Play, Philosophy and Performance

Malcolm MacLean, Wendy Russell, Emily Ryall, Malcolm MacLean, Wendy Russell, Emily Ryall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000345858
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Teoría y práctica de la educación

Play, Philosophy and Performance is a cutting-edge collection of essays exploring the philosophy of play. It showcases the most innovative, interdisciplinary work in the rapidly developing field of Play Studies.

How we play, and the relation of play to the human condition, is becoming increasingly recognised as a field of scholarly inquiry as well as a significant element of social practice, public policy and socio-cultural understanding. Drawing on approaches ranging through morality and ethics, language and the nature of reality, aesthetics, digital culture and gaming, and written by an international group of emerging and established scholars, this book examines how our performance at play describes, shapes and influences our performance as human beings.

This is essential reading for anybody with an interest in leisure, education, childhood, gaming, the arts, playwork or many branches of philosophical enquiry.

Part I

Play and the performance of morality

Chapter 1

Do toy guns kill people? Playing with guns

Chris Bateman

No-one doubts that a person shot with a toy gun within a play situation is not actually dead except in a purely fictional sense. This pretence play is a fundamental part of childhood, and as Kendall Walton (1990) makes clear, we do not so much outgrow this as we gradually participate in more sophisticated games of make-believe such as paintings, theatre, movies, and, significantly for the purposes of my argument here, videogames (Bateman, 2011). Imagining a friend is fictionally dead in a children’s game of cops and robbers is not so far from imagining that Jon Turturro was shot dead in Miller’s Crossing (Coen Brothers, 1990), or that I shot my friend dead in our game of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (Valve, 2012). In all cases, somebody ‘dies’ but only within the pretence of the game: they are merely fictionally dead.

Of course, there are certain risks of death associated with playing with toy guns in certain contexts. For instance, a 20-year-old man with Down’s syndrome was shot dead in Stockholm in August 2018 because the police mistook his plastic toy gun for a submachine gun (Barnes, 2018), and similar shootings happen every year in the United States (Steinmetz, 2013). The situation with toy guns became so concerning in the city of Peshawar in Pakistan that during the Islamic festival of Eid-ul-Fitr, when gifts are given to celebrate the end of the fasting month of Ramadan, a one-month ban on sales of toy guns has become common (Qalandar, 2015), and the Pakistani province of Sindh took the further measure this year of banning toy guns entirely (Mobin, 2018).

However, the argument I wish to develop here is not specifically concerned with the risks associated with a toy gun being mistaken for an actual firearm. Frankly, mistaking objects for guns represents a risk we can associate with having law enforcement officers who carry firearms – after all, Stephon Clark was shot dead by police in his own backyard in Sacramento simply because he had a cellphone in his hand that was mistaken for a gun (Hauser, 2018). The problem here seems to be as much to do with the social contract endorsing police officers to bear arms as with toy guns, and there is a viper’s nest of philosophical issues here that, while certainly worth our attention, go beyond the scope of this particular discussion.

The question I wish to ask here – ‘do toy guns kill people?’ – could perhaps be more precisely worded as ‘to what extent do people who play with toy guns bear responsibility for people killed by actual guns?’ It is precisely because we would not normally draw a connection here that the question seems strange. The argument I wish to develop is that, while playing with toy guns in general is an innocent form of escapism in the context of children’s games, Hollywood action movies, or videogames focussed upon firearms combat, there are specific moral dimensions of our engagement with toy guns that we do not see or consider, in part because contemporary life entails complex cybernetic networks that conceal influences and effects where we ourselves often bear at least some fractional responsibility for what transpires.

Before we can pursue this argument to its conclusion, however, we must first explore the question of whether conventional plastic toy guns should concern parents simply in the context of play. In the discussions about toy guns in Pakistan, a great deal of weight was placed upon research that had been conducted in the United States about the psychological impact of both playing with toy guns, and of disallowing children to do so. Muneeb Mobin’s (2018, no page) article, for instance, quotes child psychologist Michael Thompson as saying:

Everyone has an informal causation theory that playing with guns leads to the use of guns in adulthood. There’s no scientific evidence suggesting that playing war games in childhood leads to real-life aggression.

