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University: M icrofilm s International 300 N. Zeeb Road Ann Arbor. Ml 48106 8311728

Bowman, John Robert

THE ORGANIZATION OF SPONTANEOUS ADULT SOCIAL PLAY

The Ohio Stale University Ph.D. 1983

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University Microfilms International THE ORGANIZATION OF SPONTANEOUS

ADULT SOCIAL PLAY

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate

School of the Ohio State University

By

John Robert Bowman, B.A., M.S.

★ -k * it ■*

The Ohio State University

1983

Reading Coinmittee : Approved By

& Adviser Department of Sociology ACKNOWLE DGMENTS

I wish to express my gratitude to all the members of m y

Committee: to Gia Hinkle who contributed many insightful questions and suggestions during the many years of this re­ search process; to Sy Kleinman who encouraged me to ex­ perience firsthand the play phenomenon; and to Al Clarke who directed this dissertation.

I also acknowledge my indebtedness to all the students who provided data for this research. These individuals trusted me enough to reveal some of the most intimate details of their daily lives, and thereby allowed us an opportunity to vicariously enter their worlds of play.

Finally, I thank the New Games Foundation for showing me how to bring a little more play into my own personal life.

To Emily Whittle, wife and play partner, I again express my appreciation for all of your sacrifices and assistance.

My thanks also to Betty whittle whose editorial and typing skills were most appreciated during the final hours of this proj ect. VITA

October 7, 19 47...... Born - Hershey, Pennsylvania

1970 ...... B.A., University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky

1973 ...... M.S., The Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida

1973-1975...... Teaching Associate, Department of Sociology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

1977-1978...... Instructor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Denison University, Granville, Ohio

1979-1983 ...... Instructor, Department of Sociology, Pembroke State Uni­ versity, Pembroke, North Carolina

PUBLICATIONS

"Notes on the Organization of Spontaneous Adult Social Play." Michael A. Salter (ed.). Play: Anthropological Perspectives. West Point, New York: Leisure Press, pp. 239-259, 1978.

"On Getting Even: Notes on the Organization of Practical Jokes." in John Loy (ed.), The Paradoxes of Play. West Point, New York: Leisure Press, pp. 65-75, 1982.

UNPUBLISHED PAPERS PRESENTED AT MEETINGS

"Anthropology of Work and Play." Paper presented to the Annual Meeting of the Association for the Anthropological Study of Play, San Diego, California, April, 1977. "Stratified Talk: The Production of Asymmetry in Psychiatric Diagnosing." Paper presented to the Conference on the Pheno­ menological Analysis of Asymmetrical Interpersonal Relations, Dayton, Ohio, May, 1977. (co-author: Stephen Pfohl).

"New Games: An Approach to the Creation of a Play Community. Paper presented to the Annual Meeting of the Association for the Anthropological Study of Play, Bloomington, Indiana, March, 1978.

"Talking Nonsense and Other Forms of Speech Play." Paper pre sented to the Annual Meeting of the Association for the An­ thropological Study of Play, Ann Arbor, Michigan, April, 1980

FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Fields: Social Psychology Sociological Theory Marriage and Family Leisure, Sport and Play TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... ii

VITA...... i ii

LIST OF PLATES...... viii

CHAPTER

I. INTRODUCTION ...... 1

Statement of Research Problem ...... 4 Approaches Guiding this Research...... 8 Significance of Study ...... 11 Organization of Dissertation...... 14 S u m m a r y ...... 17 N o t e s ...... - ...... 19

II. REVIEW OF PLAY LITERATURE...... 21

Scientific Definitions of Play...... 22 Theories of Play...... 24 Historical Theories...... 25 Surplus Energy Theory...... 29 Practice/Developmental Theories...... 30 Ethological Theories ...... 32 Sociological Theories...... 34 Limitations of Existing Theories...... 39 S u m m a r y ...... 42 N o t e s ...... 43

III. FRAMING THE STUDY: REVIEW OF THEORETICAL APPROACHES ...... 4 5

Sociologies of Everyday Life...... 46 Theoretical Foundations ...... 52 Situational Determination of Meaning . . . 52 Problematic Nature of Social Reality . . . 54 Social Construction of Meanings...... 57 Fusion of Thinking and Feeling ...... 58 S u m m a r y ...... 60

v Page

III. continued

N o t e s ...... 63

IV. DOING THE STUDY: ETHNOGRAPHIC AND EXISTENTIAL METHODS 6 5

Research Strategies ...... 68 Participant Observation...... 70 Informants' Accounts ...... 77 Experiential Descriptions...... 82 Still Photography...... 84 Research Questions...... 89 S u m m a r y ...... 95 N o t e s ...... 98

V. MAKING WORK PLAY ...... 101

The Work society...... 10 2 Playing on the Job...... 10 4 Making Work Play...... 112 S u m m a r y ...... 115 Note...... 118

VI. "PLAYFUL GAMES": CREATING NEW GAMES .... 119

"Serious Games" ...... 120 "Playful Games": Playing with Games. . . . 123 Spontaneous Games...... 124 Silly and Ridiculous G a m e s ...... 12 8 Playing at Playing Games ...... 132 Combination Games ...... 133 Rules for Changing Rules...... 139 S u m m a r y ...... 14 3 N o t e s ...... 145

VII. TALKING NONSENSE AND OTHER TYPES OF SPONTANEOUS SPEECH PLAY...... 146

Play Materials...... 147 The Importance of Talk...... 148 Playfulness Expressed Through Language. . . 150 Playing with Language ...... 153 Playful Versus Ordinary Speech...... 159 S u m m a r y ...... 102 N o t e s ...... 163

VIII. PRACTICAL JOKES, PUT-ONS AND OTHER PLAYFUL DECEPTIONS...... 164

Play Materials...... 165

vi Page

VIII. continued

The Organization of Practical Jokes .... 166 The Jokester...... 168 The Victim...... 170 Is This P l a y ? ...... 174 Making Sure It's P l a y ...... 175 On Getting E v e n ...... 177 S u m m a r y ...... 180 Note...... 182

IX. THE ORGANIZATION OF SOCIAL PLAY...... 183

The Context of Adult Social Play...... 185 The Recognition of Adult Social Play. . . . 193 The Participants of Adult Social Play . . . 198 The Initiation of Adult Social Play .... 201 The Termination of Adult Social Play. . . . 209 The Rules of Adult Social Play...... 212 S u m m a r y ...... 217 N o t e s ...... 219

X. THE EXPERIENCE OF PLAYING...... 221

Existential Phenomenology and the Lived- W o r l d ...... 222 The Lived-Experience of Playing ...... 224 Experiences of Total Involvement .... 226 Experiences of Self...... 228 Experiences of Others...... 230 Experiences of Euphoria...... 231 Experiences of Time...... 231 Experiences of Transcendence ...... 232 S u m m a r y ...... 234 N o t e s ...... 237

APPENDIX

NEW GAMES: BECOMING THE PHENOMENON .... 239

Philosophy of New Games...... 240 Experiences with New G a m e s ...... 24 3

BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 251

vii LIST OF PLATES

Is This Play? ...... 87

Bubble Gum Blowing Contest...... 131

Beta Mud Slide (Sequence 1) ...... 172

Beta Mud Slide (Sequence 2)...... 172

Beta Mud Slide (Sequence 3)...... 172

Prank of "Decorating" Newlyweds' Car. . . 178

College Victory Celebration ...... 189

Student Arrested for "Playing"...... 190

"The Lunch Game"...... 245

New Games ...... 249

New Games ...... 250

vi ii CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

The purpose of this dissertation is to report on inves­ tigations that this author has conducted on the organization of spontaneous forms of adult social play. By "spontaneous social play," reference is made to occasions where the structures and procedures of playful interaction are situa- tionally emergent over the course of the social interaction; that is, the concern of this study is with the character of playful scenes which are developmentally unfolding-- where the participants are actively negotiating new rules and proposals for creating new games and other play forms.

