficient, nor to promote nostalgia for “old-time”
places. The suggestion that a critique of the modern place must
involve a romantic return to a former authenticity is itself a modernist
counter-move. The interest in other places and their epistemologies is

an attempt to discover alternative strategies of place which might
inform a theory of place that would re+place the vacuous space of
modernity.
The Hyperlocale
For much of human history, activities of various sorts have
created “places” from “spaces”, places that are identifiable as locales.
Recently, the characteristic of places to be tied to locales seems to be
loosening in the face of the modern “global place.” Part of this has to
do with the increased distanciation brought about by communications
and transportation technologies. Another part, as we have seen, is the
articulation of this distanciated space by the processes of nation
formation and maintenance.
As Anthony Giddens noted5, the disembedding mechanisms of
modernity tend to evacuate the historical idiosyncratic locality of place

4Epistemology is simply another level of fabrication, made innocent (if it is) only by
its democracy—we are all subject to it. Yet this universalized/-izing notion of
epistemology (particularly Foucault’s notion of episteme) is itself the result of the
application of the modern spatial formula: it declares “what is really true must hold
true everywhere.” Truth is never local nowadays.
in favor of re-embedded globaly-organized places. This new planetary
realm is, in effect, a type of “hyper-locality”, one consequence of which
is a continuing impact upon the reality claims of other, necessarily
smaller localities and their realms. What seems evident is that
processes in modernity act to sever places from locales, and that this
tends to un-transform the local places back into spaces.
The hegemony of modern space (and time) seems to be an
accomplished fact. We have entered the realm of the hyperlocale, of
global spaces taking on the facade of local places. The markings that
formerly signaled the individual distinction of the locale now play as
signifiers within a global language of marking. They are the simulacra

(cf. Baudrillard, 1983) of what were formerly individuated places. We
now create local places as tourist destinations, demarcated and
marketed through iconic architectural motifs. The Eiffel Tower, the Taj
Mahal, Big Ben, the Venice Canals, the Great Wall: Epcot Center at
Disneyworld (the word “world” is no mistake) re-places the world as a
hyperlocale, as a semiosis of equivalent meanings. This global
metropolitan location supports the nation as one-among-equals: but it
elides a good portion of the world in its picturesque montage. Where is
Islam in this picture? Where is Africa?
Does the hyperlocale admit to any resistance? Hardly—there is
no obvious locus of active resistance to modern nation formation—
everyone seems to want a place in Disneyworld. Yet, how uniformly
has the epistemology of modern space/time penetrated across the
globe? Clearly the global economy and world systems implicated in
5For a discussion of Giddens’s use of time-space relations, see: Gregory, 1985.

“Modernity,” as a synthetic term used to describe historically embedded but
increasingly globalized institutions and structuration, has not acquired a consensus of
meanings in the literature, I am comfortable with Giddens’s outline of its features (cf.
Giddens, 1990).
this process are active agents in the spread of the modern episteme.
But aren’t there dis-enfranchised, marginalized peoples who have not
so much resisted as they have been ignored? Are there contra-nations
out there? What is a post-modern nation? Must we re-invent the
locale for the epistemology of modernity to come into critical focus, ?
How do we study alternatives to the modern place? Where do we
look? Can an archaeology of spatial knowledge help us here? What is
the role of ethnography?
The human sciences have not problematized space sufficiently.
We lack a fundamental understanding of the spatial qualities of action,
and of the historical processes that produce places we call “nations.”

Partly, this theoretical oversight is due to the priority that space has
within modern epistemology. We valorize only knowledges that are
moveable. For a century, anthropologists have brought back souvenir
knowledges of “other cultures” as though these represented the actual
knowledges in play in these society. As Bourdieu, Foucault, and
Giddens (among others) remind us, the study of practice requires the
study of places of practice. We need a theory of space—and of
spatialized practice—that will allow this type of study. What follows is
the beginning of such a theory.

Nations, Places, and Ruling Serious Games II—1
It is not the act [of sexual intercourse] as such

that the spirit of the language tends to conceive
as play; rather the road thereto, the preparation
for and introduction to ‘love’, which is often
made enticing by all sorts of playing. This is
particularly true when one of the sexes has to
rouse or win the other over to copulation.
(Huizinga 1949, 43)
One's feel for the game is not infallible; it is

shared out unequally between players, in a
society as in a team. Sometimes it is completely
lacking, notably in tragic situations, when people
appeal to wise men who, in Kabylia are often
poets too and who know how rule aimed to
guarantee can be saved. But this freedom of
invention and improvisation which enables the
infinity of moves allowed by the game to be
produced (as in chess) has the same limits as
the game. The strategies adapted in playing the
game of Kabyle marriage, which do not involve
land and the threat of sharing it out (because of
the joint ownership in the equal sharing out of
land between agnates), would not be suitable in
playing the game of Béarn marriage, where you
have above all to keep hold of your house and
your land.
(Bourdieu 1990, 63)
“In daily life, games are seen as part of

recreation and ‘in principle devoid of important
repercussions upon the solidity and continuity of
collective and institutional life.’ [from: Caillois
1957, p.99] Games can be fun to play, and fun
alone is the approved reason for playing them.
Because serious activity need not justify itself in
terms of the fun it provides, we have neglected
to develop an analytical view of fun and an
appreciation of the light that fun throws on
interaction in general. This paper attempts to
see how far one can go by treating fun
seriously.” (Goffman 1961, 17)
Part Two:
The Theory of Serious Games
Preliminary Stuff
The basic notion of a theory of serious games is that society as
an object of study can be described as a set of serious and non-serious
games which involve its members in rule-governed and rule-creating

actions. As Giddens (1991) notes, the “sociologist’s ‘society’, applied
to the period of modernity at any rate, is a nation-state...” (15). As
such, societies and nations today (socialization and nationalism) are
mutually implicated. Yet, the genres of serious games played in the
nation-state are different from those played in other societies. By
exploring this difference we will be able to better describe the
contingent possibilities of action within each type of society.
The notion of “society as serious game” is not presented as a
monopolistic explanatory tool, but rather as a descriptive figure more
nimble at times than “society as text” or “society as drama.” Drama
and text are both implied in the play of serious games (more of this
later). Similarly, members of a society can perhaps be better
described as “players,” and “pawns” rather than as “agents6” or
“actors.” This theory brings to the fore the embodied performative
aspect of society. The actual serious games that envelope us, the
society we belong to and others we encounter as “strangers,” are only
formally delimited by the theoretical model of serious games. This
theory provides the barest of form, a basis upon which any number of
serious games, fantastic or not, can be (and have been) fashioned.
This, as Bourdieu notes, is the advantage of having such a model:
“even if it remains for the most part empty, even if what it provides us
with are above all warnings and programmatic guidelines, [having a
model] means that I will choose my subjects in a different way...”
(1990, 160).
6The terminology is confused, perhaps, as the following description of the “player”

relates very much to Bourdieu’s and Giddens’s notion of the “agent.” Giddens
discounts (and so do I) the value of the term “player” in its British dramatistic sense
(what Americans would call a “stage actor”). I will stay with the term “player”
because not only do they make “plays” but they are also involved in serious (or deep,
or thick) play. The Derridian overtones are also important here.
Embedded in the following text is also an implicit critique of
rationalism as Habermas (1984) would have us use this concept; that
is, of rationalism as a mature/advanced state of dialectical cultural
growth/evolution. At the end, it is hoped that the reader might
consider instead that rationalism has been a remarkably successful
strategy for legitimizing certain aspects of serious games. As such it is
a powerful alibi for actions, no more, but certainly this is enough of a
role for any concept. In order to approach play seriously (yes, this also
means “rationally”) an expanded and reordered notion of rationality is
needed, one not based on the pristine separation of subjective and
objective realms. (For more discussion of—mainly objections to—

objectivism, See: Bourdieu 1988, 781; 1990, 62-63 & 184; Giddens
1987, 59-60, Lakoff 1987, xiv; Weedon 1987, 78-80.) As Zizek(1991,
179-81) —after Lacan—notes, it is time for dialecticians to “learn to
count to four”, to embrace the negative, the difference outside of
serious pretensions of the ruling game. (Part III below will outline this
“trialectic” process.)
Herein is presented a discussion of terms like “nationalism” and
“game”, “work” and “play”, “serious” and “trivial”, “risk,” and
“action”. In their new (or rediscovered) meanings these terms become
tools of the game of creating a theory of games. As the semantic
space of such terms and many others changes, these changes are
signals of the transformations I wish to describe, transformations as
broad and profound as the Protestant Reformation, and as narrow—
and yet profound—as the shift from the performance of a single
Japanese matsuri as a festival to its performance as a pageant. The
following theory of games may be seen as a part of the change from a
modern to a post-modern outlook (See: Kroker), or it may not. What it
demands of the reader is not that it be accepted as true, but rather

that it be taken seriously, which is all that any game can actually
demand.
Strategic Play
This paper will explore Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of “strategic
action” from the perspective that social action generally takes place
within frameworks or contexts that can productively be called “serious
games.” Action, particularly in its nation-creating and sustaining
capacities, can be discussed using terms defined in the theory of
serious games. Before looking at this serious game theory’s more
specific socioanthropolinguistic (it’s an ugly word but someone has to

use it) extensions, the paper will introduce the theory’s place within
the human sciences.
In serious game theory, festivals, pageants, rituals, rites,
breakfast conversations, working lunches, clandestine afternoon trysts
(Huizinga’s winding road to copulation), supermarket checkout
encounters, freeway driving, political conventions, supreme court
sessions, military coups: each of the various social encounters that
envelope our actions from day to day or minute to minute are
individually determined by the game that promotes and sustains its
context and its conduct. Donning a three-piece suit for a business
meeting is actually much more than superficially analogous to donning
one’s whites for a cricket match.
Serious game theory allows for a further examination into the
strategic logic of suit-donning and other actions, as well as a
perspective on the knowledges (habitus) and constraints that frame
these actions. The use of an extended theory of “serious games”—
extended, that is from Erving Goffman’s original notion of “game

encounters” (1961)—provides a methodological entrée to what
Bourdieu calls “the feel for the game:”
I wanted, so to speak, to reintroduce agents that Lévi-Strauss and the

structuralists, among others Althusser, tended to abolish, making them into
simple epiphenoma of structure. And I mean agents, not subjects. Action is
not the mere carrying out of a rule, or obedience to a rule. Social agents, in
archaic societies as well as in ours, are not automata regulated like clocks, in
accordance with laws which they do not understand. In the most complex
games, matrimonial exchange for instance, or ritual practices, they put into
action the incorporated principles of a generative habitus: this system of
dispositions can be imagined by analogy with Chomsky's generative
grammar—with this difference: I am talking about dispositions acquired
through experience, thus variable from place to place and time to time. This
'feel for the game', as we call it, is what enables an infinite number of 'moves'
to be made, adapted to the infinite number of possible situations which no
rule, however complete, can foresee. And so, I replaced the rules of kinship
with matrimonial strategies. (Bourdieu 1990, 9)
Specifically, agency is found in both performances (events and
their contexts) and texts (oral, written, and video), and, more
problematically, in the unexpectedly “thick” region between these two
aspects7. Serious game theory allows for explorations into the actions
evidenced in performances, into the semantic ordering of texts, and
most significantly, of the structure of the hidden space between these.
The goal of serious game theory is to provide the minimal form
for social action, a description wherein action and concept
(performance and narrative) are not transparently connected. As