Research by Penny Holland (2003) suggests that children who were reprimanded for playing with guns started believing they were doing something wrong, causing them to become dispirited, and to begin to play in secret instead (behaviour commonly associated with establishing prohibitions with children). Holland argues that a policy of zero tolerance for toy guns is counterproductive since it distracts attention from the children’s play needs – to play at feeling powerful, for instance, at a time in their life when they have little or no power of their own to draw against (Curtis, 2003).

Earlier work by Vivan Gussin Paley (1984, p. vii) stresses similar themes:

If I have not yet learned to love Darth Vader, I have at least made some useful discoveries while watching him play. As I interrupt less, it becomes clear that boys’ play is serious drama, not morbid mischief. Its rhythms and images are often discordant to me but I must try to make sense of a style that, after all, belongs to half the population of the classroom.

I will not challenge these play researchers on their claims, with which I concur. Nothing is gained by denying the desire to play at superheroics, and guns (much as with toy swords) provide a path to power fantasy that children may benefit from enacting. As Holland (Curtis, 2003, no page) suggests:

Children do not determine the influences that they are subjected to. They are subjected to violent images on main stream media. We need to be supporting children in working through the themes of violence. Playing ostrich is not taking on our responsibility as adults towards children.

Similarly, in Pakistan, it has been suggested the problem is more the realistic appearance of the toy guns than anything else. Professor Anila Amber Malik, commenting on the situation in that nation (Mobin, 2018) proposed that water guns address the underlying power fantasy without resembling a genuine firearm, nor providing significant opportunity for harm. Yet with blank-firing guns appearing extensively in both television shows and movies, and also available as virtual toys in numerous videogames, we ought to be mindful that the ‘toy gun’ issue is about more than just plastic weapons in the hands of children. It is also about exposure to various fantasies of gun violence, and the fetishization of firearms as tools for conducting violence, the implications of which go beyond the psychological issues and enter into the domain of moral philosophy. Before we can discuss the philosophical aspects of this subject, however, we must acquire a solid grounding regarding the topic of toy guns in videogames.

The effects of violent play

When I first visited the United States Embassy in London to get my papers for living legally in that country, I was deeply troubled by the British police officers who patrolled the grounds whilst armed with submachine guns. It is not usual in the UK to see armed police (especially not in the early 2000s), much less to encounter semi-automatic firearms, and there was something directly unsettling about that specific experience. However, when I later returned to the Embassy to get the US birth certificate for my first born son (who has dual-citizenship in the UK and the US), I glanced at the police officers and noted of the very-same weapons they had been previously carrying: ‘oh, they’re armed with MP5s’, a kind of submachine gun manufactured by the German small arms company Heckler & Koch. What had changed in me between these two visits?

Much of the attention about the impact of violent movies and videogames has focused upon the question of whether participation in these kinds of media elicits violent behaviour. This question is not, in fact, as disputed as it sometimes appears, since the balance of evidence goes entirely against the suggestion that violent portrayals on screens causes violent behaviour. Ferguson (2015) reports on two studies correlating movie portrayals of violence with homicide rates in the United States, and the consumption of violent videogame media with youth violence rates. The results suggest that consumption of violent media was not at all predictive of increased societal violence rates, since these had declined at the times that consumption of violent media content had increased.

A significant number of published papers arguing a case against violent videogames have been written by the social psychologists Brad Bushman and Craig Anderson. The work by Ferguson mentioned above, however, set aside the results of experiments that ask subjects to complete stories (a common method deployed by Bushman and Anderson) or that measure heart rate (which could not reasonably be taken as a predictor of violence) and reached a different conclusion to Bushman and Anderson. This disagreement is much discussed in the literature, but it is important to note that no evidence currently exists to link violent media to violent behaviour, per se. Even if Bushman and Anderson’s research is accepted, the conclusion to draw would be that the play of violent videogames can be associated with a small effect on increased aggressiveness (Hull et al, 2014) – a potential cause for concern, perhaps, but quite different from the stronger claim regarding violence that is sometimes assumed.