In other words, this study will not examine formally or­ ganized games or sports.

Traditionally, sociologists and other social scientists have limited their observations and theories of play to children. Apparently these scholars have unquestionably accepted the everyday, common sense assumption of American culture that while children play, adults work.^ One con­ sequence of this taken-for-granted belief is the conspi­ cuous absence of a scientific analysis of the topic of spon­ taneous social play among adults.

1 2

Furthermore, the possibility that adults too engage in spontaneous, child-like play is qlossed over in social scien­ tific theories of play. Rather than try to describe and un­ derstand the phenomenon of play on its own terms, these

theories actually explain play away by relegating it to other conceptual categories. For example, many socialization, ethological and developmental theories view play as simply

"practice" or "rehearsal." Thus, the function of play is considered simply to be preparation for adult roles and the serious tasks of survival. However, by regarding play as practice for adult roles, such formulations obscure the very possibility of adult play as well as the essential play­

fulness of the activities in question.

More recently sociologists have begun to focus their attention on aspects of adult social life that are non-work

related. For example, the emerging fields of leisure and popular culture, as well as the sociology of sports, have

recognized the increasing importance in American society of

"free time, 11 or time not devoted to work* However, for the most part, these fields too have neglected the topic of spontaneous forms of adult play by stressing that adult

play--in contrast to children's play--is formally structured 2 in games, sports, and other recreational activities.

As previously suggested, American society has histori­

cally been a work oriented society. This work oriented way of life makes all members of our society (including social 3 scientists) see the world in characteristic ways. Because work is so highly valued, play, which is characteristically viewed as the antithesis of work, is regarded as inconse­ quential and frivolous. This is another reason why play 3 has received so little serious study.

Rather than view play exclusively from the perspective of American society's emphasis on work, or from the point of view of social scientific theories of human development and socialization, or even from the emerging sociological fields of leisure and sports whose subject matter tends to deny the very possibility of more spontaneous forms of adult play, this dissertation will attempt to describe and understand adult play on its own terms. Above all, the present study will examine this topic in a way that pre­ serves the original integrity of spontaneous adult play­ fulness as a social phenomenon.

The rich and detailed examination of the relationships between adult playfulness and everyday social life that is undertaken here reveals that adults engage in a wide variety of spontaneous forms of playful social interactions, and that such play occurs far more frequently than is normally assumed. As will be demonstrated in the following pages, nearly all areas of adult social 1ife--including work--may be potential playgrounds. In fact, once one becomes aware of the topic of spontaneous adult play, one begins to be conscious of an area of social life that has hitherto been 4 largely ignored. Paradoxically, adult play is omnipresent, yet invisible.

Statement of Research Problem

An examination of the relevant literature has revealed that the topic of play forms of adult social interaction has received very little serious attention in the social sci- 4 ences. There have been a few notable exceptions. Earlier this century German sociologist Simmel (1950) identified and defined sociability as a playful type of social inter­ action. Simmel's discussion of sociability provides much insight into an understanding of play as a social phenomenon, although his analysis is highly abstract and theoretical, and does not explicitly make reference to actual cases of adult playfulness.

More recently Goffman (1974) has identified various rules and premises underlying playful forms of actions. Al­ though Goffman, like Simmel, doesn't restrict his analysis of play to children, his discussion relies on research findings of ethology (naturalistic observations of animal behavior), and is incomplete in that he does not attempt an actual study of human social play.

Although some social scientists have recognized this aspect of adult behavior and social interaction, there have been only a few restricted attempts made to systematically 5 observe and analyze actual cases of adult playfulness. What

is notably absent in the social scientific literature is an examination of the complex relationship between spontaneous adult playfulness and everyday social life. What is needed

is an identification of the various types of spontaneous adult play, and an examination of how these various types of spontaneous adult play are achieved and sustained in every­ day face-to-face social interaction. Of course, this exami­ nation presupposes that play is something that is in fact

identifiable and analyzable. This examination also pre­ supposes a more basic question: How do we as observers and participants recognize when playfulness is expressed in social situations? Indeed, how is play socially possible?

Of the many paradoxes that tend to be associated with the phenomenon of play, one of the most baffling, for scien­ tific observers, is that in spite of all the conceptual am­ biguity surrounding this phenomenon people are readily able to recognize as well as accomplish a sense of play in their everyday interactions. Moreover, play signals are clearly understood between species; generally, there is remarkable agreement among both trained and untrained observers on the specific question of when and whether an animal is play­ ing (Loizos, 1967:182). Miller (1973:88), in questioning such unanimity in the recognition of play, points to the need for a systematic study of how play is socially recog­ nized. In the words of Bolough (1976:114), questions must 6 be raised as to "what any member must know or do in recog­ nizing or doing playfulness."

In general, there are two major objectives of this dissertation. The first objective relates to the organiza­ tion of spontaneous forms of adult social play, and involves the study of the organiztion of individuals acting in con­ cert with one another to create and successfully sustain playful social situations. Specifically, the focus of this study is to systematically examine the recognition of play by identifying the various processes of how individuals en­ gaged in face-to-face interactions come to understand that what they are doing together is to be regarded as playful.

With regards to this first problem, two research ques­ tions evolved during the course of this investigation:

(1) What is play and how is it recognized in social

situations?

(2) How is the mutual understanding of play socially

accomplished?

Simply stated, the first objective of this dissertation is to provide an adequate description of how a sense of play is both recognized and accomplished in everyday social inter­ actions.

The second major objective of this work on play relates to the organization of individual experience, and involves the study of the nature and significance of personal experi­ ences of play. The concern here is with the more subjective 7 dimensions of social play, particularly the nature of per­ sonal feelings accompanying various play experiences. From the viewpoint of the play participant, an important element of play involves individual personal feelings and their ex­ pressions. Thus, the second major objective of this disser­ tation is to provide an adequate description of the lived- experience of social play.