7 Unexpected because the social order presents itself as transparent on both
surfaces, as a structured order of meanings and practices that correspond to each
other without hidden intermediaries. Thus, studies of meaning, (e.g., those of
religious doctrines or political ideologies) have seen no difficulty in asserting that this
level is both internally consistent and can be mapped also on the action surface of
rituals—as actions designed to “represent” ideational notions. Similarly,
structural/functionalist descriptions of actions and objects see no difficulty in
asserting the clear and comprehensive accord between these and the “worldviews”
that they “represent.” The society sees itself as a “thin” surface where thought and
action are consistent and their connections immediate. Game theory posits a region
between these two surfaces, and then shows that the structures on both surfaces are
arbitrarily determined within this thick interstice where meanings and actions are not
taken seriously.
Giddens (and others, such as Geertz, 1973a and Boon, 1982) have
suggested, action must not be confused with discursive knowledge:
“You can’t wink (or burlesque one) without knowing what counts as
winking or how, physically, to contract your eyelids,... But to draw
from such truths the conclusion that knowing how to wink is
winking...is to betray a deep confusion as, taking thin descriptions for
thick, to identify winking with eyelid contractions...”(Geertz 1973a, 12).
The problematic that Geertz uncovered with his call for “thick
description” is one of determining what goes on between the worn-
smooth surfaces of narrative, on one hand, and performance, on the
other. Between these two hands, or behind them, something is said to

be happening. What we get out of Geertz is talk of “deep play” and
“meta-commentaries” (1972) What we need is just enough form to pry
these two surfaces apart. Between knowing how (and when and where
and with whom) to wink and doing it, lies—a lie8, or rather a whole
passel of lies. (Actually, I prefer Barthes’s term, “alibi,” but am
uncertain of the proper group adjective. We could be looking at a
cohort of alibis.) The biggest alibi of all is actually the one that
narrative gives to performance, and that performance uses on
narrative (it never fails), and it is something like this: “I am good and
true and beautiful, and I am just like you.” We can thus restate the
8 This is not as distressing as it might sound. As Umberto Eco noted: “semiotics is in

principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie” (1976,
7 emphasis in the original). This does, however, leave us with a theory of “games”
based on a theory of “lies” with which to replace a theory of “culture” based on
notions of universal “truths.” This suggests some necessary lowering of
expectations. Like the two fools in Bruegel’s engraving (See: frontspiece) tugging at
each other’s nose, meaning and performance make fools of us all. Why? Because
we take them seriously—or not—upon their word. Who is the real fool: the clown or
the person that takes him seriously? What is it about culture that makes us want to
be lied to?
problematic that started this paragraph: having recognized that
narrative and performance are alibis for each other, why don’t people
ever catch on?
Serious game theory begins with the assumption that action and
concept are not consistent, and for interesting reasons (not just
dysfunctional ones). Under this theory, the performative aspects of
culture earlier described by Turner (See Turner 1969, 1975, 1979; and
also Singer 195, 1984) can be explored along with their conceptual,
semantic counterparts (such as those presented in Lakoff and Johnson
(1980) and other explorations into the semantics of metaphor (Ricoeur
1977, Sacks 1977, Lakoff 1987, Lakoff and Turner 1989)). The use of
metaphor, particularly in its mythologizing role (again à la Barthes) can
be brought into full play in descriptions of serious games. Recent
social psychological studies into the motivations for actions and
desires, particularly the “flow” studies of Csikszentmihalyi (1975,
1988) and others (e.g. Mitchell 1988, Sato 1988) and Zizek’s political
readings of Lacan (1991) provide the initial conception of motivation
necessary for a serious game theory. Again, serious game theory
presents only the most basic form, just enough to allow these
linguistic, ethnographic, and social psychological notions to begin to
work in concert. It defines a vocabulary to be used in describing the
participation of the individual players, and opens current sociological
theory to the actual contingencies of this participation.
As a term, “game” seems at first look hardly qualified to
encompass the actions, and institutions that it will have to control for
serious game theory to be adequate to its own description. These
agencies and processes have been previously discussed under a
variety of terms: “cultural framework,” “life world,” “religion,”
“nation”, “ideology,” etc. Decades of careful fieldwork and study have

brought into perspective many events, actions, narratives, and
meanings that have not heretofore been readily classified as parts of
games, or in any fashion necessarily linked to performance. Partially,
this failure to to approach performance represents a Post-Reformation
critique of the efficacy9 of human action—EuroAmericans live in a
world where “play” and “games” have been marginalized in contrast
with “work” and other “serious pursuits,” and where embodied and
emplaced knowledge gives way to narratives and universal laws.
Serious game theory hopes to show how performance can be
rediscovered, and that we work at playing serious games every day. In
order for serious game theory to succeed, it must provide some

advantage over other perspectives on social action. This paper will
outline some of these advantages. Some potential objections to
serious game theory will also be discussed below.
If you are not part of the action, you are part of the context
Let us now look closely at the proposed theory of serious games.
First, a few more assumptions: As with Geertz (and before him, Talcott
Parsons, and before him, Max Weber and Émile Durkheim)—the basic
presupposition that empirically observable actions are important in
themselves is crucial to the serious game theory. What Bourdieu and
Giddens (and others) added to this presupposition is the importance of
the agent’s knowledgeability. Like Bourdieu (above), Giddens would
revive the knowledgeable agent:
In the work of Lasch, and many others who have produced rather similar
cultural diagnoses, one can discern an inadequate account of the human
agent. The individual appears essentially passive in relation to
9 The disengagement from the symbolic control of natural processes —from

religious ritual— in favor of the incremental “controls” provided by scientific
knowledge is instrumental in the commodification of human action, and in the
marginalization of the body.
overwhelming external social forces, and a misleading or false view is
adopted of the connections between micro-settings of action and more
encompassing social influences. An adequate account of action in relation to
modernity must accomplish three tasks. It must recognise that (1) on a very
general level, human agents never passively accept external conditions of
action, but more or less continuously reflect upon them and reconstitute them
in the light of their particular circumstances; (2) on a collective as well as an
individual plane, above all in conditions of modernity, there are massive
areas of collective appropriation consequent on the increased reflexivity of
social life; (3) it is not valid to argue that, while the micro-settings of action
are malleable, larger social systems form an uncontrolled background
environment. (Giddens 1991, 175)
Knowledgeability and constraints on knowledgeability are central
to the theories of Foucault, Goffman, Giddens, and Bourdieu. What
game theory adds to this mix is a basic parameter to describe these
knowledges and also a notion of observable attitude. The study of
human action is thus a study of what people do, what they know about
how to do it, and what they think about what they do10. (From now on,
the word “action” will be used to mean a behavior with its associated
knowledges and attitudes.) It is not enough to view individuals as
merely “subjects” or even “actors” in society; they must be “players”
if the society is to be performed and the performances to succeed and
thus to recreate the impetus for the continuation of the society—of the
ruling serious game.
To say that serious game theory asserts that a society is a
serious game is an oversimplification of the concepts of “society” and

of “game,” although this might have once been true in very small,
isolated societies. It is more accurate to say that a society (the
nation/state) maintains a ruling serious game, which encompasses its
10 Obviously there are behaviors, knowledges, and attitudes that are not public,
most properly, there are actions that people do alone. These aren’t many, and often
they are done alone for observable reasons. More problematically, there are times
when knowledges, or attitudes, or even behaviors (as in esoteric rituals) are masked.
People lie about these, or are themselves unaware of them. This means that some
actions are more difficult to study than others. One advantage of serious game
theory is that it provides some methodological toe-hold (mostly thanks to the work of
Erving Goffman) into the process of masking actions.
forms of legitimation and which contain one or more (and possibly
many) major sub-games that define domains of action such as the
political and the religious domains. This ruling serious game is
inherently serious for two main reasons: first because of the overlap
between the survival needs of the various players and the objects
required for the game (e.g., food, shelter, weapons, medicines, social
approval, ego recognition, etc.); and second, because it enforces its
rules with lethal (or near lethal) means (execution, excommunication,
life imprisonment, etc.).
Actions and Narratives

Publicly observable actions have two general aspects: one, a
performative aspect that shows up in events; and the other, a
conceptual aspect, which gets written down or taped, or, in oral
cultures, gets remembered. A telling of a story or a reading of a text
forms the boundary between these two aspects. This is a “fuzzy”
boundary and it is not all that apparent exactly where concept meets
performance11. The material requirements for performance—those
artistic (visual, audio, kinesthetic, sculptural, etc.), spatial and
architectural, sartorial, tonsorial, gustatory, olfactory, pharmaceutical,

11Wittgenstein’s musings on “games” and on the fuzzy boundaries between action
and concept which games display, are much to the point here. I would like to
introduce the notion of “virtuosity,” as a useful way of describing the zone between
concept (knowledge) and its performance. The advantage of this term is that it
carries meanings of embodied knowledge and the performative display of this. As
Wittgenstein noted about virtuosity (actually about “expert judgements”) is that it is
not governable by a system of rules: “What one acquires [as one becomes a
virtuoso] .. is not a technique; one learns correct judgements. There are also rules,
but they do not form a system, and only experienced people can apply them right.
Unlike calculating-rules” (1958, 227). Virtuosity disambiguates the two main
semantic fields of the term “experience”: the knowledgeable aspect (as in “She is an
experienced artist”) and the performative aspect (as in “the experience of a
concert.”) The virtuoso is a repository of knowledge/performance.
and temporal ingredients of the event—are part of the performance
aspect, are its context, and yet these also contribute to the conceptual
aspect as they engender theories, myths, histories, etc.
While the playing of any game takes on a narrative-like aspect (a
beginning, then some determinate activity, then some closure or
failure to close), and while narrative accounts of games are a part of
the history and thus of the available knowledge about games, it is
important not to confuse the playing of the game with either the act of
writing a narrative description of a game or of reading one. Narrative
accounts of serious games can tell us much about these, however,
they cannot12 convey that part of the action which is known and played
non-discursively, that part which responds and creates the habitus of
the game. As Bourdieu notes, the habitus is written into the body of
the player:
...The habitus as the feel for the game is the social game embodied and
turned into a second nature. Nothing is simultaneously freer and more
constrained than the action of the good player. He quite naturally
materializes at just the place the ball is about to fall, as if the ball were in
command of him but by that very fact, he is in command of the ball. The
habitus, as society written into the body, into the biological individual,
enables the infinite number of acts of the game written into the game as
possibilities and objective demands to be produced; the constraints and
demands of the game, although they are not restricted to a code of rules,
impose themselves on those people and those people alone who, because
they have a feel for the game, a feel, that is, for the immanent necessity of the
game, are prepared to perceive them and carry them out. (1990, 63)
A theory of social action cannot rely simply on a narrative
account of the game as it was or is played, but rather on an
examination of the habitus which creates the player, and of the role of
the player as an agent in the creation of habitus. White (1987)
conflated social actions (the playing of serious games) with “lived

