CHAPTER 10

GAMES AS BEDOUIN HERITAGE FOR ALL GENERATIONS

Man plays only when he is in the full sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays. (Friedrich Schiller, 1795)

10.1. GAMES PEOPLE PLAY

Games are part of being human across generations, across ethnicities, and occupy man in each of his life stages. They cause pleasure, except for gambling games usually a non-material reward, and enable the player to leave the real world into a world of illusion, and simultaneously dwell in the experiential and imaginary worlds alike. Perhaps activities of even give rise to a feeling of spiritual elevation as a creative and a cultural being. In his book Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture, Johan Huizinga (1984), a Dutch historian and cultural theorist, refers to play as the root of culture, arguing that every culture rests on foundation of play and that pre-modern cultures always included play in their daily lives. As he said (1984, p. ix) “Culture arises and unfolds in and as play.” Play, in this sense, is an activity integrally connected to cultural heritage and to the world that surrounds the players, and foremost, play can provide possibilities to examine and enhance knowledge about a group’s culture. (Roberts, Arth, & Bush, 1959) find in games relationships to activities of the societies or cultures in which they appear. For example, these authors relate certain games to “combat,” “hunt,” or “religious activity.” Roberts, Arth, and Bush (1959) deals with anthropological problems of the development of games, and their significance in various societies. According to them: The games of the world may be classified in terms of distinctive patterns of play. Some outcomes are determined primarily by the physical abilities of the players, some by a series of moves, each of which represents a player’s choice among alternatives, and others … by nonrational guesses … some are mined by combinations of these patterns. All these ways of determining out-comes are widely distributed among the societies of the world, and it is therefore

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possible to offer the following general classification of games: (1) physical skill, (2) strategy, and (3) chance. (p. 597) They concluded that “most games are models of various cultural activities”, for example, games of physical skill can simulate “combat or hunting”, and games of strategy may simulate “chase, hunt, or war activities, as in chess”. Moreover, they refer to games as “expressive models”, and indicate that they relate to: aspects of culture and to the variables that figure in expressive or projective mechanisms. More specifically, games of strategy which are models of social interaction should be related to the complexity of the social system; games of chance which are models of interaction with the supernatural should be linked with other expressive views of the supernatural; and there is a possibility that games of physical skill may be related to aspects of the natural environment. (Roberts, Arth, & Bush, 1959, pp. 599–600) These three models describe players’ thought processes during games. They give rise to subjective interpretations concerning players’ thinking in the extrinsic and intrinsic game world. According to Huizinga (1984), play is an act of transition from the real world into a set of actions limited in time, the created world of the game, expressed in its framing in space and time that has a beginning and an end. Games are susceptible to mathematical and logical analyses, some relationships being evident, others not obvious. The game obligates players to abide by its rules, with the main objectives of most games being to win, in some sense. Usually, the game induces competition among the players. Drive to improve one’s play may lead to reflection on the game. As a result, one may analytical thinking, gradually applying it, and thinking ahead, during future games. Improvement may lead to a sense of fulfillment, an intrinsic reward. Play has a direct impact in multiple domains, including mathematics. After all, it is well known that playing stimulates the player to invest thought in solving problems, through demonstration of new thinking strategies or those adopted from others. Another domain is players’ cultural heritage, which is an integral part of the society to which they belong. The games and their strategies employed altogether likely possess a social-cultural function. The narrative above about strategies also applies to games of chance, being inseparable from skillful players’ logical analysis of the game’s events, which include randomness and uncertainty. Games of chance, which in the 16th and 17th centuries led to the development of probability theory bring to mind the names of famous mathematicians of that era, including Blaise Pascal, Pierre de Fermat, and Carl Friedrich Gauss. Alternatively, games originating in the 20th century are based on “the study of mathematical models of conflict and cooperation between intelligent rational decision-makers” (Myerson, 1991). These games spawned a new mathematical branch dealing with strategic decision making, known as the Game

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