But is it play?

Brian Sutton-Smith and Marie-Laure Ryan were just here for Jesper's defense (which went quite well, he is now Dr. Juul!) and they both gave interesting talks. Sutton-Smith (who is much more lively and fun than came across with the DiGRA videoconference event) lectured on the nature of play. While he gives a fascinating historical account of the different ways play has been thought of he also, roughly speaking, proposes that play is what we do to deal with the fact that life can be miserable - it's a tough world, full of anxiety and disappointment, so we cope via play. It's a fascinating proposal and when he presents all kinds of engaging stories about children's play I find it hard to not buy it at least a little bit. But I've been thinking about this issue lately. We often hear how when we play we step inside a "magic circle" for the duration of the game, agreeing to a kind of fiction that is fairly distinct from our normal lives. Theorists like Huizinga and Caillois seem to go even further, suggesting that play is actually a space quite separate from, and even contaminated by, the real world. I wrote a paper on power gamers recently (comments/feedback very welcome btw) and part of what it drew me to thinking through was what we make of play that doesn't look like what we traditionally think of it as. I've been doing some research on professional gaming as well and have hit the same point - can we call this stuff that often looks like work play? Caillois is particularly harsh on this point, suggesting that when play is colonized by reality, "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 necessary to take precautions against cheats and professional players, a unique product of the contagion of reality." So I wonder, what might he (and other theorists who take this harder line) make of all the stuff that goes on in MMOGs? All those instances where the fiction of the game collides with "real" lives. The buying and selling of virtual goods for offline money. The obligations, passions, even anxieties. Are all those players really players in any strict sense? Or are they doing something else? Hidden in this question of course is why it matters at all what we call this activity. I can't say I've worked this through completely yet but I can't help but think that the more the "magic circle"-like definitions of play get pushed at (and in turn "labor"), the closer we will get to understanding what it means when our play is not fun, when it is repetitive, when it seems to look like work, when it doesn't run smoothly but is filled with contentions over rules, strategies, and cheating... and yet we keep going back, finding pleasure in it somehow. What does it mean to the definition of play when the boundaries between gamespace and "regular life" are less clear, when investments in each blur into each other. Maybe MMOGs are a special case of play and have led me to see games as much more messy than if I'd come at it from other genres (though to be honest, I doubt it). But I still wonder about all the weird boundary-activities we find in MMOGs and how much they will influence our understanding about what play is. Maybe they aren’t so boundary after all.