12 More precisely, they have not, to date. The role of the “new ethnography” is
to explore ways in which non-discursive knowledge can be discursively described.
Serious game theory will be of certain value here.
narrativizations.” Serious games are certainly lived, but they are only
after the fact rendered as narratives.
The confusion of action with narrative is a hope, often held by
historians or literary theorists; the hope that the story of the game can
substitute for the game as an object of study. This hope is also
expressed by those who wish to describe the nation in terms of its
narrativity. The late A. Bartlett Giamatti (president of Yale University
turned commissioner of baseball) used baseball as a trope in the
national story, :
Baseball is part of America’s plot, part of America’s mysterious, underlying

design—the part in which we all conspire and collude, the plot of the story of
our national life. Our national plot is to be free enough to consent to an order
that will enhance and compound—as it constrains—our freedom. That is our
grounding, our national story, the tale America tells the world... By
repeating again the outline of the American Story, and by placing baseball
within it, we engage the principle of narrative. (1989, 83-84).
Giamatti goes on to remark on the telling of baseball stories, at
“baseball’s second-favorite venue,” the hotel lobby. It is in the telling
of these stories that baseball is transformed into myth. It is in the
move from performance to narrative that the game acquires its time of
“forgetting to remember.” Narrativity is implicated in the imagination
of the game (and of the nation). The deconstruction of narrativity is a
counter-move, a remembering-not-to-forget: that is also its limit.
As Hayden White (1987) noted, the move from game playing to
narrativity does happen in many places. Their stories of their games
and our stories of their games (most ethnographies to date) are thus
deemed commensurable. However, this commensurability takes place
at an innocent, infantile level of practice; it is the sitting around the
campfire, listening to the Wanga-Wanga spin their culture type of
anthropology. No matter how much deconstructive virtuosity one can
level on these texts, they will never reveal what they were never
meant to conceal in the first place: the habitus of the game... which is
always concealed elsewhere. Again, let me return to Bourdieu:
But it is not enough to reject the juridical ideology (what the Anglo-Saxons
call the legalism) that comes so naturally to anthropologists, always ready to
listen to those dispensers of lessons and rules that informants are when they
talk to the ethnologist, that is to someone who knows nothing and to whom
they have to talk as if they were talking to a child. In order to construct a
model of the game which will not be the mere recording of explicit norms
nor a statement of regularities, while synthesizing both norms and
regularities, one has to reflect on the different modes of existence of the
principles of regulation and regularity of different forms of practice: there is,
of course, the habitus, that regulated disposition to generate regulated and
regular behaviour outside any reference to rules; and, in societies where the
work of codification is not very advanced, the habitus is the principle of most
modes of practice. (1990, 65)
If discursive rules were all that pushed agents into actions, and all that
constrained these actions into coherent system-like patterns, then the
lessons of narratives would suffice as anthropology. The need to go
beyond this type of data in order to determine how the agent knows
“how to go on” (cf. Giddens, 1979, 67; also Wittgenstein 1958) is a
need that serious game theory will attempt to fulfill. And so, let me
move on to the details of this theory. While this part of the paper
takes us seemingly far away from the nation-state, it will all be useful
in re-imagining the nation and its ruling serious game not too far down
this narrative path.
[A foretaste of a problematic to be addressed by this theory: The

ruling serious game has few players and many more pawns—the
question is not why the pawns play this game, but why they are
satisfied by it... why don’t they (we) demand or create a better game?]
Encounters of the gaming kind
In order to further explore the concepts of attitude and
motivation, we must first expand the description of what a serious
game is, and how this is “played.” The notion of a serious game as it
will be developed below owes much to Erving Goffman’s work on

events that he calls “encounters.” Goffman’s definition of an
encounter begins with a general statement of potential event
sequences:
Encounters. I limit myself to one type of social arrangement that

occurs when persons are in one another’s immediate physical presence, to be
called here an encounter or a focused gathering. For the participants, this
involves: a single visual and cognitive focus of attention; a mutual and
preferential openness to verbal communication; a heightened mutual
relevance of acts; an eye-to-eye ecological huddle that maximizes each
participant’s opportunity to perceive the other participants’ monitoring of
him. Given these communication arrangements, their presence tends to be
acknowledged or ratified through expressive signs, and a “we rationale” is
likely to emerge, that is, a sense of the single act that we are doing together at
the time. Ceremonies of entrance and departure are also likely to be
employed, as are signs acknowledging the initiation and termination of the
encounter or focused gathering as a unit. Whether bracketed by ritual or not,
encounters provide the communication base for a circular flow of feeling
among participants as well as corrective compensation for deviant acts.
Examples of focused gatherings are: a tête-à-tête; a jury
deliberation; a game of cards; a couple dancing; a task jointly pursued by
persons physically close to one another; love-making; boxing.
(Goffman 1961, 17-18, emphasis in the original)
What is important here, rather than a specific list of actions, is
the notion that the encounter creates a boundary, allows participants
to enter this voluntarily, and then facilitates both communication and
ex-communication. What is this boundary condition? How does it
work? To illustrate, he chooses a small, well-defined example, that of
the game of checkers:
Here, games can serve as a starting point. They clearly illustrate

how participants are willing to forswear for the duration of the play any
apparent interest in the esthetic, sentimental, or monetary value of the
equipment employed, adhering to what might be called rules of irrelevance.
For example, it appears that whether checkers are played with bottle tops on
a piece of squared linoleum, with gold figurines on inlaid marble, or with
uniformed men standing on colored flagstones in a specially arranged court
square, the pairs of players can start with the “same” positions, employ the
same sequence of strategic moves and countermoves, and generate the same
contour of excitement.
...Another example of this is seen in “wall games,” wherein school
children, convicts, prisoners of war, or mental patients are ready to redefine
an imprisoning wall as a part of the board that the game is played on, a board
constituted of special rules of play, not bricks and mortar.(ibid, 19-20)
The boundary condition then is a function of these “rules of
irrelevance,” which determine for the duration of the encounter what is
and shall be taken as serious or trivial. In order to maintain these rules
for the duration, the encounter must localize all the ingredients
necessary for its own completion. The encounter provides the rules
and the materials requisite for the expected outcomes of its actions.
These rules and materials Goffman terms “realized resources” (ibid,
28). (I sometimes call these “technologies of experience.”) There is
thus an economy involved, a marshalling of resources13, and a political
force to regulate this economy, and a judicial authority to resolve
disputes.
Knowing that encounters define and determine attitudes does
not explain why or how its participants allow their attitudes to be so
determined. Why do people enter into these events in the first place?
What is gained? What is the motivation? Goffman, perhaps
reluctantly, posits a type of euphoria. He promotes the notion that
these encounters are internally motivated and thus self replicating. At
the same time, he adds that this sense of euphoria is dependent upon
the reduction of “tension” in the encounter, similar to what Gadamer
sees in his notion of “play:” “Like art, play comes to rest in itself, the
sheer transformation of energy into a structure that ‘absorbs the
player into itself, and thus takes from him the burden of the initiative,
which constitutes the actual strain of existence’”(Gadamer 1985, 94;
reported in States 1988, 126-7). This reduction of tension, of the

13 There are two basic strategies to ensure that all the needed resources are
available within the encounter’s boundaries: the first is to provide a strict definition
of what is needed. This is the rule governing strategy. With this, unavailable
resources are a priorily ruled out of the encounter, and become trivialized. The
second strategy is to expand the boundary and allow for new resources and thus new
rules. This is the rule creating strategy. The former is conservative, and the later
reactionary or progressive.
burden of the strain of existence, requires the “spontaneous
involvement” of the participants:
...Focused gatherings...have unique and significant properties which

a formalistic game-theoretical view of interaction tends to overlook. The
most crucial of these properties, it seems to me, is the organistic
psychobiological nature of spontaneous involvement.(Goffman 1961, 38
emphasis mine)
When an individual becomes engrossed in an activity, whether
shared or not, it is possible for him to become caught up by it, carried away
by it, engrossed in it—to be, as we say, spontaneously involved in it. He
finds it psychologically unnecessary to dwell on anything else...(ibid, 37)
...tension refers...to a sensed discrepancy between the world that
spontaneously becomes real to the individual, or the one he is able to accept
as the current reality, and the one in which he is obliged to dwell. This
concept of tension is crucial to my argument, for I will try to show that just
as the coherence and persistence of a focused gathering depends on
maintaining a boundary, so the integrity of this barrier seems to depend upon
the management of tension.(ibid, 43)
Spontaneous involvement is de facto voluntary, since it depends
upon the participant’s willingness to enter into the encounter as
though it were entirely autotelically motivated, to become engrossed
in it—rather like a “player” gets engrossed in a “game.” Once this
threshold of involvement is met there is then the further possibility of a
reduction of “tension.” The reduction of tension is, however, not
merely a negatively defined experience, but one that Goffman, like
Gadamer, finds to be irresistibly attractive for the participant14.

14 Goffman puts it this way: “We come now to a crucial consideration. The
world made up of objects of our spontaneous involvement and the world carved out
by the encounter’s transformation rules can be congruent, one coinciding perfectly
with the other. In such circumstances, what the individual is obliged to attend to,
and the way in which he is obliged to perceive what is around him, will coincide with
what can and what does become real to him through the natural inclination of his
spontaneous attention. Where this kind of agreement exists I assume—as an
empirical hypothesis—that the participants will feel at ease or natural, in short, that
the interaction will be euphoric for them.
But it is conceivable that the participant’s two possible worlds...may not
coincide... I make a second empirical assumption, that a person who finds himself in
this situation will feel uneasy, bored, or unnatural in the situation, experiencing this
to the degree that he feels committed to maintaining the transformation rules.
The game “succeeds” only as long as it can reduce the tension
between the world it creates and other possible worlds. Success is
predicated first upon the spontaneous involvement of the players.
Without this, the encounter is preempted:
Why should the factor of spontaneous involvement carry so much weight in

the organization of encounters? Some suggestions can be made. A
participant’s spontaneous involvement in the official focus of attention of an
encounter tells others what he is and what his intentions are, adding to the
security of the others in his presence. Further, shared spontaneous
involvement in a mutual activity often brings the sharers into some kind of
exclusive solidarity and permits them to express relatedness, psychic
closeness, and mutual respect; failure to participate with good heart can
therefore express rejection of those present or of the setting. Finally,
spontaneous involvement in the prescribed focus of attention confirms the
reality of the world prescribed by the transformation rules 15 and the unreality
of other potential worlds—and it is upon these confirmations that the stability
of immediate definitions of the situation depends.(Goffman 1961, 40)
A game is tested every time it is played. For the game not to
fail, it must create an imagined “world” (a community and its
technologies of experience), a world that is uniquely right and real for
its players for the duration of its play. This is as true for serious games
as it is for recreational and children’s games. In recreational games,
for example, the play normally reaches a point where the internal risk
of the game ends (when a predetermined score is met, a goal is
achieved, a time limit is accomplished) or else the game is
prematurely terminated when one or more players become weary or
bored (See also Peckham, 77). Either end brings back the tension of
other possible worlds, of other games and factors, such as the external
15 Goffman proposes that the boundary of the encounter does not actually shut off
all outside contexts, but rather permits selected aspects of outside worlds to
penetrate after these have been altered through “transformation rules” into game
roles and game pieces. “the barrier to externally realized properties was more like a
screen than like a solid wall, and we then came to see that the screen not only
selects but also transforms and modifies what is passed through it. Speaking more
strictly, we can think of inhibitory rules that tell participants that they must not
attend to and of facilitating rules that tell them what they may recognize.” (ibid, 33)
motivations that were suppressed during the play of the game. The
goalie returns to being your boss, and the other halfback your
assistant.
When a game ends, the arbitrariness of the rules and roles
determined by the game’s transformation rules becomes evident and
spontaneous involvement fails. Alternately, when these roles and rules
are seen as arbitrary, spontaneous involvement fails and the game
ends. Spontaneous involvement is predicated upon the attitude of the
player toward the motivation of the game. The player must voluntarily
enter into the game if his involvement is to achieve this spontaneous
quality. External influences need to be filtered and transformed in

such a way that the player becomes engrossed in the play of the game
for its expected duration, otherwise the game has failed.
Motivation
Motivation, as this applies to serious game theory, has one
primary distinguishing feature. It is either autotelic to the action, or
exotelic to it. A theory of autotelic and exotelic motivation has been
developed following the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi at the
University of Chicago (See: Csikszentmihalyi 1975, 1988).
Csikszentmihalyi’s theory makes a distinction between motivations
using the location of the motivation vis à vis the action that results
from the motivation. Autotelic actions are thus internally motivated
(and perceived as such by their participants), and, as we shall see,
voluntarily entered into. This theory dissolves the dichotomy between
play and work found in traditional theories of play such as those found
in Huizinga (1949) and Caillois (1958) and well summarized in Giddens
(1964). These latter theories held only that play, e.g. any “game,” as
opposed to work, was a completely bounded experience, the risks of
which had no effect outside the boundary of the game.
What Csikszentmihalyi (1975) argues is that play is simply any
activity that is internally motivated (hence autotelic). This means that
work (labor) can also be play to the extent that it provides internal
motivation16. The notion of play can thus be applied to a broad array
of actions, and, in fact, to action in general, for any action can be
either autotelic (i.e. play) or exotelic (what should we call this?),
according to the involvement of the individual, that is, to his
perception of the source of the motivation for the action.
Exotelic actions receive their motivation from without, that is,

from goals or sanctions external to the action. The organization of the
factory requires knowledges that are external to the worker, and thus
her motivation is not informed as to the real purpose of her labor. The
factory cannot rely upon her motivation (nor her knowledgeability) and
so it relies on the regulation of her actions. The worker/agent/player is
reduced to the laborer/functional-unit/pawn:
16 What Gorz (1990)—of course after Marx—notes is that factory labor so

