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Transformative Social Play
Whether describing the way a child comes to know the rules of Marbles or the way an adult gradually enters into a game's fan community, the rules of a game are experienced and transformed through social play. In Defining Play, we identified transformative play as an instance of play when free movement within the more rigid structure of a game actually changes the game structure itself. We can also consider transformative play from a social play point of view, a phenomenon we call transformative social play.
In transformative social play, players use the game context to transform social relationships. They actively engage with the rule system of a game, manipulating it in order to shift, extend, or subvert their relations with other players. Transformative social play forces us to reevaluate a formal understanding of rules as fixed, unambiguous, and omnipotently authoritative. In any kind of transformative play, game structures come into question and are re-shaped by player action. In transformative social play, the mechanisms and effects of these transformations occur on a social level. How does transformative social play work? Borrowing some useful terms from folklorist Kenneth Goldstein, let's begin by making a basic distinction between "ideal" and "real" rules.[11] Ideal rules refer to the "official" regulations of a game, the rules written in a player's guide to Zelda or printed on the inside cover of a game of Candyland. Real rules, on the other hand, are the codes and conventions held by a play community. Real rules are a consensus of how the game ought to be played. As sociologist Frank E. Manning notes in The World of Play, "Real rules embody the players' ludic values and social relations while ideal rules have a legal, but not social, validity."[12] This distinction between ideal and real rules has less to do with the interpretation of rules (whether or not players of Pictionary may use hand gestures to encourage potential guesses, for example) and more to do with the elaboration of the rules of the game by players. Young kids playing Basketball, for example, might elaborate on the rule of "no double-dribbling" and transform it into "no double-dribbling unless you can't help it." This movement from the ideal, or legal rule, to the real, or popular rule, offers insight into the social values held by a community of players. [11]Kenneth Goldstein, "Strategies in Counting Out " In The Study of Games, edited by Elliott Avedon and Brian Sutton-Smith (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1971), p. 172–177.[12]Frank E. Manning, The World of Play. Proceedings of the 7th Annual Meeting of The Association of the Anthropological Study of Play (New York: Leisure Press, 1983), p. 19.