These two objectives were accomplished by a methodology grounded in the understanding of everyday life, and in ac­ cord with actual experiences of adult social play. Employ­ ing a qualitative methodology, the topic of spontaneous forms of adult play was approached and described by a vari­ ety of research strategies. Direct personal observation of naturally occurring playful interactions among adults was viewed as a necessary and essential ingredient of this re­ search process. Furthermore, personal participation in a wide variety of playful social situations served as another important resource. Other techniques of data collection included the use of still photographs, audio-tapes, informal interviews, and journalistic materials. Finally, all of these research materials were complemented by experiential descriptions from individuals who actually participated in a wide variety of playful forms of social interaction. 8

Approaches Guiding this Research

Initially this investigation was quite exploratory and employed the perspective of a phenomenologically informed sociology. At the beginning of this project no specific research hypotheses or theories were tested. Rather than proceed from a priori conceptualizations or from assumptions of pre-formulated theory, attempts were made to ground con­ cepts and thei r meanings in the situated context of their actual use. Consistent with the methods of a phenomenologi­ cal approach, the first methodological goal was an accurate and detailed description of the phenomena in question.

However, observations are never limited to "pure de­ script ion." These observations of playful social interac­ tions involved some structuring and interpretation on the part of the observer. Moreover, as the research progressed, ob­ servations became more systematic and structured by specific research questions. Not only is pure observation without any analytical framework impossible, but inevitably some schema imposes itself upon the data collection process as well as any attempts at elaborating and documenting generalizations made from the data. In this author’s view such structuring is an inevitable consequence of any attempt at understanding and is an essential feature and inescapable limitation of any method of reconstructing immediate experience.^ For this reason it is important to identify some of the basic pre­ suppositions and questions which necessarily guided this research project.

Observations are never a simple recording of events.

They are always responses to questions, and reasonable questions depend on the formulations of an analytical ap­ proach. The approach which guided this research was adapted primarily from the programmatic work of ethnomethodologists

(Garfinkel, 1967; Garfinkel and Sacks, 1970; Speier, 1973;

Cicourel, 1974; Hehan and Wood, 1975; and Leiter, 1980) , as well as other approaches to the organization of social behavior, most notably the situational aspects of Bateson's

(1972) and Coffman's (1974) frame model, and the empirical work of conversational analysts (Schegloff and Sacks, 1973;

Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson, 1977) ■ This research has also drawn on the descriptive work of primate ethologists

(Loizos, 1967; Bekoff, 1972). Finally, another important resource has been the discussions of various types of lived- experiences as described in the existential and phenomeno­ logical literature (Schutz, 1962 and 1967; Psathas, 1973;

Hinkle et al., 1977; Douglas and Johnson, 1977) .

Given that this research project's focus is directed towards socia 1 forms of adult play, the crucial question that is addressed is how such interactions are accomplished.

Here the concern is with organization. By organization, re­ ference is made to the ways individuals make sense of one another's actions in some consistent, coordinated way

(cf. Schwartz and Jacobs, 1979:276). In other words. 10 exactly how do participants engaged in adult play organize

their behaviors and activities for one another in order to

create a common understanding of what it is that they are

doing together?

Goffman (1974:8) has pointed out that individuals in­

volved in face-to-face or immediate interaction are con­

fronted with the question: "What is it that’s going on

here?" How this question is answered may be presumed by

the actual ways mutual understandings are achieved through

the participants 1 assumption of some shared consensus of what they are doing in the situation. However, the problems

involved in how people are able to make sense (or nonsense)

together cannot be solved simply by reference to shared know­

ledge or values. As Garfinkel and other ethnomethodologists have demonstrated, the question "What is really happening?"

is far more complicated. To some extent shared understand­

ings are always problematic in that individuals never know

for certain how to answer the above question. Individuals

involved in concerted behavior must constantly inform and

tnake clear to one another what is going on by mutually con­

structing recognizable social scenes and events. In other

words, social action in general, and social play in particu­

lar, is dependent on a great deal of interactional work.

Following the recommendations of Garfinkel and Sacks

(1970), interactional work shall be treated as a social

accomplishment. As an accomplishment, playfulness must then 11 be regarded as a process; specifically, a communicative pro­ cess that is dependent on a ceaseless body of reflexive in­ teraction. Therefore, this focus on the organization of social play is concerned primarily with the various inter­ pretive practices play participants collaboratively employ to achieve recognizable types of playful social interaction.

Significance of Study

It was previously noted that the social sciences in general, and sociology in particular, have neglected the study of spontaneous forms of adult play. The absence of significant research in this area can be related to a number of assumptions American society makes about play. First there is the common sense belief of Americans that play is characteristic only of childhood; therefore, adult play is something that really doesn't exist, because it is thought that adults don't ordinarily play. Second there is the widespread American assumption that since play is child­ like it is only a diversion from more serious concerns, or that it is inconsequential, and even trivial. Indeed a

"triviality barrier" surrounds the topic of play, and cer­ tainly something that is viewed as so unimportant and insig­ nificant does not deserve serious scientific recognition and attention.

The scientific neglect of play has been partially re­ medied during the past decade by numerous studies of 12 children's play (Caplan and Caplan, 1974; Denzin, 1975; Gar­ vey, 1977; Schwartzman, 1978). For children, play is now viewed as having significance, especially from the point of view of human development. The Caplans (1974:xii-xvii), for example, provide these comments regarding what they see as the "extraordinary power of play": play

...provides an imaginary world a child can master.

...provides a base for language building.

...has unique power for building inter­ personal relations.

...offers opportunities for mastery of the physical self.

-■.is a wav of learning adult roles.

...is always a dynamic wav of learning.

...is vitalizing.

But still very little attention has been devoted to the study of spontaneous forms of adult play. After all, although play has been found to be important for human development, adults are already adults, and they have no need to learn or prepare themselves for a developmental stage they have pre­ sumably achieved.

The current research project was motivated by the incon­ sistencies that exist between the beforementioned American assumptions regarding play and this author's own personal experiences and observations. By reflecting on these person­ al feelings and observations, I became increasingly aware of 13 a domain of adult social life that was quite pervasive, and, at least from my perspective, quite significant. Not only does this study provide a basis for a systematic description and analysis of an area of adult social life that has been nearly totally ignored in the social scientific literature, but it is hoped that this study will be able to document the real significance of spontaneous adult play to social inter­ action and social relationships.

The significance of experiences of adult play can also be seen in the following reflections of those who actually participated in playful types of social interactions.

While 1 was playing I really felt good. It made me happy to be having fun like this with my husband. It made me feel like we were very close, that we were really a happy family.

While we were flying the kite it gave me the greatest feeling, it just made me feel really free and alive.

It made me feel so happy.

It added a little excitement to that bor­ ing job and we became a lot better friends after this play episode.

We all have fun and that's the main point of play. We feel good. It always suc­ ceeds in bringing us closer together.

Actually, we all ended up as winners be­ cause all of us had a good time.

It felt really special in a way. 14

Playing together provided a sense of sharing, a sense of sharing something very personal.

I felt really good inside- At the time I was playing I felt like I didn’t have a care in the world.

