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Introducing Culture
Why would cultural critic Dave Hickey compare a rule about the size of a basketball to the hands of players such as Connie Hawkins and Julius Erving? What does he mean by suggesting the model for Basketball is the "polyglot choreography of urban sidewalks," or that the elevated hoop is Jeffersonian in principle? Hickey's comments on James Naismith's Guiding Principles of Basket-Ball differs from the formal and experiential focus of RULES and PLAY. His interest is not primarily in the formal structure of the game, nor in what players experience as they play. Analyzing the original rules of the game of Basketball, Hickey's interest is situated not inside the game, but elsewhere: in the cultural spaces within which the game is embedded. Much of our emphasis so far has been on the space inside the magic circle of a game. Occasionally, in our explorations of RULES and PLAY, we ventured to the border of the magic circle and took tentative steps just beyond it. We considered, for example, how breaking the rules can turn players into designers, and how social relations in the real world impact social relations within the space of play. But what if we continued pushing outwards, into the space beyond the boundaries of games? What would we find? The context of the game, of course. We know from systems theory that every system has an environment. But what contexts constitute the environment of a game? How do cultural contexts affect representation and game play? How do games, in turn, affect cultural contexts? These questions are the focus of our final set of game design schemas, contextual frameworks that usher game design into the richly textured realm of CULTURE.
The schemas contained within CULTURE move beyond rules and play to map relationships between the magic circle and culture at large. In "The Heresy of Zone Defense,"Hickey is writing not about the rules of Basketball, but the cultural contexts these rules represent and reinvent. Stated simply, games are culture. Chutes and Ladders is not just a children's playtime activity, but a cultural document with a rich history, designed to express a religious doctrine of a particular time and place. The Sims is not merely a simulation of suburbia, but a representation of cultural interaction that relies on an ideological reality located beyond the scope of actual game play. The Olympics are not just a series of sporting events, but a complex context in which global politics infuse the play of the games on many levels. All games are part of culture. Just as any game can be framed in terms of their formal or experiential qualities, they can also be framed according to their status as cultural objects. Unlike the schemas in RULES and PLAY, cultural game design schemas do not directly derive from the internal, intrinsic qualities of games; rather, they come from the relationship between games and the larger contexts in which they are played. These contexts might be ideological, practical, political, or even physical. In all cases, the contexts exist separately from the games themselves: the inner-city abandoned lot exists whether stickball is played there or not. Because our focus is not on the formal qualities of a game or its experiential effects, there are many ways to approach cultural analysis. In this sense, the cultural schemas we offer represent only a sampling of ways to frame the relationship between game design and culture. This is true also of the schemas presented in RULES and PLAY, but it is especially pronounced here. Culture is inimitably open-ended, and we have no doubt that new perspectives will emerge to enrich and extend the concepts we introduce.
