Play, Performance, and Identity

How Institutions Structure Ludic Spaces

Matt Omasta, Drew Chappell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317703235
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performance Art

Play helps define who we are as human beings. However, many of the leisurely/ludic activities people participate in are created and governed by corporate entities with social, political, and business agendas. As such, it is critical that scholars understand and explicate the ideological underpinnings of played-through experiences and how they affect the player/performers who engage in them.

This book explores how people play and why their play matters, with a particular interest in how ludic experiences are often constructed and controlled by the interests of institutions, including corporations, non-profit organizations, government agencies, religious organizations, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Each chapter explores diverse sites of play. From theme parks to comic conventions to massively-multiplayer online games, they probe what roles the designers of these experiences construct for players, and how such play might affect participants' identities and ideologies. Scholars of performance studies, leisure studies, media studies and sociology will find this book an essential reference when studying facets of play.

1 Introduction

Play Matters

Matt Omasta and Drew Chappell

In The Wizard of Oz, Toto races to a corner of the Wizard’s chamber and pulls back a curtain, revealing a quite ordinary-looking man. His back to Dorothy’s party, the “Wizard” frantically pulls levers, turns cranks, and speaks into a microphone. The lion, scarecrow, tin man, and young girl from Kansas suddenly realize the magic they’ve experienced – and need to help them – exists only in their imaginations, sustained by their (supposed) needs and some impressive theatrical tricks. The Wizard admits he is a “humbug,” a fraud who has kept up an act since a tornado deposited him in Oz years before.

The man reveals how he came to play the role of the “Great and Powerful,” explaining he ordered the denizens of Oz to build an Emerald City and, within it, the palace that became his performance space. Nonplussed by the fact the city was not actually emerald-colored, the Wizard “put green spectacles on all the people, so that everything they saw was green.” Oz admits: “My people have worn green glasses on their eyes so long that most of them think it really is an Emerald City.” (Baum 1900, 109)

REMOVING THE GLASSES

This book aims to help us “take off the green glasses” we ourselves wear as we play in our own Emerald Cities. We embark on this journey because we believe play matters. Every day, adults and children perform and play through myriad roles as they engage in recreational activities. While many consider these ludic experiences diversions from “real” life, we assert they play an active role in structuring that very “reality.”

We adopt roles when we play games (from board games to live-action role-playing), attend events (theme parties, interactive dinner theatre, athletic competitions, rodeos), enter certain spaces (theme parks, religious buildings), and/or manipulate avatars in virtual spaces. Even supposedly “passive” leisure activities (e.g. viewing theatre, television, or film) frame viewers in particular ways; this framing affects the social roles we play. When Oz grants the Scarecrow his “brains” – actually “a measure of bran, which he mixed with a great many pins and needles” (Baum 1900, 114) – the man of straw is no wiser than before. Simultaneously, however, his self-concept and identity are transformed. Once his perception of his role changes, his actions change; he begins to speak “intelligently” to his friends, rattling off ideas and theories he previously believed himself incapable of understanding (Baum 1900, 117).

In many contemporary societies, the recreational activities people participate in are created and governed by institutions such as corporations, non-profit enterprises, government agencies, religious groups, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). As Williams (1998) notes, “you cannot understand an intellectual or artistic project without also understanding its formation … the relationship between a project and its formation is always decisive” (168). In other words, art/play and the sources or entities that create them are not separate domains; they each exist for and with each other. No entity is ideologically neutral; institutions pursue particular social, political, commercial, and ideological agendas. This book articulates how the ideological underpinnings of institutionally structured ludic experiences may affect the player/performers who engage in them.

There is no scholarly consensus on the nature of play. We therefore begin this introductory chapter by exploring various ideas of what play might be, the possible purposes it serves, its potential impacts on players, and how it can function as performance. We outline these theoretical frameworks without privileging any particular paradigm, playing at definitions and exploring concepts through metaphoric lenses drawn from literary and imagined scenarios.