It really felt fantastic at the time and even afterwards.

These quotes came from experiential descriptions pro­ vided by such varied individuals as students, nurses, moth­ ers, a farmer, and an assembly line worker. As seen from the perspective of the player, occasions of adult playful­ ness are quite consequential and significant. The signifi­ cance of these experiences and the absence of any signifi­ cant scientific research on the topic of adult play provide the rationale for attempting a systematic description and analysis of the organization of spontaneous forms of adult social play.

Organization of Dissertation

The structure of this dissertation is laid out as follows. The following chapter provides a brief overview of existing definitions and theories of play, and concludes with an analytical scheme distinguishing various types of adult social play. Specifically, this literature review will define in greater detail what is meant by the phrase "spon­ taneous adult play.” 15

Chapter III involves an additional review of the liter­ ature concerning the various theoretical approaches which guided this research project. Briefly, the perspectives of ethnomethodology, frame analysis, phenomenological and exis­ tential sociology are examined, and the relevance of these perspectives to the current study is outlined. Furthermore, a discussion of methodology is taken up in this chapter.

Following Kaplan (1964), this discussion of methodology focuses primary attention on the underlying theoretical presuppositions of methods.

The specific procedures (or techniques) of data collec­ tion used in this study are identified in Chapter IV, and problems related to gathering data on spontaneous episodes of adult play are discussed. Finally, this chapter will examine the various research questions which guided this in- ves t igation.

The following four chapters present data from four major areas of adult social play, and hundreds of actual cases of playful social interactions among adults will be examined in this section. Specifically, Chapter V criti­ cally evaluates American society's assumptions about the re­ lationship between play and work by examining particular

instances of adult play that occur in work-related settings.

Making a distinction between the terms "play" and

"games," Chapter VI presents cases of spontaneous adult play

that are organized in a game-like fashion. However, unlike 16

"serious games," the rules of these "playful games" tend to spontaneously emerge over the course of the play. Such rules are found to be flexible and open-ended, and, in some cases, ridiculous and even silly.

The concern of Chapter VII is with one of the most fre­ quently occurring forms of adult playfulness: speech and language play. Here the importance of talk for everyday social interaction is noted. Particular attention is paid to the identification of some of the most important differences between ordinary and playful talk.

Chapter VIII presents data about another important type of spontaneous adult play, a type that is very different in structure from previously discussed examples of adult play.

Here the topic of practical jokes, put-ons, and other seem­ ingly harmless pranks is taken up. A special concern of this chapter is the issue of the ambiguity and deception that typically surround this type of playful social inter­ action. This leads to an examination of a very important question: "Is this play?"

A more extended analysis of the data follows in Chapter

IX. Generalizing from the data presented in Chapters V-VIII, the actual organization of how adult play is socially accom­ plished is addressed. Questions are raised as to the under­

lying presuppositions of adult playfulness, and the various

rules for creating and sustaining playful social inter­ actions are identified. Finally, conclusions are drawn as 17

to what factors facilitate or inhibit adult playfulness.

The lived-experience of adult playfulness is the con­

cern of Chapter X. The meaning of play as it relates to the

intentionality of players is discussed. The experience of

self and others, as well as temporal and spatial dimensions

inherent in the play experience are also described.

Finally, a short Appendix is included at the end of

this dissertation. The topic of this Appendix is "New

Games." The purpose of this discussion is to provide a brief

outline of the philosophy of this play movement, and to exa­

mine the implications of this movement for developing al­

ternatives to traditional games and recreational activities,

as well as for providing a context for legitimizing adult

play.

Summary

It is a maxim of the present study that adult play is

a significant and pervasive element of human experience and

everyday social life. Above all this dissertation seeks to

understand adult playfulness on its own terms, and to this end a finely detailed description and examination of actual

instances of this social phenomenon are undertaken. Because

attention is directed towards social forms of spontaneous

adult play, emphasis is put on how such playfulness is both

recognized and accomplished through a communicative process. 18

Furthermore, numerous descriptions of the 1ived-experience of play are provided. And all of the above are generously illustrated with playful materials. 19

NOTES - CHAPTER I

Undoubtedly, this assumption can be related historically to the Protestant work ethic which exalted work and detested all forms of spontaneous play and amusement. Gillin (1914: 825) observed that for adults Mplay--childisb, useless play-- was not only foolish, it was sinful." Although play is associated with childhood there is the "consolation that, like children's diseases, it would disappear with the advent of manhood or womanhood" (Gillin, 1914:825).

2 For example, Edwards (1973:52) declares that the restrictive and serious nature of rules in games and sports not only re­ stricts but precludes spontaneity. 3 In all fairness to science, the serious study of spontaneous play has inherent difficulties. This type of playfulness is highly ephemeral and is not easily studied in conditions of controlled observation. As will be noted in Chapter IV, the most widely accepted research techniques of the social sciences are not well suited for the study, of spontaneous forms of adult play.

4 A thorough review of this literature as well as a discussion of major theories of play will be taken up in the following chapter.

5 MacLeod has defined the phenomenological method in this way: "By the phenomenological method is meant the systematic attempt to observe and describe in all its essential charac­ teristics the world of phenomena as it is presented to us. It involves the adaptation of what might be called disci­ plined naivete. It requries the deliberate suspension of all explicit assumptions, e.g., as to the existing stimulus or underlyina mechanism, which might bias our observation. The phenomenological question is simply, ’What is there?' without regard to why, whence or wherefore" (MacLeod, 1947: 193-194) .

^Johnson (1975:215) too stresses the problematic and emergent nature of field research in his remarks that "we must 20

understand that literal description is impossible and that it is necessary for the observer to select out those fea­ tures of the research that are in accord with his categories of relevance...." CHAPTER II

REVIEW OF PLAY LITERATURE

"There is a certain kind of behavioral sci­ entist who, at the least threat of an ex­ posed ambiguity, scurries for cover like a hermit crab into the nearest abandoned logical shell" {Kaplan, 1964:71).

The literature relating to play is reviewed here in an attempt to delineate the diverse and sometimes conflicting perspectives on play. This chapter aims to clarify the meaning of the concept "play," and to differentiate this term from others with which it is often confused.

As will be demonstrated, the meaning of the term "play" is very problematic from a scientific perspective. This difficulty in conceptualizing play is reflected in the multi­ plicity of scientific definitions of this term, and in the large number of theories attempting to explain play as a social phenomenon. Following a review of some of the most widely used definitions and theories of play, a critique of these conceptualizations of play will be provided. Finally, suggestions will be offered as to how the deficiencies in existing conceptualizations of play can be remedied.

21 22

Scientific Definitions o£ Play

Although individuals in everyday life may be vague and

imprecise in their definitions of play, scientists and

others who seek systematic knowledge and understanding have

a need for precise and exact definitions of play. In

general, compared to common sense, science has more exact

rules of procedure for knowing and defining, seeks semantic

clarity and distinctness, and seeks definitions which

are compatible with available knowledge (Garfinkel, 1967:

265). Scientists who are interested in the subject of

play must be first concerned with play as a concept, and with the problem of defining this concept. Although there are some scholars who are reluctant to define play,^ most preface their discussions with a concise and unambiguous

definition of play.

