Most people, when asking how a game ended, will often ask “Who won?” In the tradition of sports and many board games, this is the ultimate goal: to determine a winner and loser. But what happens if this is not or cannot be the case? What if players at the end of game leave on equal footing and the question of “Who won?” becomes meaningless? I will attempt to examine this concept through three non-traditional game examples, two drawn from the New Games movement and one drawn from the Fluxist movement.
For my first example, I will refer to the DeKoven’s New Game Prui. In this game, all players huddle in close and one player is designated the “Prui,” who is not allowed to speak. The game then begins and the players shuffle around in this huddled group, exchanging handshakes and asking, “Prui?” If the person does not respond, they have met the Prui and are now also a Prui and cannot respond to the “Prui?” question. The game proceeds in this manner until all players are silent.
One of the most interesting ways in which this game subverts traditional game mechanics is that the final state of the game (the arrangement of conditions at which the game ends) is not framed in competitive terms. For instance, in a typical sports game, such as football, the game continues until one person wins. Though a timer typically determines when the game should end, in most cases someone must have a higher score in order for the game to actually end, hence the reason for overtime periods. Even in cases where games can end in a draw, the game’s end state is framed in competitive terms. No player has won or lost, but this end state still must be acknowledged and placed within a win-loss framework (in record keeping this is typically laid out as “win-loss-draw”).
In Prui, this sort of framing never occurs. Instead the final state of the game is the point where everyone is silent and where play cannot persist because there is no possible way for it to happen (no one can talk, so no one can ask, “Prui?”) One of the most interesting results of this aspect of the game is that the game no longer becomes about positioning yourself as a “winner” in final state, since there is no winner. Because of this, the game becomes less about forethought (about positioning yourself to be a winner) but instead becomes about the process of the game itself. In the experience of the game, the player becomes part of a single community achieving a singular goal, rather than two separate teams competing. Cooperation becomes the mode of operation, but the game still maintains enough game-like qualities to be labeled as such. The Ludica article Sustainable Play states of Prui, “ it was also clear that the goal was not to win or lose, but to re-learn how to play well together.” (Ludica, 3)
This subversion of the competition also takes place in another of DeKovan’s New Games: Rock-Paper-Scissors Tag. In this game, players form two teams and collectively decide on their “throw” in a game of rock-paper-scissors. The teams then face each other at a set distance and play a game of rock-paper-scissors. The losers run away from the winners towards a safe zone. Anyone tagged is then added to the winners’ team and a new round is played. This continues until all the players are absorbed into one team.
While this game contains more competitive elements than Prui it still has an end state in which there are no winners and losers, once again subverting the traditional sports-aligned paradigm of competition and the competitively-framed end state. The subversion in this case might even be stronger than that in Prui, because the game utilizes competitive means to reach a final goal which is not framed in a competitive manner. For instance, game play does begin with two teams and these teams engage in stages (rounds of rock-paper-scissors) that end with winners and losers, but as the game progresses, the competition typically becomes more lopsided, with the winner’s team getting larger and larger until it is many against a few and eventually none.
The structure of R-P-S Tag works in such a way that winning slowly moves a player from the competitive state that the game originally takes towards a state of neutrality. The act of winning itself works against the concept of winning, since ultimately, the winners create a state in which winning is pointless. In this way, the game demonstrates that although a game may contain competitive elements, those elements do not have to function in such a way that the final state will place the players on different levels or bestow upon them higher and lower statuses. Competition can be a means without being an end. As DeKovan states in The Well Played Game, “The objective on winning or losing is only useful on insofar as it implements the search for the Well-Played game.” (DeKovan, 99). Competition is useful in the context of the game to create an enjoyable experience but is discarded as an end state, where it has little place other than to subvert the experience of the Well-Played game by creating winners and losers.
As a final example I will turn to Yoko Ono’s White Chess Set. This serves as an example of a game that has appropriated a game which has rigidly competitive structure and end state but completely subverts its original competitive structure. By using entirely white pieces on a white board as opposed to its original black/white dichotomy, White Chess Set instantly challenges the players’ notion of winning and losing. From the onset, there is little to distinguish the two players’ game spaces, other than their starting position. As the game progresses, the distinction blurs until it reaches a point where this distinction is lost. Not even the board, which is all white, can provide any indication of a player’s ownership of a piece.
Once this level of blurring or confusion occurs, the futility of a achieving a traditional end state becomes apparent. Because the sense of ownership is lost, there can be little competition. Without the distinction between the players, the process of eliminating pieces becomes arbitrary. It matters little what piece is removed from the board, because even if it was originally one players piece, that player will find little problem in appropriating another player’s piece for their own purpose (if they can even tell a distinction between “mine” and “theirs”). By subverting the sense of ownership and player distinction in a traditionally competitive game, White Chess Set demonstrates how a something that was once competitive can be easily be manipulated to form a non-competitive play space.
It is important to note the context in which these games were created, which provides further insight into their structure and use. The New Games movement was at least in part inspired by the anti-war movement in reaction to the Vietnam War. The competitiveness in traditional sports-based games serves as a strong metaphor for war, which oftentimes is framed in terms of winners and losers. The horrors of the Vietnam War - both those inflicted on civilians and the soldiers - lead many to reconsider this idea of winners and losers at not just the military level but also in other levels, include the powerful metaphor of games. This was also the case for White Chess Set which functions, as Pearce states, as an “elegantly placed anti-war statement” that draws “attention to the deeply militaristic metaphors … by conscientiously objecting to their implicit narratives of combat and enmity.” (Pearce, 90) All of these examples point to one of the strongest powers of games: the ability to examine the rules and structures in even the most dangerous and affecting realms of society (such as war), play with those rules and structures in a safe environment, and provide a new perspective which allows us to challenge those rules and perhaps even reform those rules to better serve all of us, rather than just some.
Works Cited
Pearce, Celia. "Games as Art: The Aesthetics of Interactivity." Visible Language: Special Issue on Fluxus. January 2006.
Fron, J., Fullerton, T., Morie, J. & Pearce, C. (aka Ludica) (2005). "Sustainable Play: Towards A New Games Movement for the Digital Age." Digital Arts & Culture Conference Proceedings. Copenhagen, December 2005.
DeKoven, B. The Well-Played Game: A Player's Philosophy. New York: Anchor Books, 2002.
Well done Tom. I some nice thematics running through the blogposts: games without goals, games without winners, games with changing rules. I particularly like your analysis here because I think in the video game medium we really take this notion for granted. Players often talk about "beating" the game...Winning has been argued by many contemporary game theorists as a requisite feature of something we call "a game." You did a nice job here of analyzing how each of these games subverts the convention of a "win state" in a very specific, experiential way.
Posted by: gamegrrrl | 11/15/2009 at 04:04 PM