alienates the worker from the results of labor that it cannot be knowledgeably
accepted by the worker as autotelic. “The important thing here is that the inert
materiality of the machinery (or the organization which imitates it) affords past
poiesis (dead labour or the organization) a lasting hold over the workers who, in
putting it to use, are forced to serve it. The greater the amount of fixed capital (that
is, of dead labour and dead knowledge) per work station, the more unyielding this
hold. ...‘dead labour’, ‘mind objectified’, comes between the worker and the product
and prevents work being lived as poiesis, as the sovereign action of Man on matter”
(Gorz 1990, 52). This, however, does not prevent an attempt by management to
“sell” labor as play. The worker must remember to forget his alienation for the
poiesis of work-that-is-play, and to regard “dead labor” as play. To the limit that
work is not play, the worker sacrifices his life to “dead labor.” The fiction of the
nobility of work obscures this sacrifice.
As it becomes more complex, the organization of specialized functions, for
the purpose of accomplishing a task which exceeds the comprehension of any
individual, is increasingly unable to rely on the agents’ own motivations for
accomplishing this task. Their favourable disposition, personal capacities and
goodwill are not enough. Their reliability will only be ensured by the formal
codification and regulation of their conduct, their duties and their
relationships. I term functional any conduct which is rationally programmed
to attain results beyond the agents’ comprehension, irrespective of their
intentions. Functionality is a type of rationality which comes from the
outside to the conduct determined and specified for the agent by the
organization in which she or he is subsumed. This conduct is the function
which the agent has to perform unquestioningly. The more it grows, the more
the organization tends to function like a machine. (Gorz 1989, 32)
Gorz’s explication of the term “functionality” (to describe exotelic
actions and organizations) represent a limit both for serious game
theory and for functionalist notions of society. Serious game theory is
centrally concerned with the autotelic actions of “players”.
Functionality describes the exotelic regulation of the actions of
“pawns”. Functionalist social theory (despite its universalist
pretensions) finds its limit in the description of functionality. Within
serious game theory, notions of functionality are useful mainly because
of the presence of pawns within games. Serious game theory also
allows for a further description of autotelic (e.g., embodied) action.
How the Game is Played
Autotelically motivated actions require certain ingredients or
conditions. Internal motivations (and knowledges) can be as diverse as

the actions that spawn them, what they have in common is the fact
that they are autotelic to the action. Only certain varieties of actions
create internal motivations: i.e., there are formal constraints on
games, constraints which the theory of serious games will describe:
“Common to all these forms of autotelic involvement is a matching of
personal skills against a range of physical or symbolic opportunities for
action that represent meaningful challenges to the individual”
(Csikszentmihalyi 1988, 181). And so, performance provides a
differential potential for autotelic motivation depending on the

opportunities for “meaningful challenges” to the participant, and also
depending on how the provided challenges match up with the
participant’s skills and expectations. Because of this differential, an
action, say participation in a collective ceremony, may be autotelic for
one individual and exotelic for his neighbor.
Autotelic motivation creates a particular form of experience.
This experience Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow,” a term derived from a
common element found in many descriptions of it17. According to him,
highly autotelic actions tend to reduce the participant’s awareness of
time and of self. Similarly, the above “encounters” described by
Erving Goffman create the “selective inattention” of concepts such as

time and self:
A visual and cognitive engrossment occurs, with an honest unawareness of
matters other than the activity; what Harry Stack Sullivan called ‘selective
inattention’ occurs, with an effortless dissociation from all other events,
distinguishing this type of unawareness both from suppression and
repression. (Goffman 1961, 38; after Sullivan)
With all this selective inattention, one might be led to suspect that
autotelic actions were confused, random behaviors. Quite the
contrary. These actions involve intense attention to a perceived set of
well defined concepts, rules, and behaviors. Activities such as rock
climbing and performing surgery—both of which have been described
as providing deep flow experiences—require intense attention to
immediate circumstances (Csikszentmihalyi 1975).
17According to Csikszentmihalyi, the greater the perceived risk, the wider the
symbolic arena of activity—up to the point where the individual feels preempted from
entering the activity because her personal skills cannot possibly meet the challenges
involved—the more profound the flow experience will be. Furthermore, flow is
apparently not entirely a quantitatively measurable experience: one experience of
an extremely “deep” flow nature is thus not equitable to several “shallow” flow
experiences. Deep flow, once experienced, is apparently extremely psychologically
addictive (1975, 138). He also adds that flow experiences organize experience in
evolutionarily important ways (1988, 15-35).
The Mask of Ideology
Many actions seem to be paradoxically autotelic and exotelic.
The paradox is real, for there is always a friction between these types
of motivation. For example, actions that are motivated by coercion
(and are by that exotelic) sometimes also offer the structures of
activity that create the potential for autotelic involvement. [The actual
structure of such an action is that of a sub-game (autotelically
motivated) within a larger game, where the individual is coerced by the
larger game into the performance of the sub-game. More about this
later.] The explanation is a psychological one. The individual actually
forgets (remembers to forget—the game is there to remind him to

remember to forget) the original coercion in favor of participation in
the event for the event’s own sake—just as though his participation
were originally autotelically motivated. Involuntariness gives way to
voluntary participation18. The notion of voluntariness is itself
problematized, since both a positive goal direction and a negative
punishment can be seen as forms of coercion. This describes a
primary effect of institutions that provide autotelic experiences for
ideological ends: these experiences mask other, exotelic factors.
A horrorific and extreme example of this comes from a study of
prisoners (and from his own experiences) in Nazi concentration camps
by Bruno Bettelheim. Bettelheim (1960) writes that the result of the
involvement of the prisoner in the event of his own imprisonment and
18 Weeden describes this process in terms of the formation of the engendered

subject: “The crucial point for the moment is that in taking on a subject position, the
individual assumes that she is the author of the ideology or discourse she is
speaking. She speaks or thinks as if she were in control of meaning. She ‘imagines’
that she is indeed the type of subject which humanism proposes—rational, unified,
the source rather than the effect of language. It is the imaginary quality of the
individual’s identification with a subject position which gives it so much psychological
and emotional force” (1987, 31)
torture, was “a personality structure willing and able to accept SS
values and behavior as its own.” (169 [reported in Giddens19, 126]).
What I call “risky games,” (See: below) are another example of the
psychological force of flow experiences. Such games are voluntary
from the start but they engender inherently serious risks to the
participants. From sadomasochism to sky diving, people put
themselves into potentially lethal contexts to create a deep experience
of flow.
Flow creating actions commonly include sequences of events
that: a) engender immediate challenges (risks); b) demand a level of
mental and/or physical participation; and c) reward this participation

with a corresponding level of flow. Thus the effort to meet the
challenges20 provided by the flow event is matched with an immediate
sense of pleasure/satisfaction. Such actions are performed and
19 Giddens (1979) discusses how this engrossment works in the behavior of a

mob, as an example of what he terms “critical situations.” Such situations are
distinguishable as radical disturbances of the “day-to-day life in routine settings”
(123). Following Freud, he points out that these situations trigger a regressive
reidentification with the event (and particularly with leaders in the event). This
regressive form of “object-affiliation” is highly ambivalent, however, as it can rapidly
swing from a positive (and serious) identification to negative (still serious) rejection
(127). Today’s Great Leader is tomorrow’s sacrificial lamb. He then notes that this
scenario is true not only for concentration camps and mobs, but for the
“psychological dynamics of social movements...” (ibid, emphasis in the original.)
Critical situations are thus not extraordinary in their organization, but simply more
pronounced in the contrasts of selective inattention they promote.
20The greater the perceived risk, the wider the symbolic arena of activity—up to the
point where the individual feels preempted from entering the activity because her
personal skills cannot possibly meet the challenges involved—the more profound the
flow experience will be. Furthermore, flow is apparently not entirely a quantitatively
measurable experience: one experience of an extremely “deep” flow nature is thus
not equitable to several “shallow” flow experiences. Deep flow, once experienced, is
apparently extremely psychologically addictive (Csikszentmihalyi 1975, 138).
repeated in order to achieve and renew this experience. Participation
is its own reward, and performance is the requirement.
Attitude
That such actions always prescribe what must be paid attention
to, and what must not be paid attention to brings us to the role of
attitude in serious game theory, and a major contribution that this
theory makes in articulating the processes of ideology. Attitude, as
this is mapped into the serious game theory, also makes one central
distinction: that of an attitude of seriousness, characterized by careful
attention, and that of triviality, characterized by careful inattention or

denial. Attention is itself a combination of attraction and avoidance;
that is, attention can be defined positively or negatively21.
Sanctions against a behavior or object create attention to its
avoidance. Sanctions are never explicitly applied to what is trivial. As
it is not taken seriously, the trivial cannot be acclaimed as a threat.
We will see, however, that failure to follow any of the games rules—
even by overt attention to triviality—can result in expulsion from the
game—but perhaps in a different manner than an expulsion because of
transgression of an announced sanction. It is perhaps the difference
between insanity and criminality, between the asylum and the prison,
which is a fine difference at that. Attention to the trivial is seen as an
aberrance, rather than a transgression.
A scheme of attitudes
21 Like the world of the trivial, the world of the negative-but-serious was long left
out of functional descriptions of cultures perhaps because of the notion that the
negative-but-serious aspects were actually parts of the individual’s psyche, rather
than fully part of public (sometimes less obviously so) actions. This refusal of
anthropology to admit psychology now seems quite arbitrary and short-sighted.
Games (serious and otherwise, and you can also read
“ideologies” here) demand that we pay attention to what is serious

(S1), and that we treat as serious what we are told to pay attention to
(S2) (note that these are not the same demands). Money and
patriotism are good examples. Money is serious, and as such it

demands our attention (S1). We are also told to be patriotic (S2)—to
pay attention, and to take patriotism seriously: no irony is allowed
among true patriots. Conversely, games demand that we do not pay

attention to what is trivial (T1), and that we treat as trivial what we are
told not to pay attention to (T2) (these are also two quite distinct
demands). The game is stabilized because it offers a maximal flow

experience for those players who voluntarily follow its demands, who
become engrossed in the game and lose whatever external
perspective that might deflect their correct attitude.
Given the basic demands of the game there are four main
attitudinal stances a participant might have toward the serious aspects
of a game: they can be pakka players, those who follow all the rules
(+S1,+S2); dilettantes, who play the game, but not “seriously” (+S1,-
S2); dissidents, who play the game against itself (-S1,+S2); and the
avant garde, who deny the game, but still play by its rules (-S1,-S2)22.
There are also four more stances, based upon the attitudes toward the
trivial aspects of the games demands: (+T1,+T2; -T1,+T2; +T1,-T2; -T1,-
22 These fit rather well into Calinescu’s discussion of modernism. The pakka players
are the modernists, convinced that they control the future; the dilettantes are into
decadence (an attitude that requires the absence of attention to the boundaries
between the serious and the trivial); the dissidents are doing kitch and camp (turning
the trivial into the serious and vice versa); and the avant garde is out there
pretending to lead the course of social change, while playing the same game as the
modernists. Of course, the post modernists are opting out of the game altogether, a
stance that looks from various perspectives as any one of the three non-pakka
stances.
T2). These, we might call respectively the trivial stances of the pakka
player, the skeptic, the deviant, and the clown. Because they take
place in the realm of the trivial, these stances have escaped much
notice and differentiation. For example, studies of culture have
generally not probed the areas of denial that the culture demands.
These are the various marginal positions heretofore relegated to
footnoted descriptions of deviance and farce. The potential for the
world of the trivial—the locus of resistance to the serious game—to
affect the world of the serious has not been sufficiently explored.
Serious game theory brings this dynamic to the fore (and it will be
further explored below).