The scientific literature on play is replete with defi­

nitions of what is (and what is not) play. The following

definitions represent some of the most common ways of

delineating the concept "play": play is a nonliteral

orientation (Garvey, 1977); playfulness is a suspension

of the meaning, purpose, or seriousness of social action

(Bolough, 1976); play is the antithesis of structure

(Forrest, 1978) r play is an experimental dialogue with the

environment (Eibl-Eibesfelt, 1967); play is a context, it 23 is a mode of organization of behavior {Bateson, 1956); and, finally, play is the intrusion of unserious mimicry (make- believe) into social interaction (Goffman, 1974).

One of the most widely cited definitions of play is that offered by Huizinga. For Huizinga (1950:28) play is defined in the following manner: "Play is a voluntary activity or occupation executed within certain fixed limits of time and place, according to rules freely accepted but absolutely binding, having its aim in itself and accompanied by a feeling of tension, joy, and consciousness that is

'different' from 'ordinary life.'"

Other writers have chosen to define play by way of suggesting lists of criteria distinguishing this phenomenon.

Piaget (1962:147-150), for example, has listed these cri­ teria as a way of distinguishing play from non-ludic ac­ tivities: (1) play is autotelic (it is an end in itself);

(2) play is spontaneous; (3) play is an activity for plea­ sure; (4) play has a relative lack of organization; (5) play represents freedom from conflicts; and (6) play is over- motivation. Piaget further noted that while such criteria attempt to distinguish play in relationship to non-ludic activity, this distinction is far from clear after all.

Piaget (1962:150) then offered his own definition of play:

"We can therefore say that if adapted activity and thought constitute an equilibrium between assimilation and accomo­ dation, p lay begins as soon as there is predominance of An examination of the above definitions points to a number of problems. One problem relates to the conceptual confusion surrounding the term "play" and other related phenomena. For example, the terms "play" and "games" are sometimes used interchangeably. Even among scholars who have sought to differentiate types of play (Huizinga, 1950

Caillois, 1961; and Piaget, 1962), there exists little consistency in their use of these two words.

A second problem relates to the obvious disagreement about what constitute the most salient characteristics or criteria of play. in addition, it is not clear how the various criteria of play are related. Finally, it should be noted that some of these criteria clearly apply to behaviors that are not typically regarded as playful.

Because of these and other difficulties related to definitions of play, a great deal of controversy surrounds 3 the concept of play in the scientific literature. unfor­ tunately, an examination of some of the most important theories of play does little to clarify these issues.

Theories of Play

There exist a large number of theories that attempt to explain the origins, properties, and functions of various play forms. A number of excellent reviews exist 25 which provide useful summaries of both classical and contem­

porary theories of play (Ellis, 1973; Berlyne, 1969; and

Millar, 1968). A complete discussion here of all these

theories is neither possible nor desirable, since my commit­ ment is to examine and display play itself, rather than to

examine specific theories about play. It will be noted

that a number of these theories must be judged inadequate on several grounds. However, before any specific criticisms

can be leveled, it is first necessary to briefly outline

the main ideas and assumptions of some of the most widely

accepted explanations of play. For present purposes, it is

possible to categorize these play theories into the follow­

ing five types: (1) historical; (2) surplus energy;

(3) practice/developmental; (4) etholoqical; and (5) socio-

logi cal.

Historical Theories

One of the most significant historical approaches to the study of play can be found in Huizinga's Homo Ludens.

Huizinga's approach to the topic of play is historical and not strictly scientific. For Huizinga, the essence of play is fun, and fun is a concept that "resists all analysis, all logical investigations" (Huizinga, 1950:3). Above all, play is to be approached as a totality. 26

Huizinga, in his analysis of the nature and signifi­

cance of play as a cultural phenomenon, observed that play

is older than culture, since animals can be observed playing.

According to Huizinga, playful elements can be found in nearly all parts of culture, and, indeed, Huizinga goes so far as to argue that culture as such would be impossible without this dimension. The importance of play to culture can be summarized by Huizinga’s conclusion that civilization arises and unfolds in and as play.

In discussing the etymology of play, Huizinga noted that the development of the linguistic concept of play as a logically homogeneous concept occurred relatively late in human history. With the exception of most modern European languages, the languages of the world lack a generic term for play, and, surprisingly, do not define play in terms 4 of its opposition to work.

Huizinga's historical view of play is premised on the belief that culture arises in the form of play, that the earliest forms of culture had a certain play character.

However, as a culture changes this play element recedes and is hidden behind other cultural phenomena, most notably the sacred sphere. In Huizinga's view, a harmonious balance of play and "earnest" are necessary for civilization to

flourish. Huizinga's analysis of the history of play and

its relationship to culture led him to conclude that since 27 the Middle Ages there has been a decline in both play and the quality of civilization. This decline in play is especially characteristic of modern times where there exists 3 a false sense of play and a tendency to be too serious.

Even sports and athletics have become a thing sui generis.

In the words of Huizinga (1950:199): "In the case of sport we have an activity nominally known as play but raised to such a pitch of technical organization and scientific thoroughness that the real play-spirit is threatened with exti neti on."

Another historical attempt at understanding play can be found in the works of Aries. According to Aries (1966:101),

"in Western civilization, down to the eighteenth century at least, the words 'games' and 'play' did not signify any­ thing childish." Elsewhere, Aries (1962) noted that during the seventeenth century both children (after the age of three or four) and adults played the same games. "Converse­ ly, adults used to play games which today only children play" (Aries, 1962:71).

However, with the Industrial Revolution there came about a new valuation of work, and a corresponding devaluation of play. Before this time, work and play were not seen as polar opposites. Work took up much less time, and it did not have the importance and existential value that is has

in modern society. Moreover, as Aries (1962:73) observes,

"games and amusements extended far beyond the furtive 28 moments we allow them: they formed one of the principal means employed by a society to draw its collective bonds

closer, to feel united."

According to Aries (1962), this separation of work and play also paralleled another historical trend: the separa­

tion of childhood from adulthood. The notion of childhood as a separate stage of life is a relatively recent inven­

tion in Western society. However, in this new segregation play did not always fall to the children, and work to the

£ 1 adults. This can be seen in the following poem written

in 1915:

The golf links so near the mill That almost every day The laboring children can look out And watch the men at play.

—Sarah Cleghorn, "Quatrain" {Quoted in Forrest, 1978:4)

The above historical trends, coupled with the Protestant work ethic which further exalted work and denigrated play, led to the modern Western assumption that while adults work, children play. What is to be considered most significant in these historical studies is the recognition that not all cultures and historical epochs defined play and work as opposites, and the recognition that the association of play with childhood is of relatively recent origin, perhaps characteristic only of modern Western societies. Another contribution of these historical studies is that they 29 document the importance and pervasiveness of play through­ out culture and history. Certainly these studies provide us with a greater understanding of the origins and the relati­ vity of our own assumptions regarding the nature and signi­

ficance of play as a social phenomenon.

