لطفا منتظر باشید ...
The World Cup, which begins on Friday in Japan and in South Korea, will be watched by billions. The spread of satellite dishes has taken the world's best teams to the farthest-flung places. People in Shenyang or Khartoum, who have no idea that Manchester is a town in England, now support Manchester United. A statue of the team's star, David Beckham, adorns a Buddhist temple in Bangkok. Osama bin Laden, if he is alive, will presumably be among those billions sitting in front of the television, and all of them, with the exception of most Americans, will appreciate the roiling political context in which the game is so often played.—Simon Kuper, "The World's Game Is Not Just a Game"
Introducing Cultural Rhetoric
last chapter, we introduced the idea that the structures of a game are reflections of the culture in which it is played. As play scholar Brian Sutton-Smith writes, "One might ask two Olympic runners how much of their thought while racing is given to the moves within the race, how much to the gold medals that might follow it, and how much to the glory of the country they represent…. All of which is to say that the play and the game are played partly for their own sake and partly for the values attributed to them within the ideologies that are their con-text."[2] As objects produced and played within culture at large, all games reflect their cultural contexts to some degree. In this chapter, we dig more deeply into this premise, focusing specifically on the way that games reflect cultural values. We explore how the internal structures of a game—rules, forms of interaction, material forms—mirror external ideological contexts. Another way of saying games reflect cultural values is that games are social contexts for cultural learning. This means that games are one place where the values of a society are embodied and passed on. Although games clearly do reflect cultural values and ideologies, they do not merely play a passive role. Games also help to instill or fortify a culture's value system. Seeing games as social contexts for cultural learning acknowledges how games replicate, reproduce, and sometimes transform cultural beliefs and principles. This way of looking at games—as ideological systems—forms the basis of this first contextual game design schema, Games as Cultural Rhetoric.
Games reflect the values of the society and culture in which they are played because they are part of the fabric of that society itself. For example, the capitalist rhetoric of the American Dream infuses many American games. State lotteries are marketed with tag lines like,"Anyone can be a millionaire." The TV game show Who Wants to be a Millionaire? (adapted from the British version) glibly celebrates the pursuit of wealth in the rhetorical question that makes up its title. The question is not if you want to become rich, or what the ramifications might be, but merely who will be given the chance. These games encapsulate the paradox of American identity and its accompanying ideologies of wealth. They speak to the clash between a rugged, pioneering individualism and a desperate desire for shortcuts to success and submission to fate.
In historical games, as much as in contemporary ones, cultural ideologies permeate the magic circle to impact rules and play. The rules governing movement and interaction in the game of Chaturanga, an ancient forbearer of Chess, reflect the values and social hierarchies of the Indian military of the fifth century. According to historical sources, the unknown inventor of the game used the armies of India as his design model. The pieces of Chaturanga include the king, the minister, the elephant (which later became the bishop in Europe), the horse (knight), the chariot (rook) and the foot soldier (pawn).[3] Over time, as the game spread from country to country, modifications were made to the design of the game pieces to reflect the particular strengths of national armies. The introduction of these new pieces (such as the queen and the bishop) were not merely superficial changes, but impacted the formal structure of the game and the player experience as well. [1]Simon Kuper, "The World's Game Is Not Just A Game, " The New York Times Sunday Magazine, May 26, 2002.
[2]Brian Sutton-Smith, The Ambiguity of Play (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 77.[3]E.M. Avedon and Brian Sutton Smith, editors, The Study of Games (New York: Wiley, 1971), p. 274.