When combined with the first four attitudinal stances, attitudes
toward the trivial describe a fairly complex range of possible attitudes
toward any aspect of any possible game. There are thus sixteen basic
stances that an individual might have toward a whole game. It should
be noted that to be a “player” in the pakka sense is only one23 of these
sixteen. This attitude, which I call an attitude of “orthoposture” is also
a factor in the successful completion of the current game encounter,
and in the player’s ability to enter future similar encounters. The
orthopostural attitude is that of spontaneous involvement directed as
what is serious for the game, and an equal neglect of what is trivial
within the game. The central task of ideology is to guarantee the
orthopostural attitude of all its players.
Players, Pawns, and Strangers
23All other psychological stances are dangerous to the completion of current game
event, or to conservation of the current game rules. The most dangerous player of
all is the “avant garde clown.” (These are also the players most likely to be fitted for
straight jackets.)
A player, as Goffman uses the term does not include everyone
physically within the game space (1961, 36). There is another, more
general level of participation open to individuals, that of participant. A
player is a participant who is empowered by the rules of the game to
make plays. (A play is any action that effects the state of the game.)
In the game of chess there are two players who make plays using
pieces on a board.
In order to be empowered as a player, a participant must be
chosen to fill a required game role, and must enter this role with that
attitude of voluntary and spontaneous involvement that was described
above. Because of this, an individual can be a player in only one game

at any time. This is quite important, since (as will be presented below)
some games have hierarchical levels of sub-games. A player in a sub-
game is never simultaneously a player in the larger game.
There are two types of non-player individuals who might also be
within the localized game space, and which I will term the pawn and
the stranger. A pawn, as the term suggests, is really nothing more
than a participant that fills the role of a piece of equipment—a part of
the context—in the play of the game. If this brings to mind regal
levantine chess games where servants are dressed as pieces and
ordered about on a courtyard-sized board, then the notion has been
correctly understood. A stranger is someone who is not involved in the
play of the game, but who finds or puts himself within the physical
context of the game. As a rule, strangers bring dangers, as they tend
to distract players by their unaware, inappropriate behavior or by
suggestions for alternate games.
Since their role is to create the action of the game, players are
vitally important for the success of the game. A game fails mainly
when its players lose their spontaneous involvement in its play.

Certainly, problems with the context of the action, including mistakes
by pawns and distractions of strangers can contribute to a “dis-
engrossment” of the players and the premature end of the current
game event. In the end it is still the role of the players to determine
whether the game will continue to its normative closure. Even the
premature death of players, while this might end the current event,
would not prevent the next occurrence of the game from selecting a
new set of players.
It should also be noted that only the players experience the
euphoria/flow of the game. A corollary to this is that players in sub-
games experience a lower level of flow than players in the main

game24. One possible outcome of this corollary is that players in lower-
level games (who are thus pawns in the higher level games) should be
susceptible to invitations of other, higher-level games that offer deeper
flow opportunities. An example of this is perhaps the lure of the drug
“culture,” or the inducements of religions that promise more attractive

afterlives.
Pawns require no prescribed attitudinal involvement (they
provide docile bodies that serve a functional role), and can be pawns
at different games at the same time. In fact, a player at a sub-game is
simultaneously at most a pawn in the larger game. For example, the
ticket-holding audience of a sporting event are pawns in that they are
allowed into the context of the event only when they agree to a non-
player role. They are not necessarily strangers, however, because
they agree to follow certain rule-governed behaviors, but they are also
not players since they are not empowered to make plays25. As long as
24 For example, players in an “audience game” experience a lower level of flow than
do players in the game being viewed.
25 An audience might (and perhaps usually do) constitute a sub-game of the main
game. As such, individual members of the audience are players in this game, and
pawns can be made to follow the directions of the players, by coercion
if not reward, then they are adequate to their role.
Strangers are essentially non-participants, with no role to fill,
although they may be potential participants in later game activities. A
pawn that abandons his role and is replaced might become a stranger.
Other strangers may actually be players or pawns in other games, the
boundaries of which are intruding into the context of this game. They
may, therefore, not be innocent strangers, but instead, agents of a
foreign game. The anthropologist filming a Trobriand Island rite of
passage is a stranger not to be ignored.
Games and social control
The notion of games with sub-games has interesting extensions
in the ideological characterization of societies. However, a few
preliminary observations are all that can be included in the space of
this paper: Players will prefer to play at higher levels, because the
potential for flow is higher there, yet it seems that games prefer to
limit the number of players as a strategy to maximize the realizable
resources-per-player, and to reduce indeterminacy in the play of the
game. Remembering that players in a sub-game are at most pawns in
the higher-level game, the higher level games might appear to have a
small number of players and many pawns. Higher level games tend to
restrict access to themselves, and to promote, instead, varieties of
long-duration sub-games. Since any game can potentially engross its
players’ attention, these sub-games are potentially effective in
distracting the attention of pawns who might otherwise disrupt the
higher-level game.
yet still only pawns in the main game. In this sub game, ushers may be pawns and
first-time viewers may still be strangers.
Externally, this brings up the observation that most of the people
are sacrificing potentially deeper flow experiences in favor of long-term
lower level flow games. Radical changes in game states might
succeed by offering higher levels of flow to more participants. But the
dynamic within the stable periods of a ruling game is for that game to
optimize the flow experiences and the realizable resources for its
players, while promoting other, sub-games to keep its pawns in line.
This dynamic between levels of games provides a perspective on
various aspects of ideological social control. The active presence of
levels of games (always in the plural), informs the creation of game
places. In Foucault’s notion of the “panopticon” the place of the

prisoner (metonymic for the citizen) exhibits the visible/invisible
boundaries that separate the larger game from its sub-game:
...power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will

constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from
which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether
he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may
always be so. In order to make the presence or absence of the inspector
unverifiable, so that the prisoners, in their cells, cannot even see a shadow,
Bentham envisaged not only venetian blinds on the windows of the central
observation hall, but, on the inside, partitions that intersected the hall at right
angles and, in order to pass from one quarter to the other, not doors but zig-
zag openings; for the slightest noise, a gleam of light, a brightness in a half-
opened door would betray the presence of the guardian. (201)
The effects of this imbalance of knowledge (and power) while
seemingly total and unrelenting, are also liable to resistance, as long
as there are places where such resistance can be discursively
organized—as long as the panopticon has its own blind spots. The first
step in resistance is always a will to knowledge, not the knowledge of
the guardian’s presence, but of his desires and his game.
Nation/states support state nationalism as a sub-game, the larger
game remains hidden beyond the ken of prisoner/citizen.
Ken and the rim of an activity

Nation spaces and sacred spaces (hierogenous zones) are places
a part (call it a one rim) of which is placed necessarily beyond the
ken26 of the pawn. These places share an essential structural feature
with confidence games and practical jokes: they frame (to use
Goffman’s term) activities that are fabricated in such a fashion as to
limit the ken of the person subjected to (thus the subject of) the joke,
or the con, or the nation, or the sacred. This means that the actual
boundary of the game—a perspective of which is normally assumed to
be included within the subject’s ken—is in this case controlled so as to
be beyond the subject’s ken. Such activities can succeed only by
hiding both certain contents of knowledge (thereby suppressing doubt

in the subject), and by hiding the fact that there is actually a broader
frame to the activity (thereby suppressing suspicion)27.
A sub-game then is a fabrication of the larger game in which the
players of the sub-game are led to believe that they are players in the
larger game. Nationalism is used by members of an interest group to
promote a broad “imagined community” (Anderson 1983) that would
support the social/economic advantages of the interest group.
26Goffman’s use of “ken” implies several related meanings: “1. Perception,

understanding. 2.a. Range of vision. b. view, sight.” The American Heritage
Dictionary of the English Language, 1970. In its spatial role, ken more directly refers
to a range of vision available to a subject of an activity.
27 The minor suppression of doubt and suspicion is more or less implicated in the
maintenance of places generally, simply as an entrance requirement of the activity
that sustains the place. The “mystique” or reputation of any place is liable to doubt
and suspicion. The suppression of doubt and suspicion are, however, central
activities for those places that purport to be national (or hierogenous). The national
place succeeds through a necessary deception. This is accomplished not only
through the alibi of myth, but also through the confidence of rituals which mask their
own arbitrariness through overcoding. Apart from myth and ritual, there are also
other economies involved which help control attitudes and desires.
Nationalism may thus be described as a serious game (in the form of
the nation/state it is the ruling serious game) played by key members
of an interest group. This game includes a wider population of pawns
(members of the imagined community) who identify themselves as
members of this imagined community. The pawns are provided with a
sub-game which creates an autotelic motivation for its own
continuation: the pawns in the larger game are players in this sub-
game, but they are told that this is “the only game in town,” so to
speak. The existence of the larger game is kept a secret, together with
the means to join into the interest group cadre (the players in the
larger game) which enjoys the autotelic (and social/economic) rewards

for their voluntary participation in the larger game.
Obviously, national or sacred games and con games have
features that allow us to distinguish between these activities.
However, one shared feature of these fabricated experiences that they
are normally passed off as unfabricated. The true panoptic
mechanisms are both pervasive and invisible—the subject28 is her own
guardian. But as pawn, she is never the player, for the guardian is
himself a pawn, a function of the machinery. It is in the remembering
to forget that subjugation to the nation is made voluntary, and that
patriotism is substituted for humanity.

28 To endure, fabricated experience must avoid the penetrating gaze of the
subject—and now the reflective gaze of the social scientist. What Foucault (and
Wittgenstein, and Bourdieu, and Goffman, etc.) tell us is that all experience is
fabricated. It is not some reality that is beyond our reach, but rather the rim of our
own experience that escapes us, and is then naturalized as “what qualifies as
reality”. If we are to acquire a ken that no longer admits fabricated experience (if we
are to realize this most modern of mental states, and here Habermas is quite on the
mark), we might also wish to determine whether it is possible to simulate/stimulate
engrossment in activities within an aware and reflexive discourse. Otherwise we will
have succeeded only in removing the body entirely from the structuration of social
experience.
In examining the construction and maintenance of a national
place, we might ask the question: “How is suspicion suppressed?”
Why is this place deemed authentic, and another one a fake? What is
important is to figure out how communities determine “real” national
places from “fake” ones. To understand the circumstances under
which we think things are real, we should look also to those
circumstances which are deemed unreal. This type of hetero-postural
attitude is quite unacceptable for the game. In order to ask these
questions we must accept the role of the stranger, of the player of a
foreign game. And we must accept our part in the disruption of the
ruling serious game. But before we even ask how they succeed in
suppressing suspicion, we must ask “Who are the players?”
The role of the player
The actions of players determine the play of the game, and this
determines whether the game will achieve its normative duration and
whether or not it will be played subsequently. The game is thus highly
dependent on the performances of its players (as it is on the
functioning of its pawns but for other reasons). These performances
are in turn dependent on levels of skills and knowledge—on the ability
to approach the challenges of the game without becoming bored or
discouraged. All games, but most particularly serious games, restrict
the role of “playership” to individuals who have possess certain
predesignated qualifications29 (Goffman 1961, 31).

29 While the player might lose his sense of self during the play, his extra-game
identity is a factor in his being chosen to enter this state. In this, the game both
reinforces and abolishes social identity. This accounts, in some part, for the notion of
“communitas” (Turner 1969) found in many games, such as Ndembu festivals. The
contrast between status/role relationships in one game, and those of another, may
be extreme to the point of an actual reversal of roles and status. According to
serious game theory, the optimal flow experience would require that the participants
selectively un-attend to external roles. However, on a non-conscious and most
In order to locate the actual players of the game, one might start
by asking: “Who’s having the most fun here?” Unfortunately, it is not
that simple. As Gorz notes, economic reason has colonized the life
world to such an extent that nobody’s having much fun these days.
Instead, one might ask, “Who’s getting rich here?” There is a certain
correlation between wealth and the level of serious game at which one
can/is playing (cf. Bourdieu 1984). But wealth is a clumsy signal here
—better indicators are found in the notions of “risk” and “desire”. Who
is risking what, and how are desires created and sated... these
questions lead to the serious game player.
From games we play to games that play us
What do we know so far about serious game theory? 1.) Players
enter the game through a voluntary, spontaneous involvement. 2.)
With an orthopostural attitude players are able to accept the foci of
attention and inattention that the game’s transformation rules require.
So they take as serious what the game tells them is serious, and they
take as trivial what the game tells them is trivial. In return, the game
is able to reduce the tension between its rules and those of other
possible games. 3.) The game becomes uniquely true for its players,
and provides them with autotelic, euphoric/flow experiences, which
reward them for participating and help keep them focused on those
serious aspects of the game for its duration. 4.) All of the necessary
resources for the game are localized within the game’s boundaries.
In short, a game—virtually any game—creates an imagined
world. The game provides all the ingredients, the resources, rules,
histories, challenges, and players needed to complete its expected
duration within a self-defined time and space, a world of its own
making which systematically neglects alternative worlds.