Surplus Energy Theory

The surplus energy theory of play was put forth first

in the writings of the German poet Schiller in 1795, and

later reformulated under the influence of evolutionary theory in the works of Spencer (1855) .

The importance that Schiller accorded to play is best summed up in his famous quote that "man plays only when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is fully a human being only when he plays" (1967:107).

Schiller contended that the basis of play can be found in a primary "play impulse." This impulse was said to be stimulated by superabundant energy. Thus, for Schiller, the origin of play related to the natural expression of a primary impulse that is activated by the overflow of vital 7 energy. Although Schiller argued that play manifested itself in free, non-utilitarian exercise, play was said to have value. First, play has intrinsic value in that it is an activity that is pleasurable and enjoyed for its own sake.

Secondly, play has extrinsic value in that it contributes 30 to the moral enhancement of both the individual and society.

Schiller's notion of surplus energy was the basis of

Spencer's (1855) definition of play as aimless activity; although Spencer's formulation of play was also influenced by evolutionary theory. For Spencer, play is characteristic only of higher animals who do not expend all their energies in their needs for survival. Only animals in the highest stages of evolutionary advancement have energy to waste in immediately pleasurable activities.

The classical theories of Schiller and Spencer are not supported, however, by current research findings in biology.

Beach (19 45) has noted that present-day knowledge of physio­ logy has not identified any process whereby unexpended energy is stored up in the body to the point of creating pressure that demands release. Furthermore, surplus energy is not always a condition of play; animals who have played to the point of exhaustion have been observed responding to further play stimuli (Groos, 1898; Beach, 1945).

Practice/Develonmental Theories

One of the first attempts to identify important func­ tions of play can be found in the writings of the Swiss philo­ sopher, Groos (1898; 1901). Groos rejected the surplus energy theory of play; instead of regarding play as aimless activity,

Groos argued that play behavior involved the practice of 31

skills and actually prepared young animals and children for

the serious skills that are needed later in adult life. Like

later developmental theorists, Groos regarded such practice

as the primary function of play.

The developmental theory of Piaget (1962) is yet another

attempt to explain the origins and significance of play.

Piaget postulated that the play behaviors of children go

through successive stages. Piaget's theory of play is

closely associated with his theory of intellectual develop­

ment .

Piaget (1962) distinguished four stages of cognitive development: (1) sensory-motor (or preconceptual); (2) repre­ sentational; (3) concrete operational; and (4) formal opera­ tional. Each of these cognitive stages exhibits a charac­ teristic type of play activity. In the first stage play con­ sists mainly of sensory-motor practice in the form of repetition. The emergence of true play in the form of

symbolic or make-believe play characterizes the period of

representational intelligence. Finally, games with rules

emerge during the concrete operational stage and continue

into the formal operational stage.

Within Piaget’s theory, play is a function of immatur­

ity. Piaget (1962:168) observed that games with rules "mark

the decline of children's games and the transition to adult

play, which ceases to be a vital function of the mind when the individual is socialized." Contrary to everyday ex­ perience, Piaget (1962:146) argued further that these games with rules "are almost the only ones that persist at the adult stage." Piaget, like other theorists within the prac­ tice/developmental tradition, assumes that play is primarily a childhood phenomenon, and thus denies the very possibility of adult forms of playful expressions.

Etholoqical Theories

Ethology involves the scientific study of the behavior of animals in their natural environments. Like practice and developmental theories, ethological theories assume that ani­ mal play has survival value. This can be noted in Aldis'

(1975:1) remarks regarding the functional significance of play: "Although plav is often considered to be a frivolous pastime of little consequence, play probably has important survival value for many species of animals, and it may be more important for the healthy development of children than has been generally realized."

Although ethologists have identified many forms of play­

ful interaction, much of their observations are of social play play involving the interaction of two or more animals.

Bateson (1956), for example, observed otters not only

fighting with one another, but also playing at fighting.

One of the most noticeable characteristics of this kind of 33 play is that it borrows or adopts patterns from real fight­

ing. That is, one way play behaviors differ from that which they are modeled after is that there is an altering g of the original pattern.

Specifically, ethologists have found that playful trans­

formations may occur when patterns of behavior are altered

in the following ways: (1) the sequence of the original ac­

tivity is reordered; (2) individual movements making up the sequence are exaggerated; certain movements are repeated and/ or exaggerated; (4) the sequence of the original activity is broken off completely, but later resumed; and (5) certain movements within the sequence are not completed, and this incomplete element is repeated many times (Loizos, 1967:178).

According to Loizos (1966:7), "In every case, during play,

the performance of the movements from which play is derived

is uneconomical, and therefore would be inefficient in terms of the original motivating context."

Beach's (1945) summary of the ethological literature on play is still useful in identifying some of the most impor­

tant features of play. According to Beach: (1) play is

characterized by an emotional element of pleasure; (2) play 9 is more typical of the immature animal than the adult;

(3) the outward forms of play are species specific; and

(4) the amount and diversity of play in a particular species

is related to its phylogenetic position. 34

In addressing the problem of how animals are able to discriminate playful from non-playful activities, ethologi­ cal studies of play have focused attention on the vital im­ portance of observing exactly how this social activity is accomplished. One significant finding of how animals accom­ plish a sense of playfulness is the identification of the various play signals that provide a context (or frame) for altering the meaning of subsequent behaviors. It is impor­ tant to note that play as a type of social interaction is classified by context in very significant ways.

Sociological Theories

One of the first sociologists to examine the topic of play was Spencer, and his views were previously addressed under the surplus energy theory of play. The social signifi­ cance of play was not specifically a concern of Spencer's explanation of this phenomenon; it was not until the writings of the German sociologist Simmel that a sociological examina­ tion of playful social interactions first appeared. In order to properly understand Simmel's ideas of the social nature of play, or what he referred to as "sociability," it is first necessary to elaborate his version of sociology.

For Simmel, sociology was primarily a method which sought to analyze society (or sociation) in a way that dis­ tinguished its form and content. By forms, Simmel is 35

referring to mental or logical categories which are the

basic organizing principles of experience, while contents

are those practical aspects of immediate existence such as

needs, drives, interests and purposes which lead individuals

to enter into interactions with one another.

According to Simmel, some forms of interaction emerge for the sake of the forms themselves, rather than for any practical purpose- These are the so-called play forms of sociality that are devoid of pragmatic content. For example,

Simmel describes playful forms of conversation in this way:

In serious affairs of life men talk for the sake of the content which they wish to impart or about which they want to come to an understanding— in sociability talking is an end in it­ self: in purely sociable conversation the content is merely the indispensable carrier of the stimulation, which the lively exchange of talk as such unfolds (Levine, 1971:136).

