Roger Caillois - The Corruption of Games

Where the problem is to enu­merate the characteristics that define the nature of play, it ap­pears to be an activity that is (1) free, (2) separate, (3) uncertain, (4) unproductive, (5) regulated, and (6) fictive, it being understood that the last two characteristics tend to ex­clude one another.

These six purely formal qualities are not clearly related to the various psychological attitudes that govern play. In strongly opposing the world of play to that of reality, and in stressing that play is essentially a side activity, the inference is drawn that any contamination by ordinary life runs the risk of corrupting and destroying its very nature.

At this point, it may be of interest to ask what becomes of games when the sharp line dividing their ideal rules from the diffuse and insidious laws of daily life is blurred. They certainly cannot spread beyond the playing field (chess- or checkerboard, arena, racetrack, stadium, or stage) or time that is reserved for them, and which ends as inexorably as the closing of a parenthe­sis. They will necessarily have to take quite different, and on occasion doubtlessly unexpected, forms.

In addition, a strict and absolute code governs amateur players, whose prior assent seems like the very condition of their participation in an isolated and entirely conventional activity. 

But what if the convention is no longer accepted or regarded as applicable? Suppose the isolation is no longer respected? The forms or the freedom of play surely can no longer survive. All that remains is the tyrannical and compelling psychological atti­ tude that selects one kind of game to play rather than another. 

It should be recalled that these distinctive attitudes are four in number: the desire to win by one’s merit in regulated competi­tion (agon), the submission of one’s will in favor of anxious and passive anticipation of where the wheel will stop (alea), the desire to assume a strange personality (mimicry), and, finally, the pursuit of vertigo (ilinx). In agon, the player relies only upon himself and his utmost efforts; in alea, he counts on every­ thing except himself, submitting to the powers that elude him; in mimicry, he imagines that he is someone else, and he invents an imaginary universe; in ilinx, he gratifies the desire to temporarily destroy his bodily equilibrium, escape the tyranny of his ordinary perception, and provoke the abdication of conscience.

If play consists in providing formal, ideal, limited, and escapist satisfaction for these powerful drives, what happens when every convention is rejected? When the universe of play is no longer tightly closed? When it is contaminated by the real world in which every act has inescapable consequences? Corresponding to each of the basic categories there is a specific perversion which results from the absence of both restraint and protection.
The rule of instinct again becoming absolute, the tendency to interfere with the isolated, sheltered, and neutralized kind of play spreads to daily life and tends to subordinate it to its own needs, as much as possible. What used to be a pleasure becomes an obsession. What was an escape becomes an obligation, and what was a pastime is now a passion, compulsion, and source of anxiety.

The principle of play has become corrupted. It is now neces­ sary to take precautions against cheats and professional players, a unique product of the contagion of reality. Basically, it is not a perversion of play, but a sidetracking derived from one of the four primary impulses governing play. The situation is not unique. It occurs whenever the specified instinct does not en­ counter, in an appropriate game, the discipline and refuge that anchor it, or whenever it does not find gratification in the game.

The cheat is still inside the universe of play. If he violates the rules of the game, he at least pretends to respect them. He tries to influence them. He is dishonest, but hypocritical. He thus, by his attitude, safeguards and proclaims the validity of the conven­tions he violates, because he is dependent upon others obeying the rules. If he is caught, he is thrown out. The universe of play remains intact. Neither does the professional player change the nature of the game in any way. To be sure, he himself does not play, but merely practices a profession. The nature of competi­tion or the performance is hardly modified if the athletes or comedians are professionals who play for money rather than amateurs who play for pleasure. The difference concerns only the players.

For professional boxers, bicycle riders, or actors, agon or mimicry has ceased being a recreation intended as a relaxation from fatigue or a relief from the monotony of oppressive and exhausting work. It is their very work, necessary to their sub­sistence, a constant and absorbing activity, replete with obstacles and problems, from which they properly find relaxation by play­ ing at a game to which they are not contracted.
For the actor also, a theatrical performance is mere simula­tion. He puts on make-up and costume, plays and recites. But when the curtain falls, and the lights go on, he returns to reality. 

