Play’s Republic

     In both Huizinga and Callois, there is a discussion of the cheat and the spoil sport in regard to games and play.   The cheat, both argue, is less problematic to the play environment because cheaters always affirm the game itself.   Although cheaters deliberately break rules, they do so with the understanding that everyone else will uphold the rules.  It is in the cheater’s interest to make sure the magic circle is not broken.  Without a game, why cheat?

The spoil sport, on the other hand, is seen as the enemy of play.  Unlike the cheat, who accepts the game despite exploiting it, the spoil sport renounces the magic circle altogether.  “The spoil-sport,” Huizinga writes, “shatters the play-world itself.  By withdrawing from the game he reveals the relativity and fragility of the play-world.” (11)  Similarly, Callois argues “the game is ruined by the nihilist who denounces the rules as absurd and conventional, who refuses to play because the game is meaningless.” (7)

However, this characterization of the spoil sport seems short-sighted.  Although it is hard to deny that “the nihilist who denounces the rules” is acting antagonistically towards those who choose to play, I do not think this spoil sport necessarily ruins the magic circle.  The spoil sport may do his best to denounce play as “absurd and conventional,” but what place does argument have in play?  As both Huizinga and Callois argue, play is free and unproductive.  Players have no pretense of the value of their play — they simply play to play.  Therefore, rather than ruining the magic circle, the spoil sport seems only to announce his own incompatability with the magic circle.

And we can take this distinction further.  Again, although it is hard to deny that the spoil sport works against those choosing to play, I feel that the spoil sport cannot help but be playful himself.  Here I am not referring to the spoil sport who refuses to play, but the one who refuses to play by the rules.  This species of spoil sport simultaneously engages and renounces the magic circle — is both plays and destroys.  And in so doing, the spoil sport becomes the epitomy of play, strategically exposing the liminal space, forcing into the open the omnipresent tension between “real” and “play” that all good players willingly overlook.  (Perhaps, in this sense, play may be less spontaneous, and slightly more self-conscious than Callois and Huizinga argue — at least in philosophical concept, if not in practice.)

In fact, it seems that the spoil sport is often a source of creativity within play.  Both Huizinga and Callois recognize that play ceases to be play when it becomes overly-institutionized, regulated, controlled.  The spoil sport acts as a natural antagonist to this regulation, challenging and denying rules when those rules stifle the spoil sport’s individual conceptions of play.  In challenging rules, the spoil sport opens new spaces for play.  Though he may deny one magic circle, he paves roads to another.