Another example that Simmel provides relates to the sexual interactions of men and wcmen. Whereas eroticism would be one serious content of such interactions, coquetry has emerged as a playful form of eroticism. in Simmel's words, "It is the essence of feminine coquetry to play hinted consent and hinted denial against each other to draw the man on without letting matters come to a decision, to rebuff him without making him lose all hope" (Levine, 1971:

134) . 36

According to Simmel, play forms of association are to be regarded as a process characterized by a sense of tact, equality {or democracy), and courtesy. Specifically, Simmel formulated the "principle of sociability" in this way:

"Everyone should guarantee to the other that maximum of sociable values (joy, relief, vivacity) which is consonant with the maximum of values he himself receives" (Levine,

1971:132).

In summary, for Simmel all playful modes of interaction put primary emphasis on the notion of "good form"; what is important about playful forms is not the contents of these interactions, but rather, how these interactions are actually accomplished.

The significance of play for both individual develop­ ment and society can be found discussed in the works of

George Herbert Mead. According to Mead (1934:152), play and games provide "a medium for the development of the self."

Mead studied children at play and observed that children go through two general stages in the development of their self-concepts. In the first, or play stage, the child plays at taking the roles of others. For Mead, play always involves playing at something— a child plays at being a mother, a cowboy, or a fireman.

Play in the above sense precedes the second stage, that of the organized game. The game stage differs from the play stage in that now the child must be able to take on the 37

attitude of others. The game involves an organization of

roles, and to play a game the child must address his perfor­

mance to the expectations of everyone involved in the game.

This is illustrated by Mead's description of the game of baseball. In an organized game of baseball, the child:

...must have the responses of each posi­ tion involved in his own position. He must "know what everyone else is going to do in order to carry out his own play. He has to take all of these roles. They do not all have to be present in conscious­ ness at the same time, but at some moments he has to have three or four individuals present in his own attitude, such as the one who is going to throw the ball, the one who is going to catch it, and so on. These responses must be, in some degree, present in his own make-up. In the game, then, there is a set of responses of such others so organized that the attitude of one calls out the appropriate attitudes of the other (Mead, 1934:151).

This ability to take on the role of the generalized other, and to recognize how roles have a definite relation­

ship to each other is an important function of game playing,

and is viewed by Mead as essential to successful participa­

tion in society.

Another important contribution to the study of play

can be found in the works of the French sociologist

Caillois. Caillois (1961) begins by providing a critique

of Huizinga's widely accepted definition of play, a defini­

tion which was previously considered here. Caillois argues

that Huizinga's analysis is actually restricted to a certain

type of play: contests or competitive games. According 38 to Caillois, Huizinga, as well as others, have minimized the many diversified forms of play and games. Caillois, in his examination of different game possibilities, proposed a fourfold game classification: games are to be categorized according to the dominance of the role of competition (agon), chance (alea), simulation (mimicry), or vertigo (ilinx).

This game classification is illustrated by Caillois (1961:

13) in the following manner: "One plays football, billiards, or chess (agon); roulette or a lottery (alea) r pirate,

Nero, or Hamlet (mimicry) : or one produces in oneself, by a rapid whilring or falling movement, a state of dizziness and disorder (ilinx)."

To further remedy the narrowness of Huizinga's formu­ lation, Caillois places games on a continuum with two polar types. According to this typology, at one extreme there are types of games which manifest a kind of uncon­ trolled fantasy, creativeness, impulsiveness, exuberance, improvisation, and spontaneity. This polar type if desig­ nated paidia— its root being derived from the word "child."

At the other end of the continuum are types of games charac­ terized as arbitrary, conventionalized, calculated, anJ subordinated to rules. This polar type is designated

1udus. Whereas games of the former type are dominated by impulse, games of the latter type are dominated by control.

In summary, for Caillois the movement toward ludus and away from paidi a is accompanied by greater and greater 39 explicit game regulation.

Li mi tat1ons of Existing Theories

As previously noted there is little consensus among scientists on the question of what is play. In fact, there are nearly as many definitions of play as there are scholars who write about play. Unfortunately, much of the conceptual confusion surrounding the phenomenon of play is compounded

in theoretical attempts to explain its origins or functions.

These theoretical formulations of play must be judged inade­ quate on several grounds.

The most widely accepted theories of play regard play

as practice for adult activity. One major difficulty with

these explanations is that no clear distinction is made

between the playful and non-playful behaviors of children

or young animals. Surely not all the behaviors of the young

are to be regarded as playful.

Another deficiency of practice/developmental theories,

as well as some ethological theories, is that it has never

been documented that if the young are prevented from playing

that they will be less efficient as adults. That is, the

hypothesis that play is practice for adult life has not been

supported by empirical evidence. Furthermore, the question

can be raised as to why it is necessary to play in order

to practice, when the animal (or human) could just practice. 40

But perhaps more importantly, as Loi2 0 s (1967:185) correctly

notes, "To regard play as practice for adult function does not account for the fact that adults as well as infants play

in most mammalian species in which play occurs at all."

Nearly all play theories regard play as primarily a child­ hood phenomenon, thus denying the very possibility of adult

forms of playful expressions.

Many of these theories of play can be criticized for

their lack of empirical support. Very seldom do theorists attempt to document their explanations with actual cases of playfulness. With the possible exception of ethological studies, when examples are given most tend to be hypothetical and these illustrations do not usually relate to the every­ day lives of children or adults.

All of these theories share one thing in common: they all start with the assumption that play must serve as some­ thing which is not play, that it must have some kind of pur­ pose. In approaching play as if it is something to be ex­ plained away, most of these theories deal only incidently with the question of what play is in itself, or what it means for the players.

Another criticism of these theories is that they are all inconsistent with their own definitions of play, as well as the essential nature of play as a social phenomenon. Most of these theories define play as an activity that is characterized by an emotional element of pleasure, spontaneity, 41 and as an end in itself. In other words, play is defined as having no extrinsic goals, as being inherently unpro­ ductive. Yet to explain play by noting the importance of the possible functions or consequences of this phenomenon is in effect to deny the very essence of play.

It should be noted also that many of these definitions and theories of play often simply describe play as not real, or not work, or not serious. In these formulations play depends on contrast and has a systematic relationship to that which is not play. However, the exact nature of this relationship is never made clear,^ and a close inspection of these conceptualizations reveals a number of questionable presuppositions. Ontologically, an external and independent reality is postulated. Moreover, this reality is presupposed as a given and is said to exist prior to play. Such presuppositions are tantamount to re­ garding reality as a fixed and changeless category.

It is necessary not only to reassess the deeply en­

trenched dichotomy between play and reality (or between play and work) that many of these theories assume to exist, but also to call into question such static conceptions of both play and reality.^ Play and reality must be regarded as both process and interactional activities. As such, questions must be raised as to how7 a sense of play (or

reality) is accomplished. Rather than define play as a

class of activities, or as being simply in opposition to 42 work or reality, attempts must be made to describe how and under what conditions spontaneous forms of adult playfulness actually emerge in everyday social situations.