The separation of the two universes remains absolute. For the professional bicycle rider, tennis or football player also, the con­test, match, and track remain regulated and formal competition. 

As soon as the contest ends, the audience runs for the exit. The champion returns to his routine responsibilities, where he must protect his interests, devise and apply a strategy that will assure him a successful future. As soon as he leaves the stadium, velodrome, or ring, the perfect and precise rivalries in which he has pitted his strength under conditions as artificial as possi­ble give way to rivalries that are formidable in quite another way. The latter are insidious, incessant, and implacable, and permeate all of life. Life, the comedian off the stage, is now again part of the common lot, removed from the closed-off space and the privileged time ruled by the strict, gratuitous, and indisputable laws of play.

Outside of the arena, after the gong strikes, begins the true perversion of agon, the most pervasive of all the categories. It appears in every conflict untempered by the rigor or spirit of play. Now competition is nothing but a law of nature. In society it resumes its original brutality, as soon as it finds a loophole in the system of moral, social, and legal constraints, which have limits and conventions comparable to those of play. That is why mad, obsessive ambition, applied to any domain in which the rules of the game and free play are not respected, must be de­ nounced as a clear deviation which in this case restores the original situation. There is no better example of the civilizing role of play than the inhibitions it usually places upon natural avidity. A good player must be able to contemplate with ob­jectivity, detachment, and at least an appearance of calm, the unlucky results of even the most sustained effort or the loss of large sums. The referee’s decision is accepted in principle even if unjust. The corruption of agon begins at the point where no referee or decision is recognized.

In games of chance, there is a comparable corruption of the principle as soon as the player ceases to respect chance, that is, when he no longer views the laws of chance as impersonal neutral power, without heart or memory, a purely mechanical effect. With superstition, the corruption of alea is born. It is indeed tempting for one who submits to fate to try to predict the outcome, or at least influence it in his favor. The player finds special significance in all kinds of phenomena, encounters, and omens, which he imagines to be forebodings of good or bad luck. He looks for talismans that will protect him most effica­ciously. He abstains from anything unlucky, as revealed by dreams, forebodings, or presentiments. Finally, in order to be rid of unlucky influences, he indulges in various magical prac­tices.

Such an attitude is only aggravated by games of chance. It is found to be quite prevalent, even if subconscious. It is not re­stricted to the habitues of casinos or racetracks and the pur­chasers of lottery tickets. The regular publication of horoscopes by daily and weekly newspapers transforms each day and each week into a kind of promise or menace for their readers, who are thus kept in suspense by the heavens and the dark powers of the stars. These horoscopes most often reveal the daily lucky num­ber for readers born under the different signs of the Zodiac. Each one can then buy the lottery tickets corresponding to these num­bers: some ending with that number, some in which that number is contained several times, and some with a succession of numbers that add up to it— thus applicable to all to some degree.1 0 It is significant that the most popular and most obvious superstition of this type is directly associated with games of chance. And yet it must be admitted that it is not limited to games of chance.

Upon waking up in the morning, everyone is supposed to find himself winning or losing in a gigantic, ceaseless, gratuitous, and inevitable lottery which will determine his general coefficient of success or failure for the next twenty-four hours. Decisions, new enterprises, and love affairs are all considered. The astrologer is careful to point out that the influence of the stars is exerted within quite variable limits, so that the oversimplified prophecy could scarcely turn out to be entirely false. To be sure, the reac­tion of the majority of the public is to smile at such puerile pre­dictions. But it still reads them. And more important, it keeps on reading them. At this point, many begin reading the astrological section of their newspaper. It seems that newspapers with large circulations do not readily risk depriving their readers of this satisfaction, the importance or prevalence of which should not be underestimated.