The subsequent chapters explore specific play phenomena, from swimming with sharks to visiting Disney World, considering how institutions structure these experiences, promote particular narratives, and engage player-participants. While these chapters reference the theories outlined in this introduction, some contributors employ discordant theoretical frameworks, as is often the case with scholarly literature concerning play. What we are ultimately trying to do, as an interdisciplinary group of scholars interested in how play impacts (or possibly constitutes) our lives, is examine play from multiple epistemological, even ontological, standpoints.

(NOT) DEFINING PLAY

While definitions of play abound, arriving at “the” definition of play is an impossibly chimeric endeavor. We concur with Schechner’s (2013) observation that the task of defining or pinning down the term is indeed “very hard” (89). Words fail to capture ludic essences; play refuses to confine itself within the ivory tower of any academic discipline. Indeed, play scholarship is inherently and intensely interdisciplinary. It amalgamates theory from anthropology, art, cultural studies, education, game theory, leisure and recreation studies, literary theory, media studies, medicine, sociology, theatre and performance, psychology, and beyond. Guided by their unique disciplinary paradigms, these fields proffer diverse and sometimes incompatible ideas of what play is and might be.

That play “can be everywhere and nowhere, imitate anything, yet be identified with nothing” (Turner 1986, 31) has not prevented ambitious scholars from attempting to define it. Among the first was Johan Huizinga, whose 1938 Homo Ludens (“Man the Player”) describes play as:

A free activity standing quite consciously outside ‘ordinary’ life as being ‘not serious,’ but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained from it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner. It promotes the formation of social groupings which tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress their difference from the common world by disguise or other means. (13)

Though pioneering, Huizinga’s description excludes much of what we might call play. Later scholars (e.g. Caillois 1958; Carse 1986) acknowledged play’s enigmatic nature and abandoned attempts to define it, instead attempting to categorize it; yet play evades such codification. Even attempts to develop tools for analyzing play prove difficult. While Schechner (2013) offers seven ways to approach play and playing, he acknowledges “they cannot be separated out from each other” sharply. He thus “orbits” and “touches on” them when considering actual instances of play (93).

We need not be uncomfortable with play’s amorphous nature, however. Schechner (2013) describes the Indian concept of maya-lila, a paradigm that suggests the material world we experience is but a playground for the gods – that life is “a kind of playing” in which “boundaries between ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ or ‘true’ and ‘false’ are continuously shifting and/or wholly permeable” (113–114).

Still, we had to develop a basic framework for describing the types of phenomena we explore in this book – that is, we had to decide what play might be for us at this particular moment. We began by considering previous definitions, then broadened them and solicited case studies from other scholars who investigated specific play phenomena. As contributors proposed ideas, we noticed the sites of study they offered were almost all structured by institutions such as corporations, government agencies, religious organizations, and NGOs, rather than by individual people. We decided to limit the scope of our project to play phenomena designed by such institutions while recognizing that even types of play seemingly developed apart from such entities (e.g. playground games) are influenced by them in subtle ways.

While there are some exceptions, the phenomena we explore as play generally share the following characteristics (for most people, most of the time):

• They are grounded in particular sites (designated physical or virtual spaces).

• They are governed by pre-established rules or protocols.

• They encourage players, implicitly or explicitly, to perform prescribed roles.

• Players usually visit or engage in the phenomena voluntarily, often for the express purpose of playing.

• Players usually expect to experience some form of pleasure as they engage in the phenomena.

Although these parameters delineate the scope of our investigation, we do not intend them as a comprehensive definition of what play is or might be.

While we adhere to no singular definition of play, we recognize our thinking has been influenced by the many scholars who have studied play before us. Their ideas have shaped, distorted, discredited, and affirmed our own theories. It would be impossible to exhaustively review the myriad divergent theories that scrutinize or codify play in this space. However, in the next few sections we review some of the most prevalent and compelling literature on those aspects of play’s ontology and epistemology highly relevant to the analyses of ludic sites that comprise the following chapters.

