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Cultural Meanings: A Few Examples
Although many facets of a play experience depend on relationships established by a game's formal and experiential structures, there are other important qualities that achieve resonance by way of culture. The "meaning" of a game of Dominos played on a hot summer night on a Brooklyn street corner, for example, gains richness from a whole slew of contextual factors: the hot, sultry air that provides a perfect acoustical buffer to the slapping ivory tiles; the loose and easy postures of the four Puerto Rican-American men gathered around the makeshift card table; the well-known story of the grand champion who is said to have never lost a match but who now sits poised to lose. Each of these contextual factors plays a role in qualifying just what the game means at any particular moment. From Dominos and DigDug to Pong and Pachinko, any game admits to many different levels of meaningful play. More than just rules and play, all games involve a series of cultural structures against and within which the play of the game occurs. From the social hierarchies of fan participation to the architectural spaces where games take place, what is "at play" in culture directly affects the game experience. Consider the following passage from Stefan Fatsis' book Word Freak, in which he points out some of the cultural structures at play in and around the game of Scrabble: Rosie O'Donnell regularly talks about her Scrabble addiction. Higher brows love it, too. In a bit about mythical Florida tourist traps, Garrison Keillor lists the international Scrabble Hall of Fame. Charles Bukowski's poem "pulled down shade" ends with the lines: "this fucking / Scotch is / great. / let's play / Scrabble. Vladimir Nabokov, in his novel Ada, describes an old Russian game said to be a forerunner of Scrabble. The game is a cultural Zelig: a mockable emblem of Eisenhower-era family values, a stand-in for geekiness, a pastime so decidedly unhip that it's hip.[3]
Pop cultural artifact or highbrow pastime? Emblem of geekiness or symbol of the tragically hip? Scrabble is all of these things and more, when considered from a cultural perspective. Scrabble appears in so many cultural contexts and interacts with culture in so many ways that appreciating every aspect of Scrabble's cultural play would be an impossible task.
Any game that establishes a strong presence in culture immediately engages with innumerable cultural structures. Take Basketball, for example. With what contexts outside of the magic circle does the game connect? We could consider the roles of players, coaches, referees, cheerleaders, or fans, each of whom affects the cultural identity and experience of the game. There is the physical context of the arena to consider, as well as the roles of the vendors, technicians, ticket scalpers, and mascots. What about the context of the media, including television and radio announcers, newspapers, satellite broadcasting, and Pay-Per-View TV? Or the economics that make the game possible, from ticket and licensed t-shirts sales to the negotiation of player salaries? Then there are the professional organizations that regulate and administrate the game. For fans or players of the game, Basketball can also be a context for establishing social status, group affiliation, cultural identity, or access to a college education. Every one of these elements contributes to the overall cultural significance of the game. Whether players and spectators realize it or not, when they play or watch a game they are taking part in generating, embodying, and transforming these cultural meanings. These meanings are not fixed, but are always in some way "at play" within existing cultural structures. As we know from earlier chapters, play is free movement within more rigid structures. Recognizing just what cultural structures can be brought into the cultural play of a game is a powerful design strategy. Grand Theft Auto III, for example, plays with the mythos of urban criminal culture and gangster cinema; Jet Grind Radio offers a stylish sci-fi exposition on graffiti and skate cultures. Silent Hill II, on the other hand, looks to the genres of horror and film noir for its cultural play.This kind of play can pair the more rigid forces of cultural convention with the loose and poetic qualities of human participation. As we play a game like Jet Grind Radio or GTA III, we are not just playing with the game rules: we are also playing with the rules and conventions of culture that the games reflect and transform. [3]Stefan Fatsis, Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), p. 4.