The more credulous are not content with the summary articles in papers and general magazines. They have recourse to special­ized periodicals. In Paris, one of these has a circulation of more than 100,000. The adept often visit a fortuneteller with some regularity. The figures are quite revealing: 100,000 Parisians consult 6,000 diviners, seers, or fortunetellers daily. According to the Institut national de Statistique, 34 billion francs are spent annually in France on astrologers, magicians, and other frauds. 

In the United States, for astrology alone, a 1953 investigation counted 30,000 professional establishments, twenty specialized magazines with a circulation of 500,000 readers, and 2,000 periodicals that publish horoscopes. It was estimated that $200 million are spent annually for no other purpose than seeking answers from the stars— this not including other methods of divination.

Numerous indications of the association between games of chance and divination are easily found. One of the most con­ spicuous and immediate is that the very same cards used by players in trying their luck may also be used by prophets to pre­dict the future. Seers only use special games in order to enhance their prestige. Ordinary dinner plates may be used, newly in­ scribed with naive legends, impressive illustrations, or traditional allegories. At every point there is a quite natural transition from chance to superstition.
As for the avarice today observed in the pursuit of good for­tune, it probably compensates for the continuous tension in­volved in modern competition. Whoever despairs of his own resources is led to trust in destiny. Excessively rigorous com­petition discourages the timid and tempts them to rely on ex­ternal powers. By studying and utilizing heavenly powers over chance, they try to get the reward they doubt can be won by their own qualities, by hard work and steady application. Rather than persist in thankless labor, they ask the cards or the stars to warn them of the propitious moment for the success of their enterprises.

Superstition therefore seems to be a perversion, i.e. the appli­cation to reality of one of the principles of play, alea, which causes one to expect nothing of himself and leaves all to chance. 

The corruption of mimicry follows a parallel course. It is pro­duced when simulation is no longer accepted as such, when the one who is disguised believes that his role, travesty, or mask is real. He no longer plays another. Persuaded that he is the other, he behaves as if he were, forgetting his own self. The loss of his real identity is a punishment for his inability to be content with merely playing a strange personality. It is properly called aliena­tion.

Here, too, play is a protection from danger. The actor’s role is sharply defined by the dimensions of the stage and the dura­tion of the spectacle. Once he leaves the magic area, the fantasy ends and the most vainglorious histrionics and the most eloquent performances are brutally constrained by the very necessity of passing from the dressing-room of the theater to the resumption of his own personality. Applause is not merely approval and re­ward. It marks the end of illusion and play. The masked ball ends at dawn and the carnival is only for a short time. The costume is returned to the store or the wardrobe. The old per­sonality is restored. The sharp limits of play prevent alienation.
Alienation occurs toward the end of profound and continuous labor. It takes place when there is no sharp dividing line between fantasy and reality, when the subject has gradually donned a second, chimerical, and all-pervasive personality which claims exorbitant rights with respect to a reality with which it is of necessity incompatible. The time arrives when the alienated one — who has become another— tries desperately to deny, subdue, or destroy this new self, which strongly resists, and which he regards as inadmissible, inconceivable, and irksome.

It is remarkable that in agon, alea, and mimicry, the intensity of play may be the cause of the fatal deviation. The latter always results from contamination by ordinary life. It is produced when the instinct that rules play spreads beyond the strict limits of time and place, without previously agreed-to rules. It is permissi­ble to play as seriously as desired, to be extremely extravagant, to risk an entire fortune, even life itself, but the game must stop at a preordained time so that the player may resume ordinary responsibilities, where the liberating and isolating rules of play no longer are applicable.

Competition is a law of modem life. Taking risks is no longer contradictory to reality. Simulation also has a role, as in the case of confidence men, spies, and fugitives. As a compensation, vertigo is almost absent except for those rare professions in which the task is to control it. The risk of sudden death is also present. At fairs, special precautions are taken to avoid acci­dents on the various rides that stimulate vertigo artificially. Acci­dents nevertheless happen even on equipment designed and con­structed to assure complete safety to the users, through having undergone careful periodic checks. Physical vertigo, an extreme condition depriving the patient of protection, is as difficult to attain as it is dangerous to experience. That is why the search for unconsciousness and distortion of perception, in order to spread into daily life, must assume forms very different from those ob­served on contraptions that gyrate, speed, fall, or propel and which were devised to stimulate vertigo in the closed and pro­tected world of play.