PLATFORM 9¾: RELATING PLAY AND REAL LIFE

Given the human propensity to define phenomena in terms of what they are not, many play theorists compare and contrast “play” with what we might call “real life.” As if watching students pass through the wall of Platform 9¾ in King’s Cross Station into the wizarding world created in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, these scholars search out and attempt to delineate the border between the play and real-life realms. Their efforts reveal four major schools of thought:

1. Play and real life are discrete/separate concepts/realms/experiences, and/or,

2. Play is an imitation of and opportunity to learn about real life, and/or,

3. Conversely, real life is constituted/shaped by play, and/or,

4. There is no distinction between play and life; life is play, and vice-versa.

These theories are neither exhaustive nor mutually exclusive. Some theorists shift among them depending on the particular play experience they are discussing. Some other theories of play, such as the contention play is not an activity but rather a state of mind (Brown 2009, 60), are incongruous with any of these paradigms.

School 1: We Only Play at Recess: Play as Not-Reality

An exemplar of the first perspective is Huizinga’s (1938) theory that play is “quite consciously outside ‘ordinary’ life” and that “no profit can be gained” from it (13). Consider a college student who, after spending hours revising a research paper, closes her word-processing program and plays a computer game in which she assumes the role of a brave medieval warrior fighting to save a kingdom. One could interpret her game-playing as an escape from the pressures of real life, since the role she embodies in the game is necessarily “other than” real experience. Caillois (1958) might argue her play was “a separate occupation, carefully isolated from the rest of life” (6) because of its virtual nature and the fact it involved only one sentient being: the gamer herself.

Similarly, consider an elementary school student who occupies her recess time stomping through the schoolyard pretending to be a fire-breathing dragon. Her play arguably occurs outside of the “real world” which, of course, has no room for dragons or interspecies transfiguration. As she roars and breathes imaginary fire upon her classmates and imagines setting their village aflame, her performance is a form of metacommunication (Schechner 2013, 103) that sends the message “this is play,” something distinct from reality.

Those who subscribe to the idea that play is separate from real life logically conclude that play therefore lacks real-world effects. Henricks (2006) states that in “play, all of us are granted a certain dispensation from the normal consequences of action” (2). The girl/dragon is not reprimanded for her massive campaign of destruction, no matter how many villagers’ homes she destroys with her firey breath. Her play seems isolated in time and space, enjoyable in the moment but hermetically sealed off from real life.

School 2: Playing House: Play as Mimesis

Many theorists, particularly those from the fields of psychology and education, postulate play is not distinct from real life but is rather an imitation of and/or opportunity to learn about it. According to these theorists, we make discoveries about the world around us by playing, usually in indirect and safe(r) ways. The skills we learn through such play benefit us when we later perform them in the “real world” (Bailey 2011, 151).

Newman and Newman (2012), for example, report that children begin engaging in the playful repetition of motor activities as infants; such play later develops into “the deliberate imitation of parental acts” (211). Further, “once the capacity for symbolic thought emerges, children become increasingly flexible in allowing an object to take on a wide variety of pretend identities” (Newman and Newman 2012, 212).

Vygotsky (1967) famously argued in his theory of proximal development that children progress through a series of developmental levels as they mature. In his view, by “playing at” behaviors at the next higher level, children eventually learn and attain that level of development. Lobman and O’Neill (2011) similarly claim: “in their everyday lives, children perform who they are becoming. Children perform as conversationalists by taking turns babbling and become speakers; they perform as readers by pretending to read, as they become readers” (x). In sum, this school of thought sees play as a rehearsal for life and holds that we play at and practice the skills we need in the future.

How then might play – children’s and adults’ – transfer to other psychological, intellectual, and social contexts within an individual’s life? Brown (2009) notes: “Play’s process of capturing a pretend narrative and combining it with the reality of one’s experience in a playful setting is, at least in childhood, how we develop our major personal understanding of how the world works. We do so initially by imagining possibilities – simulating what might be, and then testing this against what actually is” (36). As such, learning is the testing of imagined ideas in real-life contexts. Turner (2007) expands on this idea: “Role-play and problem-solving drama offer the participant an alternative social site for learning and understanding their behaviour and the world around them: an apprenticeship for life” (190). If play is rehearsal for life – a process of testing what could be against what is – how do ideologies play a role? What is being tested and applied by the players? What are the rules, strategies, and tactics, and how do we learn which to value and which to reject?