Certain recent research (ibid), which picked up more than a few headlines, suggested that the focus on direct links to violence might be misleading, and proposed instead a connection between risk-glorifying videogames and what the researchers termed ‘behavioural deviance’, meaning alcohol use, cigarette smoking, aggression, delinquency, and risky sex. In so much as there is a case being developed against videogames, it is proceeding by narrowing the scope of the accusation to an increasingly specific class of games and is no longer directly concerned with questions of ‘causing violent behaviour’, but rather other kinds of much more general concerns regarding, in this case, risk-taking behaviours.

From a philosophical perspective, one of the particularly interesting aspects of psychologists’ pointed interest in violent videogames is the way in which ‘videogames’ are frequently deployed as a category to describe a range of media so wildly diverse that it would not be an exaggeration to suggest that treating them as a single category risked entirely distorting the medium. There has, for instance, been no investigation as to whether Luxuria Superbia (Tale of Tales, 2013) increases interest in the paintings of Georgia O’Keefe; whether Dear Esther (The Chinese Room, 2008/2012) inspired reading more ghost stories, nor whether Proteus (Key and Kanaga, 2012) encourages hiking. Over the last 30 years, videogames have become impossibly diverse and far more interesting than their violent examples suggest – but this, of course, does not remove concerns that emerge in connection to the use of violence within videogames.

Since our topic is ‘toy guns’, which I take to include those virtual toy guns used in certain violent videogames, we can take from the psychological research so far few if any strong conclusions beyond the noted weak effect on aggression and ‘behavioural deviance’. The concern I wish to raise here – that toy guns might contribute to actual deaths – might justifiably be considered a far more serious matter, and requires no statistical meta-analysis to be understood. I concur with psychologists investigating the effects of games that a focus on ‘causing violence’ is misleading. But I also want to suggest that ‘behavioural deviance’ is also a misleading point of reference here, since the consequences I intend to draw out show the extent to which our capacity to judge the risks of technology – including both videogames with guns, and actual guns, and other things besides – is hopelessly distorted, and a far greater concern than is being considered by the psychological research community.

I began this section by reflecting upon my own change of attitude towards police officers armed with firearms. This was directly caused by my engagement with videogames, and since I do not particularly enjoy gun games (that is, videogames with guns at the core of their play), I can even trace the influence directly to the Counter-Strike franchise (Le and Cliffe et al., 1999/2000 onwards). My friends and I began playing these with v1.6 in the early 2000s, and followed the franchise all the way through to Global Offensive, which I mentioned above. It is not the kind of game I would choose to play on my own, but I was happy to go along with my friends’ preferences. Yet playing these games significantly affected me, most notably because it taught me the names of guns. It was precisely from playing Counter-Strike that I learned to identify an MP5, the weapons that the police officers outside the US Embassy were armed with.

In terms of the effects of gun games, which include many titles in the hugely popular first person shooter (FPS) genre, nobody seems to have significantly noticed that – whether or not players are in support of firearms restrictions and gun control or are themselves owners or operators of firearms – the culture of knowledge surrounding gun games is the same as the culture around guns themselves. In other words, whatever an individual’s stance on actual guns, players of gun games build up the same kind of repertoire of knowledge regarding manufacturers, types, ammunitions, and accessories, as a person who was, for instance, a member of a gun range or interested in collecting firearms. If the argument against parents letting their children play with guns is that guns might be normalized (a point raised repeatedly in the aforementioned discussions in Pakistan), it must be noted that gun games are tremendously effective at normalizing the existence and presence of firearms. It was precisely th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction – ‘Just’ (pre)tending: the performativity of philosophising play
• Part I Play and the performance of morality
• Part II Language and play in/and ‘the real’
• Part III Playful aesthetics
• Part IV Play’s performative praxis
• Index