 These costly, complex, cumbersome installations are scarce except for amusement parks in capitals or when erected periodi­cally by traveling carnivals. In their very atmosphere, they be­long to the universe of play. In addition, the thrills they provide correspond point for point to the definition of play: they are brief, intermittent, calculated, and as discrete as games or suc­cessive encounters. And finally, they remain independent of the real world. Their influence is limited to the duration of the ride.

It stops as soon as the machine stops and leaves no trace in the rider except for his being fleetingly stunned until his usual equi­ librium is restored.

To adapt vertigo to daily life, it is necessary to substitute am­biguous chemical power for clear-cut physical effects. The de­sired stimulus or sensuous panic, which is brutally and brusquely provided by the amusements at a fair, is now sought in drugs or alcohol. But this time the whirling is no longer outside or separate from reality. It is imbedded and generated there. If this intoxication and euphoria can temporarily destroy clarity of vision and motor coordination, free one from the burden of memory and from the terrors of social responsibilities and pressures, just as in the case of physical vertigo, nevertheless its influence does not cease with the passing of the seizure. The organism is slowly but permanently changed. Given a permanent need, there is created an unbearable anxiety. This is in complete contrast to play, which is always contingent and gratuituous activity. Through intoxication, the pursuit of vertigo makes increasing inroads into reality, all the more extensive and per­nicious in that it creates a dependency which constantly presses against the threshold across which the desired disorder is found.

Even on this point, the case of insects is instructive. They find a source of pleasure in games of vertigo, illustrated by the whirling mania of whirligig-beetles which transform the surface of the quietest pond into a silvery carousel, if not by moths flitting about a flame. Yet insects, especially the social insects, also exhibit the “corruption of vertigo” in the form of an intoxi­cation that has disastrous consequences.

Thus, one of the most prevalent types of ant, Formica sanguinea, greedily licks up the fragrant exudates of rich ether secreted by the abdominal glands of a small coleopterous insect called Lochemusa strumosa. The ants place its larvae into their nests, feeding them so meticulously that they neglect their own young. Soon the larvae of Lochemusa devour the ants’ offspring. 

The ant queens, badly cared for, will no longer give birth to any but sterile females. The anthill dies and disappears. Formica fusca, which in a free state kills the Lochemusae, spares them when it is enslaved by Formica sanguinea. To indulge its taste for fragrant grease, it permits Atemeles emarginatus, which is no less a peril to its safety, to enter its hive. Moreover, it will de­stroy this parasite if it is enslaved by Formica rufa, which does not tolerate the parasite. Thus, it is not a case of irresistible attraction, but of a kind of vice that can disappear under certain circumstances. Servitude, in particular, sometimes stimulates it, and sometimes makes it resistible. The masters impose their habits upon the slaves.20 These are not isolated cases of voluntary intoxication. An­ other species of ant, lridomyrmex sanguineus of Queensland, seeks the caterpillars of a small grey moth in order to drink the intoxicating liquid they exude. The ants press the juice flesh of these larvae with their mandibles in order to extract the liquid. 

When they have drained one caterpillar, they move on to an­ other. It is unfortunate that the larvae devour the eggs of lridomyrmex. Sometimes the insect that produces the fragrant exudate “is aware of” its power and entices the ant to its vice. 

The caterpillar of Lycaena arion, studied by Chapman and Frohawk, is provided with a sac of honey. When it encounters a worker of the species Myrmica laevinodis, it raises the anterior segments of its body, inviting the ant to transport it to its nest. 