Taussig (1993) connects the concept of physical embodiment to identity construction, stating that ideas and memory are strongly connected to physicality (46). Chappell (2010) applies this concept to play: “Through becoming the other – in a limited capacity and for an isolated period of time – the performer learns what it is to be the other, and makes choices about his or her identity-in-role, revealing those choices in bodily action and adherence to discursive practices” (5). Goffman (1959) and Butler (1993) note that people “rehearse” life, trying out various notions of the self, then materializing them, in concert with the structures we live in and through, into the versions of ourselves we wish to present.

School 3: Alice Promoted to Queen: Play as (Trans)formative

In Through the Looking-Glass, Alice (as a white pawn) journeys across a giant chessboard, overcoming challenges and advancing through the game. The puzzles she solves and the bizarre experiences she navigates change her. When she finally reaches the final square of the board she is promoted to queen, completing her transformation. This enables her to take further action. She captures the red queen, wins the game, and returns home. Alice does not just learn about her world through play; she changes it.

Like Vygotsky, child psychologist Piaget asserts that some play involves “accommodation”: learning about and adapting to our environment, as explained in the previous section. However, Piaget regarded play “mainly as an assimilative activity” (Rogers and Evans 2008, 27). When we “assimilate,” we do not adapt ourselves to our environment but rather adapt our environment to suit ourselves and our imaginations (Rogers and Evans 2008, 27). Nicholson (2013) similarly notes that some games are transformative because their “goals and structure [are] designed to change players.” He further argues that in some instances, play need not have goals or structures at all; “sometimes, the play activity itself is rich enough to be transformative” (np).

This sort of transformative play can challenge hegemonic norms, leading the dominant powers in a given society to repress it. Indeed, Spariosu (1989) notes that as early as Classical Greece, Plato and his contemporaries deliberately subordinated play to other types of pursuits in order to suppress its transformative potential (162). If indeed the games a society plays constitute that very society (Caillois 1958), the ability to control play has far-reaching ramifications. Johnson (1998) notes the field of cultural studies interrogates cultural artifacts to determine if, as Plato may have intended, they suppress transformation or if indeed they enable it. He poses questions such as:

Do these forms tend to reproduce existing forms of subordination or oppression? Do they hold down or contain social ambitions, defining wants too modestly? Or are they forms which permit a questioning of existing relations or a running beyond them in terms of desire? Do they point to alternative social arrangements?”

(Johnson 1998, 107)

How then might these cultural forms ask players to enact transformative potential? If we can imitate real-life actions and situations in play without necessarily experiencing immediate real-world consequences, then play “prov...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Play Matters
• 2 Warriors, Wizards, and Clerics: Heroric Identity Construction in Live Action Role Playing Games
• 3 Homo Ludens and the Sharks: Structuring Alternative Realities while Shark Cage Diving in South Africa
• 4 Playfully Empowering: Stunt Runners and Momentary Performance
• 5 The Future of Family Play at Epcot
• 6 Mormons Think They Should Dance
• 7 All the Dungeon’s a Stage: The Lived Experiences of Commercial BDSM Players
• 8 Cheering is Tied to Eating: Consumption and Excess in Immersive, Role-Specific Dinner Theatre Spaces
• 9 Becoming Batman: Cosplay, Performance, and Ludic Transformation at Comic-Con
• 10 Plaza Indonesia: Performing Modernity in a Shopping Mall
• 11 Britpicking as Cultural Policing in Fanfiction
• 12 Dramatic Manipulations: Conflict, Empathy, and Identity in World of Warcraft
• 13 Afterword: Who are You?
• Editors
• Contributors
• References
• Index