The nation game is good example:
Finally, it [the nation] is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the

actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is
always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this
fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many
millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited
imaginings.
These deaths bring us abruptly face to face with the central problem posed by
nationalism: what makes the shrunken imaginings of recent history (scarcely
more than two centuries) generate such colossal sacrifices? I believe that the
beginnings of an answer lie in the cultural roots of nationalism.
(Anderson, 9)
That the game is such a “limited imagining” and still able to command
the desires and attitudes of its players is the central question at hand.
There are, of course, differences between creating an entire

“nation” and creating a recreational game (such as, say, basketball),
but these differences are all within a typology of possible games,
rather than between something “serious-and-a-non-game” and
something “non-serious-and-a-game.” Games are quite enough.
Between the trivial game and the inherently serious30 game there is
only a distance of attitude and of scope. As will be shown below this
distance can be crossed and even reversed with astonishing quickness.
In any game, the world created by this game is continually tested
in the process of playing it. If the game does not play, if the action (in
either its conceptual or performative aspects) fails, the player(s) may
cease to voluntarily continue his/her/their role(s) and the game may
30 All games are internally equally “serious” about the rules and the contents of
their world. This is an important concept to remember, as it will be potentially
confused with the other notion—that of inherently serious games. Games are
inherently serious when they encompass risks that endanger the player’s existence
or status. This latter seriousness is the type of seriousness that is meant by the
notion of a “serious game.” The notion of a serious game is not simply the rather
obvious notion of playing a non-serious game for life-threatening stakes. Instead of
this “playing chess (or checkers, or tic-tac-toe) with death” sense, the notion of a
serious game is one where the game encompasses “real-world” social interactions,
such as political or religious events.
end prematurely. In any game, from tiddly-winks to thermo-nuclear
war, action is determined first by the selection of players, by their
motivations, attitudes, and then by their play of the game.
The nation is necessarily a game as it must select and attract its
“players” into its self-defined boundaries, where, by selective
inattention, they are able to become engrossed in their nationalism
and to identify themselves (regressively, if you are a Freudian, but in
any case voluntarily at some level) with the roles their nation
establishes for them and through this engrossment and the lack of
tension, they achieve a euphoria, an experience of flow that makes the
world “worthwhile” of itself.
Maps of desire
From here it remains to look at some “real world” activities and
see what the serious game theory does with them, and if this can be
taken seriously. Let’s begin again with Goffman, who, citing the work
of Max Weber, proposed that his theory of encounters (part of what I
call “games”) might well be expanded into “serious areas of life”:
Just as properties of the material context are held at bay and not
allowed to penetrate the mutual activity of the encounter, so also certain
properties of the participants will be treated as if they were not present.
..[the] effort to treat sociability as a type of ‘mere’ play, sharply cut off from
the entanglements of serious life, may be partly responsible for sociologists
having failed to identify the rules of irreverence in sociability with similar
rules in serious areas of life. A good example of these rules in the latter areas
is found in the impersonal calculable aspects of Western bureaucratic
administration. Here, Weber supplies an obvious text, providing only that...
we accept as a tendency what is stated as fact: ‘The “objective” discharge of
business primarily means a discharge of business according to calculable
rules and “without regard for persons.” ’[Weber, 1946, p.215, stress in the
original.](Goffman 1961, 20-21)
The processes of socialization belong to long duration games
that use rules to describe and enforce selective inattention, particularly
in its use of discipline on affective display (ibid, 25). Every social
encounter includes demands on the attention of its participants, now-

familiar demands concerning what is to be considered seriously and
what is to be considered as trivial—that is, not to be considered at all.
The notion that some games are inherently serious, should not
be confused with any notion that a game might provide access to
“universal truths.” Games that control the survival needs of
individuals, that include the resources necessary for these needs
within their own realized resources, are inherently serious because the
risks that they engender, the challenges they provide, coincide with
the process of psychobiological survival of these individuals. It is
possible to classify games according to the overlap between their
boundaries (and also their localized resources) and those of the needs,
desires, and obsessions of their participants.
Various configurations of human needs have been advanced, one
of these is found in A. H. Maslow (1954). He presented a hierarchy of
need levels. This type of scheme, however, allows that “primitive”
societies are still grappling with lower level needs, while more
“modern” societies have met these and are facing the higher level
needs. The notion of a hierarchy is perhaps not a useful one, however,
the schema of four types of needs—biological, safety, group, and ego—
seem fairly comprehensive. In serious game theory, these form the
area where inherently serious games are found (See: Figure 1,
preceding the bibliography).
Inside the area of survival need there are two more areas: the
area of desire, and that of obsession. In these areas, the material
requirements of the survival need area are transformed by other
technologies of experience into harmless or harmful “playthings”. The
preparation of food required for survival is transformed into the art of
cuisine in the area of desire, and eating into an obsessive game by
gluttony as well as by abstinence or anorexia. A similar process occurs

with sex. Copulation for reproduction becomes recreational sex in the
area of desire, or an obsession in the games of nymphomaniacs or
celibates. Sex is overlaid with an economy of desire, with a sexuality
(cf. Foucault 1990).
The area of desire is where trivial games are played. The
failure of a trivial game has no effect on the survival needs of the
individual, but rather on the immediate consumption of desire. The
area of obsession is that area where trivial games become risky
again. In this area, both failure and prolonged success may present a
risk to the psychobiological status of the individual. The area of need
is normally defined and bounded by the ruling serious game. It forms

the outer boundary of this game. All games external to this are
considered trivial unless they overlap this boundary. The boundaries
between needs and desires and obsessions are also determined by this
game. (See: figure 2, preceding the bibliography). The determination
of what constitutes a need vis à vis a desire vis à vis an obsession
varies between ruling serious games.
When a serious game overlaps a basic human need, it still
creates its own common-sense rules about this need. Needs, even the
most basic ones, are defined arbitrarily within the game. A well-
documented example for this is the creation of rules about foods:
rules that tell not only what can and cannot be eaten safely, but what
types of nourishment are important, and how food resources are to be
handled to assure continuing supplies. While an argument can be
made that certain substances (cotton balls, say, or gravel) offer no
possible nourishment even though they might be consumable, the
range of cuisines, each with its own prescribed foods, around the
planet is quite remarkable31.

31 Again it is not the purpose of serious game theory to determine a complete
classification of possible ruling serious games. What the serious game theory
The idea here is that even when a serious game controls one or
more basic human need(s), it arbitrarily defines—within some rather
broad psychobiologically based parameters—that need for its players
and it backs this up with types of internal legitimation that have
previously been called ideological or religious or simply mythological.
What is more difficult for a game to determine and control are the risks
involved in participation.
Risk and performance
The perception of risk is an integral factor in all games. Since
games must provide a suitable challenge in order to generate the

experience of flow, every performance involves risk. Risk is a dynamic
property of games, since it responds to the skills of the participants,
and to their history of performance. For example a long game must
provide challenges over the lifespan of the player, while short games
must be able to match improved skill levels with greater challenges.
The primary notion of risk in the theory of serious games equates risk
to the challenge provided by the performance.
A corollary to this notion is that of ritual as action in the
performance that controls risk (See: Staal). Certain non-risky actions
in the performance must happen so that other, risky actions can occur.
This thread of non-risky action extends from the starting ceremony to
the normative end of the game. It represents the fixed context that
the technologies of experience have determined is necessary to
support the challenge of the performance. In a basketball game, these
rituals include (not exclusively) the arrangement of the court, the
properties of the ball, the keeping of the time, and the notion of a
“foul.” Games protect their boundaries by ritualizing actions that
might threaten these. In serious game theory, ritual represents action

designed to reduce risk. The rituals of the state are enforced primarily
to reduce the risk to the ruling serious game—not the risk to its pawns
or even its players.
Of course, the reduction of risk at the level of the game cannot
fully reduce risks to the game itself, to its completion and renewal.
There is a “meta-risk” that even ritual cannot preempt. As Sophia
Morgan pointed out:
Barbara Myerhoff has argued that rituals are paradoxical: ‘because they are
conspicuously artificial and theatrical yet designed to suggest the
inevitability and absolute truth of their messages. {They are} dangerous
because when we are not convinced by a ritual, we may become aware of
ourselves as having made them up, thence on to the paralyzing realization
that we have made up all our truths.’ [Myerhoff, 1979, p.86] To exorcise the
danger and the paradox, ritual on the one hand anchors itself in tradition, and
on the other hand minimizes as much as possible the perceptual, cognitive or
emotional distance between the participant and the text reenacted. It can
neither articulate the arbitrariness of the text nor allow any disturbance of the
participant’s immersion in it. For this reason, no matter how great the
uncertainties, fears or hesitations of the shaman or initiate, there is one
existential moment that cannot be contained in ritual: the moment—a
common topos in literature—at which the hero stops to ask ‘What shall I say
now? What is my text? What is the next step of this journey?’ Even if such
a moment were ever to appear in ritual, by virtue of its necessarily being a
ritual moment its function could only be to affirm the efficacy of the
text...Thus, even though ritual is a privileged space of liminality, there is one
type of liminal mixing and mingling that it can neither warrant nor perform
without destroying itself—that categorical trespassing in which the work
becomes the object of its own discourse, and which is the space proper of
literature (Morgan 1984, 81).
A game forces the proper attitude of attention on its participants and

rewards this with the promise of flow experiences. Yet the game is
thereby vulnerable to changes in attitude. The most serious ruling
serious game is undone when its players cease to take it seriously.

Nations, Places, and Ruling Serious Games III—1
“Before its birth, the Nation is present as a

superego voice charging the Convention with
the task of giving birth to it. Lefort is quite
justified in designating this condition by the term
“fantasy”.” (Zizek, 1991, 262)
“What made the new Soviet situation so easy to

miss was the phenomenon of double
bookkeeping characteristic of authoritarian
regimes: the same people would be the loyal
servants of Brezhnev’s “stagnation” in their
public lives and increasingly deviant in their
private lives. ”(Hoffman, 18)
“Students started it. Small groups of them had

been active for at least a year before. They
edited faculty magazines. They organized
discussion clubs. They worked on the borderline
between official and unofficial life. Many had
contact with the opposition, all read
samizdat...But they also worked through the
official youth organization, the SSM.” (Ash, 42)
Part Three:
In the realm of the Trivial
Trivium redux
This is a story of the twin (triplets actually, since the serious
realm has a double nature) worlds that determine the course of human
thought and action. Every game, it seems, creates not just one world,
but three. The boundaries between these worlds are as fluid as
attitudes, and just as certain. As attitude is also the barrier between
belief and skepticism, commitment and apathy, so attitude also
determines our stance toward the triple worlds engendered by serious
games. Such attitudinal boundaries are drawn and redrawn during the
course of each of our lives.
The world of the trivial exists within every game, invisible to the
serious discourse of that game because its profound neglect is a basic
part of that discourse. Yet inside inflatable shoes of the part-time
campus (office, sidewalk...) clown wiggle the same toes that can also
press the pedals of power. A preliminary result of serious game theory
is a validation, or even a valorization, of the trivial, of the mostly
unwritten world of the contra-serious.
On its part, society tells us what to take seriously. By this it also
tells us what to neglect. What is neglected on the level of the serious
is invariably pursued on the level of the trivial. It is here, where the
socio-cultural structures need not be followed, where all the rules are
subject to modification, that culture reinvents itself.
In the world of the trivial all socio-cultural changes, great or
small, have their unrecorded beginnings. Curious theories that were
bandied around over drinks, utopian novels read on vacations, video