There it feeds on the larvae of Myrmica. The latter has no inter­est in the caterpillar during the periods in which it does not produce any honey. Lastly, a Javanese hemipter, Ptilocerus ochraceus, described by Kirkaldy and Jacobson, has in the middle of its ventral side a gland containing a toxic liquid which it offers to ants that are partial to it. They hasten to lick it up at once. The liquid paralyzes them, and they thus become an easy prey for Ptilocerus.' The aberrant behavior of ants does not prove the existence of instincts harmful to the species, as has been maintained. It proves rather that the irresistible attraction for a paralyzing sub­stance may neutralize the most powerful instincts, particularly the instinct for self-preservation which causes the individual ant to guard its safety and directs it to protect and feed its offspring.

The ants, so to speak, “forget” everything because of the drug. They behave most disastrously, submitting themselves or aban­ doning their eggs and larvae to the enemy.
In an oddly analogous way, the stupidity and drunkenness produced by alcohol lead man down a road where he is insidi­ously and irrevocably destroyed. In the end, deprived of the freedom to desire anything but his poison, he is left a prey to chronic organic disorder, far more dangerous than the physical vertigo which at least only momentarily compromises his ca­pacity to resist the fascination of oblivion.

As for ludus and paidia, which are not categories of play but ways of playing, they pass into ordinary life as invariable op­posites, e.g. the preference for cacaphony over a symphony, scribbling over the wise application of the laws of perspective. 

Their continuous opposition arises from the fact that a con­certed enterprise, in which various expendable resources are well utilized, has nothing in common with purely disordered move­ment for the sake of paroxysm.

What we set out to analyze was the corruption of the princi­ples of play, or preferably, their free expansion without check or convention. It was shown that such corruption is produced in identical ways. It entails consequences which seem to be in­ ordinately serious. Madness or intoxication may be sanctions that are disproportionate to the simple overflow of one of the play instincts out of the domain in which it can spread without irreparable harm. In contrast, the superstitions engendered by deviation from alea seem benign. Even more, when the spirit of competition freed from rules of equilibrium and loyalty is added to unchecked ambition, it seems to be profitable for the daring one who is abandoned to it. Moreover, the temptation to guide one’s behavior by resort to remote powers and magic symbols in automatically applying a system of imaginary correspondences does not aid man to exploit his basic abilities more efficiently.
He becomes fatalistic. He becomes incapable of deep appreci­ation of relationships between phenomena. Perseverance and trying to succeed despite unfavorable circumstances are dis­couraged.

Transposed to reality, the only goal of agon is success. The rules of courteous rivalry are forgotten and scorned. They seem merely irksome and hypocritical conventions. Implacable com­petition becomes the rule. Winning even justifies foul blows. If the individual remains inhibited by fear of the law or public opinion, it nonetheless seems permissible, if not meritorious, for nations to wage unlimited ruthless warfare.

Various restrictions on violence fall into disuse. Operations are no longer limited to frontier provinces, strongholds, and military objectives. They are no longer conducted according to a strategy that once made war itself resemble a game. War is far removed from the tournament or duel, i.e. from regulated combat in an enclosure, and now finds its fulfillment in massive destruction and the massacre of entire populations.

Any corruption of the principles of play means the abandon­ment of those precarious and doubtful conventions that it is always permissible, if not profitable, to deny, but the arduous adoption of which is a milestone in the development of civiliza­tion. If the principles of play in effect correspond to powerful instincts (competition, chance, simulation, vertigo), it is readily understood that they can be positively and creatively gratified only under ideal and circumscribed conditions, which in every case prevail in the rules of play. Left to themselves, destructive and frantic as are all instincts, these basic impulses can hardly lead to any but disastrous consequences. Games discipline in­ stincts and institutionalize them. For the time that they afford formal and limited satisfaction, they educate, enrich, and im­munize the mind against their virulence. At the same time, they are made fit to contribute usefully to the enrichment and the establishment of various patterns of culture.

from the book Man, Play and Games by Roger Caillois