poetics and marginal art: The trivial escapes by definition the ruling
discourse. That is its power. Here is where the unplotted future
creates its own history, writes its myths. Subversion, progress,
decline: the changes that force great religions into hasty conclaves
and governments into exile belong first to those games that people
enter without notice, without risk.
The irony is that the ruling serious game creates a world of the
trivial by its rules of systematic neglect (by denying attention to this
world). Out of this world will come new games to challenge the ruling
game. The study of this process is, however, made problematical by a
gross imbalance of evidence. The ruling serious game controls the
serious discourse of the society (what gets written down or
remembered), defining itself, reinventing its history, and
systematically neglecting various ideas and actions which then
constitute, in a mostly ad hoc manner, the world of the trivial.
In the course of a change from one serious game to another,
aspects of the previous serious game become trivialized, and these
quickly drop out of the ruling discourse, to be replaced by other

aspects that were formerly trivial, and which occur in the discourse
almost as revelations, astonishingly important, carrying their new-
found seriousness on their sleeve. Often the new serious game
contains dramatic reversals, rituals and meanings turned upside down.
The question is then begged: how can people change so radically?
How can they live with such inconsistency? Without being facetious,
the answer is, of course, they just do not take the change seriously.
Visible rapid, radical change in a serious game is not what it
looks like from the outside at the level of the serious discourse. The
changes at this level can appear to be extremely abrupt, but the
evidence of this change at the serious game level is actually preceded

by a longer period in which a number of potential changes have
matured on the trivial level and, simultaneously, in which a number of
the players of the game have ceased to play certain parts of the game
as serious. This internal breakdown not only precedes but precipitates
the eventual change, as the game cannot proceed for long without
controlling those aspects that it describes as serious.
Change in any serious game is thus a stocastically organized
(that is disorganized) threshold event in which neither the threshold
nor the outcome can be predicted. After the event, the new serious
state is quickly reinforced by a new myth/history, and the abrogated,
now-trivial, aspects of the game disappear from the ruling discourse.
(The inflatable shoe is now on the other foot, so to speak.) The result
is, from the outside, a sometimes radical disruption in the game
state32. From the inside, however, as new myths quickly and
32 The question can arise as to whether there is, in fact, a new game. I will propose
that any change that substitutes a new serious aspect for an old creates a new game.
Thus the discussion will be one of changes between games, rather than between
stages of games. Stages might connote some logical progression between games,
when there is only the unpredictable disjunction between what was and has
seamlessly harden around the new serious aspects, the changes are
mostly imperceptible to those who still (figuratively or literally) keep
their heads. Continuity is reestablished, and, where the old game
cannot be banished to the world of the trivial, it is displayed in
pageants or in museums as a nostalgic curiosity.
The Trialectic
The process of cultural change—now recognized as a disjunction
in game states—cannot be characterized as a positivist, Hegelian or
Marxist (or even hermeneutical, in Gadamer’s spiral notion) dialectic,
but a tension between serious and trivial games: most interestingly,

between serious games taken trivially and trivial games taken
seriously33. For this reason, I will disambiguate this process from that
of dialectic by coining a new term: “trialectic.”
A trialectic is a process whereby any serious game is abandoned
in favor of another serious game. This process requires the positing of
two levels of participation, the serious level and trivial level. The
governing process of the trialectic is not that of one serious game
(thesis/tradition) confronted by another serious game
(antithesis/avant-garde) resulting in a third serious game

disappeared from the ruling discourse, and what is now, and seems to be embedded
in history and myth within the ruling discourse. All games are new games. As was
discussed above, however, games that occupy the serious need-space of human
action tend to appear perennial, in that they must answer needs determined by
psychobiological entities, humans; needs that have not themselves changed—
although their definitions might have—much in the last several thousand years.
33 Without undo prolixity, it might be worth repeating that all games are serious
internally. When a trivial game is played, it presents itself as serious and demands
the same spontaneous engrossment and rules of irrelevance as inherently serious
games. Since an individual can only be a player in one game at a time, he must
abandon, temporarily, his role in the serious game in order to play the trivial game.
The king that plays hop-scotch with his daughter is at that moment performatively a
hop-scotch player and not a king.
(synthesis/revolution), but rather the resonance between a serious
game—with both traditional and avant garde components—and any
number of trivial games that it engenders, which eventually coalesce
into a new serious game or games, one of which will supersede the
original serious game. Old games are thus never defeated as much as
they are abandoned. They cease to be taken seriously34.
This subversion of the serious by the trivial is categorically
paradoxical. Thus the trialectic can only fail in providing a systematic
explanation of the processes involved. Because this failure is
guaranteed by the object of study (socio-cultural forms and processes),
the trialectic still succeeds in providing an understanding of the object.

That this understanding falls short of systematicity35 means simply
that it will not attempt to provide system where this is not evidenced.
Where a game is subject to change, however, the process of the
trialectic comes to the fore, and explanation must give way to paradox
and irony. Here is where understanding does not lead to explanation,
but rather to a simple awareness and perhaps to wonder, or maybe
laughter.
Because the ground of change is continuous and contiguous with
any game—all games change—the trialectic must be seen as a
necessary aspect of the game (particularly on its defenses and
reactions against change), and thus a necessary component of any
game study. In fact, many (maybe most) of the systemizing features
34 Games of change internally, of course, and these changes generally reflect an

awareness of the trivial, of the possibilities being created outside the realm of the
serious. Reform may preempt the trialectic process, or merely delay this.
35 There is plenty of systematicity in the organization of serious games. Here is
where descriptions of functions and structures come into play, and where
phenomenology and hermeneutics are of value. Descriptions of games as they are
constituted and interpreted are equally as important for the study of serious games
as they were for world views, religions, etc.
of serious games—particularly their over-coded ritual or mythological
contents—are needed only as strategies against the trialectic
processes of change. (The recourses to systematic ritualization, the
over-coding of legitimacy, may be primarily defences against the
trialectic.) For this reason it makes little sense for any description of a
serious game to exclude the trialectic simply because it falls outside
the domain of the methods of systematic explanation (i.e. to attempt a
description of a serious game within the limits of reason alone), or,
conversely, to attempt to systemize the trialectic. The trialectic
process disappears under either method.
“Only a Game...”
There are many types of objections to serious game theory.
These include (not exclusively): the objection that this theory
“reduces” objective truth to culturally mediated “truth”—to alibi (let’s
call this is the theological objection); the objection that this theory is
too “powerful,” since it admittedly creates a level of perception not
available to members of the nations and societies it describes (this is
the social-empirical objection); the objection that this theory reduces
the agencies and institutions of society to a level of games (the “mere”
game objection); and, the objection that this theory denies any praxis
for positive cultural change (the petulant avant garde objection). Like
a good theory, this one has its own defenses.
To the first objection, it is noted that “objective truth” has not
yet been verified and can no longer be taken seriously (the theory uses
its own weapons here) as a basis for inquiry. The theory welcomes all
efforts to establish that an objective universal truth does exist (futile
games have long been played) but it resists the notion that previous or
current ruling serious games are based on such adamantine ground.

There is, for this theory at this time, no absolute or universal ground at
all, only the arbitrary grounding of those notions that the game
determines are serious by means of writing its own myth and history.
Against the notion that it is too “powerful” the theory notes that,
just as phonology requires the positing of a phonetic level unavailable
to speakers of the language (and yet none the less undeniable as a
tool for inquiry into phonology, so too semiology requires the positing
of a “semetic” [semEEtik] level in order to approach the organization of
meanings. This is quite in line with current semiotic theories (cf.
Barthes, Lakoff and Johnson). The fact that speakers of a language
cannot normally explain how their language works (but are curiously
adept at its use) has not stopped linguistics from seeking such an
explanation. Furthermore, that the game of serious game theory
grants itself a privileged position is both acknowledged and hedged.
The hedge is this: serious game theory is only relatively privileged, in
that it provides a level of awareness (not approaching explanation)
over the trialectic processes of other games. It is unable to do this for
itself, however, and awaits with trepidation the time when some
unremarkable undergraduate at some unremarkable university will spit
out the notion at a department seminar that will lead to a new game
theory.
To the objection that this theory also reduces very serious
actions and contexts to the “level of games” is met by an expanded
notion of the word “game” which encompasses more “serious” actions
on battlefields or in corporate board rooms as well as the “trivial”
actions on ballfields or in cruiseship card rooms. Serious game theory
provides a unified theory of human action without postulating an a
priori privilege for either “trivial” (e.g. festival) events or “serious” (e.g.
“real-world”) events. Within certain bounds what is then serious or

trivial is totally determined by the game itself. There is no a priori
absolute or universal measure of seriousness, or truth, as this is
commonly described. There are only differentially successful lies
about what is serious and what is not.
Finally, to the petulant avant garde (cf. Calinescu, Jameson,
Habermas 1981), who look to influence the trialectic through radical
thought and action at the serious level, serious game theory does,
indeed, offer little comfort. The notion that rational action has little to
do with the overall trend of cultural change does strike directly at the
strategies of the avant garde (however, this has nothing to do with
reasonability as a metaphorical construct that has had profound

influence over the types of new games that have been created in the
last five hundred years).
Serious game theory suggests that real subversion takes place
on the level of the trivial, that social change occurs when those
aspects of society that society takes seriously (its myths) are subject to
the trialectic process—a process that has no overt leaders or followers
and no defensible agenda, no counter-culture, no planned covert
actions. And so, a particular culture change cannot be orchestrated,
the trialectic process cannot be aimed at anything specifically; the
trialectic process of cultural change can, however, be generally
nourished by encouraging the venues where trivial actions take place,
where farce and fantasy are encouraged. Amateur theatres, dark
cafés, underground presses, rock and roll concerts, back alleyways,
pirate radio stations, street festivals, costume parties, dorm rooms,
circus side shows, church socials, office parties, universities (ideally):
wherever people meet, and whatever they do and communicate
outside the panoptic scope of the ruling serious game, will feed the
trialectic process. Conversely, the threat of trialectic change is best

preempted by controlling these same venues, by colonizing the world
of the trivial. In short, if the revolution is to come (and who knows
where this will take us) the coffee shop must be recaptured from the
avant garde, who take it all too seriously, and preserved as a
sanctuary for the trivial.
By proposing this indeterminacy, the theory of serious games
comes up against a dilemma it cannot escape: it proffers a
performative aspect of social action that cannot be reduced to this
society’s conceptual aspect. In fact, performance cannot be properly
conceptualized at all; there is no transcendent perspective on it. The
depths of thick description lead us rapidly away from rational

descriptions into darkly poetic limit at the edge of language, or, as
Bataille might argue, beyond. Is there a reliable method that can
transpose this type of performance into descriptive prose?
End play
By now it is clear that serious game theory makes a lot of
promises (and that this paper has assumed monographical—if not
manifestoed—proportions). It retains as many lose ends as a plate of
linguine. By conjoining knowledgeability and attitude with action,
suddenly the performative surface of action becomes available again
as an object of study. The original promise of the study of social action
can be expanded to represent all game performances, and
performance, all action. At the same time, these are relinked with the
semantics of action, with meanings and narrativities that have become
serious or trivial in the process of game-making.
The study of social actions as serious games can now explore
their performative and semantic aspects and determine the alibis that
keep these (and us) holding on to each other’s noses.

Nations, Places, and Ruling Serious Games 1
Figure 1
Figure 2
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After-words
Games and the study of place
Time and Space
All games, serious and trivial, have expected durations. They
can, therefore, be distinguished according to this feature. Most trivial
games, such as recreations like baseball or chess, occur in one day.
Let’s call these “short games.” Serious games are often meant to
endure throughout the lifetimes of their players. These might be called
“long games.” Some apparently short games (such as festivals)
actually reoccur at set intervals (yearly, say) throughout the lives of

their players and should better be classified as “intermittent long
games.” Other games have no pre-set duration, merely thresholds
where the challenge of the action or the realized resources no longer
maintains them. Warfare is such a game. These are perhaps “open
ended games.36” What should be remembered is that a game must
provide all the resources needed to sustain its action throughout its
expected duration, and that the longer the game, the more there arise
possibilities for players to lose their spontaneous involvement and to
leave the game. This also brings up the point that a nation-state is not
a single game, but a congery of games. It falls to the habitii (and there
are more than one of these) to provide the coherence among games.
All games have some way to mark their beginnings. There is
always some action that signals the start of the game, or the
introduction of a new player. Short games also have endings, while
long games simply outlast their players. Intermittent long games have
36 This scheme is also perhaps open-ended. Serious game theory is less

interested in providing an exhaustive typology of possible game types than it is in
sketching the bare outline of their normative form. So this is enough typology for
now.
starts and endings every time they occur, but the ending also signals
the preparation for another beginning. Open ended games may end in
disarray or they may have some form of closure. However they begin
and end, games usually keep their own sense of time, marking this in
ways that are important only to that game37. At the edges of this time
are the temporal boundaries of the game, within which the game must
provide all the time needed for its proper play.
A player in a long game may, and probably will, become a player
in a succession of short games. However, since an individual can be a
player in only one game at a time, he must abandon his role as a
player in the long game for the duration of the short game. During
that time his role is limited to that determined by the short game. So a
person can play chess this morning, soccer this afternoon, and join the
festival next week. Games can also easily be embedded into other
games as long as it is remembered that a player at a sub level is at
most a pawn in a higher level game.
Games also keep a sense of place. They define the loci of their
action. Serious games create serious boundaries. Players and pawns
confine their attentions within these boundaries, and even boundary
infractions by strangers might result in their expulsion from the game
place. Within the outermost boundary of the game all the necessary
resources for the game’s duration must be found, including the space
it needs. The nation’s borders are also the boundaries of the nation’s
ruling serious game. In order to expand this game, the nation must
37 One way of locating games then is to locate all of the ways that time is kept in a
culture. A variety of conflicting measures of time can usually be found, and the use
of these externally ad hoc measures of time (hours, innings, quarters, laps, seasons,
centuries, moves, sides, sets, campaigns, trends, millennia, strokes, various
calendars, and so forth) signal the existence of different games.
expand its borders. (See After-Words below for a discussion on the
study of game places.)
Technologies of Experience
The creation of game-space and game-time occurs on the
conceptual as well as the performative surface. The histories and the
lore of these are all part of the game. If this paper tends to dwell on
the performative side of serious games, it is not because the
conceptual side is lacking in form or features, but rather because
serious game theory has more profound implications on the study of
performance than it does on that of ideas. Most importantly, this

theory permits an examination of both of these aspects under the
condition that they do not transparently reflect each other. What the
two aspects exhibit in concert is a culture created and invested with
serious ideas and performances, with trivial ideas and performances,
and with the inevitability of change.
To create and repeat specific performances, what I call
technologies of experience are devised and maintained at the
performative and the conceptual aspects of action. These, the
knowing how to do the action are transformed into the doing of the
action at the time of its performance (See: Hymes). These are the
material requirements of the habitus, along with the knoweldge of their
making and their wielding. Technologies of experience supply all the
ingredients of the action and its required context. These inform the
experience of the action during its performance. The material
ingredients of modern ruling serious games include the normalizing
institutions, the schools and hospitals, as well as military and police
institutions and their instrumentalities. These are games with deadly

intent. What do ruling serious games look like, and how do they
operate?
Games and boundaries
The boundary of a game (of a festival, a city, a nation) is
fabricated as “an analytical category that itself is part of the social
dynamic of that place” (Murphy, 1991, 29). If the ethnographer does
not problematize the place as displayed in the practitioner’s map,
place disappears as an object of study, and is simply reified in any

subsequent analysis (ibid., 26). Each game contains a logic of
performance, a habitus which needs to be studied on its own terms.

We cannot assume that maps drawn from inside different games are
liable to comparison, nor that comparison will reveal some universal
logic. In fact, the enterprise of comparison is wholly inadequate for the
task at hand. Instead of comparing “their” maps with “our” maps, we
should use their maps to reveal the spatial logic of those places
deemed serious and trivial to their game, and use their logic to
deconstruct the naturalness of our own logic of place.
The game realm
Erving Goffman (1984) used the term “realm” to signify “the
meaningful universe sustained by [an] activity.” The process of the
“framing of experience”, which he described in careful detail, acquires
its geographical extension in the notion of “the realm” (26). Let me
propose that his notion of “realm” can be translated in its geographical
extension to mean “place”. Geographically speaking, place means
realm, and realm stands for place.38; Games create and sustain
38A corollary to this is that realms typically describe places can be mapped and
these maps reveal a logic of spatial meaning for the realm. I would suspect that
some quality of “mapability” will be found in any place that qualifies as reality. Of
meaningful universes we can call places. They make these places out
of pre-transformed vicinities we can call “spaces”.
That places can be separated from spaces they “occupy” is an
essential notion for social geography. The transformation of spaces
into places is the very process which interests many social theorists
today. How locales acquire and maintain “place-ness” is deemed
integral to social integration, and such processes have finally been
acknowledged as central to social theory and ethnographic practice.
At the same time, one characteristic of places is that these have
tended to be tied to locales39. The locale is the extended place of the
game, it contains all the localized resources for the game.

The difference between maps of such a place40, and, say a
topographic map of the corresponding space is not only, or even
importantly, a question of a simple transformation of scale, or
projection, or perspective, or accuracy. It is also important that this
difference is also not that between a “mental or subjective map,” of a
place, compared to its “actual physical” representation. The difference
signals the significant shift of meaning that occurs during the course
course , mapability is not restricted to the one type of graphic representation, but is
simply the geographic extension of a more general “describability.” The availability
of a geographical description of a certain level of specificity might be a central
quality of places that acquire “reality.”
39For a discussion on “locale” see: Anthony Giddens, “Time, Space, and
Regionalisation”, in Gregory and Urry, 1985, p. 271.
40Think of maps of fictional countries, of invisible cities, fantastic planets; and also of
statistical atlases, tourist guides, communication networks. On the surface, Goffman
might seem to be saying that all these maps describe places the meaning of which is
determined by the realm (singular) which qualifies as reality; this is something of a
Habermasian take on Goffman—a suggestion that any rational discussion would
settle the issue of which map most closely describes some external reality—but
Goffman is suggesting something quite different. What Goffman is saying is that an
activity sustains a place which is taken as real by participants while they are
engrossed in this activity.
of an activity when meanings internal to the activity “re-place”
meanings that hold outside (or before or after) the activity. Places are
event-full, they are locii of repeated practices. They acquire meanings
during these practices.41
To study a place
The point here is that the need for engrossment presents a
limitation on the study of places in that their meaningfulness is
acquired partially through the engrossment of the practitioner and is
thus accessible in a reliable manner only during the activity. The study
of their maps requires an ethnographic exploration of the activities

that use these maps.
The necessity of the ethnographic moment in no way lessens the
need for a history of maps, of places, or of realms. Again, things aren’t
so simple; There are answers to questions that can mainly be sought
during activity when the logic of the realm of the activity is in place.
The same question asked outside of the activity—in another realm—
will generate a different answer. At the same time, activities not only
create realms of meaning, but also institutions, communities of
participants (and outcastes), texts, and histories. These become
resources that are recursively used in the continuation of the activity.
Of course they must be explored. What is also implied in the need for
an ethnographic moment is an experiential realist semantics of place
(cf Lakoff, 1987), one that ties this study to bodily activities and thus to
an ethnography of these activities. Such a semantics might acquire
the label post-(or late) modern, for it challenges modes of
categorization (such as subjective/objective) implicit in most modern

41What are those questions that can only be answered by the practitioner while
engrossed in the practice? How are these properly translated into academic prose?
The difficulties of the “new ethnography” are inescapable in this project.
types of discourse. Whatever position these new semantic theories
achieve in relation to modern intellectual thought, they are quite useful
for interpretive ethnography, and also for the task of creating of maps
of places.
In the course of modernity one might note a shift away from
maps that acquire meaningfulness during an activity, that inform and
are completed through the activity, to a type of map that can be
created and then interpreted without the experience or memory of
such engrossment. The distinction between maps the interpretation of
which requires a link to engrossment in activities and those that do not
is, of course, determined by this feature of the realms/places the maps

describe. As modernity is bound up in the devaluation of
knowledge/meaning tied to bodily activities (in favor of disembedded
meanings, rational discourses, experimental reasoning, etc.) there is a
corresponding devaluation in the production and interpretation of
maps of such realms (in favor of maps of spaces, satellite images,
topographical representations, etc.). The field of hyper-locality
emerges in the vacuity of de-activated places. Once the activities that
sustained these places disappear, there is no place left to “save,” no
“there” there to take away. The task facing the ethnographer is thus
two-fold; to acquire knowledge of a place (as thickly described, to use
Geertz’s term) and also to develop the theoretical and practical means
to map (represent) this place.

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Nations,

This bias towards the temporal ... is an instance

Part One: The Problem of Place

The Problem of not Problematizing Place

The human sciences have not problematized space sufficiently.

We lack a fundamental understanding of the spatial qualities of action,

and of the historical processes that produce places we call “nations.” I

find it curious that even theorists, such as Foucault, Bourdieu, and

and institutions, have failed to significantly address the

epistemological and historical processes that underlie our concept of

The modernist notion of “space,” of a vacuous undifferentiated

universe where physical and metaphysical laws apply uniformly—the

space of experimental reason that defies local aberration; the space of

truth—still underpins critical social theories long after these have

problematized space’s younger sister: time. At the drawing boards of

To speak of a modernist notion of “space” suggests alternative

notions. “Pre-modern” and “extra-modern” come to mind, if one

wishes to again to temporalize modernity. But then that which is

outside its “space.” In it universalizing narrative of (evolutionary)

development, modernity has defined itself as a time in advance of

other times. So we find stone-age peoples in the Philippines, and a

address modernity’s death grip on space.

In The Order of Things, Foucault reminds us of a place in time

of Eudoxia. I am not simply saying that people conceived of time and

space in this fashion, although this is so—what I wish to show is that a

universe so conceived allowed people to live in places (also imagined)

that were astoundingly different from the spaces of modern nations,

and that the process of nation formation was necessarily preceded by

the epistemological shift which Foucault described (although again not

sufficiently in it spatial nature).

The co+incidence of this epistemological shift with the early

the founding of universities in Paris and Oxford, and, subsequently, the

particularist speculations of Ockham at Paris and the vernacular de-

ritualization of praxis by Wycliff at Oxford; with the musings of

Copernicus and the decentering of the Earth; with the invention of

cross-ocean navigation technologies and the maps these explorations

required; and with the need for accurate survey technology to

articulate land holdings in new colonies, and the effects of cultural

decentering because of travels to new worlds (to other places)—

particularization re-places similitude in the natural sciences, and

relativization re-places cosmic order in the physical sciences—all of

happens in those very places where the nation-state is to be

I don’t have a blow-by-blow description of the transition from the

epistemology of place-as-microcosm to that of space-as-empty-and-

critically revaluing our theories to uncover these spatial

epistemological assumptions, and then forging a spatially self-

From Places to Nation Spaces

Turning now to the uniform space of nations1, two spatial

processes seem to be working in the creation of nations. The first

process in the spatial consummation of the nation is a process I will

call “interiorization.” This is the emptying out of pre-existing places

within the nation’s borders—the absolute destruction in place and

memory of the sui-generis distinctions that formerly articulated

localities. These distinctions are elided together with the verbal

(dialectical) distinctions that once marked them. National languages,

enforced through national education systems, erase local knowledges

and those pre-existing customs formerly used to distinguish among

locales—locally exclusive festivals, for one example, local laws for

A totalizing uniformity of space is created within the borders of

the nation. Transportation and communication links are established.

Internal boundaries are suppressed and interior-travel—the new

pilgrimage which Anderson describes—is promoted. Centralized

Local disturbances are now a matter of national concern. The national

boundaries create a uniform power container that subjugates all