Summary

This survey of the available literature on play reveal­ ed a dearth of scholarly writing on the topic of adult play.

Although some of the most prominent names in sociology have incorporated into their work theoretical statements about the significance and relevance of play, these sociologists, as well as other social scientists, have mainly concerned themselves with issues related to the functions of play.

And since one important function of play is practice for adult roles, many of these theories either ignore or deny the very possibility of adult forms of playful expressions.

This review of the play literature has revealed a con­ spicuous absence of a systematic description and analysis of spontaneous adult play in everyday social interaction. The absence of such research provides an important rationale for doing the present study.

Whereas the aim of the present chapter was to provide a review of the relevant literature of play, the following chapter will review the theoretical approaches underlying this investigation of the organization of spontaneous adult social play. 43

NOTES - CHAPTER II

Winnicott {3 971) is even reluctant to provide examples* As he acknowledges, "the thing that I am referring to is uni­ versal and has infinite variety" {Winnicott, 1971:xii).

2 Borrowing these terms from biology, Piaget noted that the two processes of assimilation and accommodation are present in all activities. Assimilation involves the adjustment of new objects into the child's existing knowledge schemata, while accommodation involves the modification of such know­ ledge schemata in response to new objects. A more extended discussion of Piaget’s views of play will be taken up later in this chapter in an examination of various theories of play.

3 Berlyne’s (1969:843) conclusions to his review of empirical studies and theories of play are perhaps representative of the scientific community's difficulty in conceptualizing play. Berlyne suggests that play is not a particularly use­ ful category and that "psychology would do well to give up the category of play in favor of both wider and narrower categories of behavior."

4 This is true of Huizinga’s native language, Dutch, where one word corresponds to both the nouns "play" and "games." For the most part Huizinga's remarks about plav really refer to games with rules.

5 Huizinga's pessimism over the future of European civiliza- tion appears to be related to historical events in Europe during the 1920's and 1930's, especially the rise of Nazi- ism (Norbeck, 1976:5).

^Stevens (1963:386), for example, notes that in nearly all other societies than ours children are very much involved in work: "Typically, work begins somewhere between the ages of three and six, the load of duties is gradually increased, and sometime between the ages of nine and fifteen the child becomes -occupationally speaking— a fully functioning adult. 44

7 The recreation theory of the German philosopher Lazarus accepted Schiller's notion of an opposition between work and play; however, rather than theorizing that play is the result of surplus energy, Lazarus argued that play actually conserves or restores energy. Lazarus advocated active re­ creation as a restorative for work (Millar, 1968:20)’. Kando (1980:27) notes too that modern meanings of recreation tend to conceive recreation in some lialetical relationship to work.

Q Poole’s (1966) observations of polecats demonstrate one such alteration. In contrast to genuine aggression, Poole noted that aggressive play is adapted to the strength of the opponent and attempts to avoid both pain and fear producing si tuations. o Aldis (1975:109) reports that adult play is extremely rare, noting that "When it does occur, it appears to be mainly be­ tween young adults, and as such it may merely represent a lingering remnant of the juvenile tendency to play." Bell and Harper (1977:173) also observe that "In most mammals, the young are responsible for the initiation of play-bouts with adults."

*^lt can be argued that play is not always completely dis­ tinct from work or other non-play activities. For example, how would these theories classify someone who was both work­ ing and playing at the same time?

^One frequent strategy for achieving a static description of play is noted by Denzin (1975:461-462). Denzin, in his overview of existing theories of play and games, observes that often such formulations are restricted to "context- free typologies." Such de-contextualizations gloss the in situ and interactiona1 production of play. CHAPTER III

FRAMING THE STUDY: REVIEW OF THEORETICAL APPROACHES

"The goal of the social sciences is the explanation of the 'social reality* as experienced by man living his everyday life within the social world" (Schutz, 1962:34).

The previous chapter's review of the literature related to theories and definitions of play revealed a need for studies of adult play. The current investigation is justi­ fied in that adult play has been found to be an area of everyday life that exists, yet there has been little or no scrutiny of this social phenomenon by most of us, lay or professional. Moreover, since there exists no comprehen­ sive study of this social phenomenon as it pertains to adult social life, this investigator has opted to examine adult play as it occurs naturally in a variety of everyday life situations.

The aim of the present chapter is to review the various theoretical approaches which guided this research project.

Although the goal of this investigation was to examine adult social play with as few preconceptions as possible, this work is, nevertheless, informed by a number of theoreti­ cal commitments. Briefly, this investigation of the organi­ zation of adult forms of playful social interactions was

45 46 influenced by the following perspectives: (1) ethnometho- dology (including conversational analysis); (2) existential sociology; (3) frame analysis; and (4) phenomenological sociology.

Elsewhere, these perspectives have been described by Douglas (1980) under the rubric "sociologies of every­ day life," and by Smart (1976) as "alternative sociologies."

Although there exist some important differences, each of these four approaches shares a common theoretical founda­ tion. The identification and elaboration of the assump­ tions making up this common foundation is the focus of the present chapter, and the relevance of each of these approaches to the methodological goals of this dissertation will be discussed. Following the recommendations of Kaplan (1964), this discussion of methodology will focus primarily on the underlying theoretical presuppositions and assumptions of methods, and only secondarily on criteria used in assessing the specific procedures (or techniques) of data collection.

Sociologies of Everyday Life

As previously noted, the concern of this dissertation is to examine adult social play itself--to display this phenome­ non on its own terms. In order to accomplish this objective, actual cases of spontaneous forms of adult play were identi­ fied and observed in a variety of everyday life situations. This eoimiiitment to study social phenomena on their own terms by observing naturally occurring instances of these forms of social interaction relates to what Douglas has described as the underlying orientation of the sociology of everyday life.

According to Douglas (1980:1) : "The sociology of everyday life is a sociological orientation concerned with the experi­ encing, observing, understanding, describing, analyzing, and communicating about people interacting in concrete situations.

There are two important points made in this definition, and both points have important epistemological implications.

First, this type of sociology attempts to observe and experience the actions and behaviors of individuals engaged in ordinary, everyday life social situations. According to

Schwartz and Jacobs (1979:5), this everyday life world in­ cludes :

motives, meanings, emotions, and other subjective aspects of the lives of in­ dividuals and groups. It also includes their daily actions and behaviors in ordinary settings and situations, the structure of those actions, and the ob­ jective conditions that accompany and in­ fluence them.

These social situations are the natural settings of daily life, and are not experimentally controlled, or hypo­ thetical situations. Rather than hypothesizing about what adult social play looks like, or questioning members of society as to what they think happens or did happen during social occasions of play, the sociologist of everyday life 48 attempts to observe and experience firsthand what in fact does happen when adults engage in playful social interactions.

Secondly, the sociologies of everyday life seek to ana­ lyze the social world from the perspective of the partici­ pants. The actors' subjective points of view are central to this version of sociology. Unlike natural or physical phe­ nomena, social phenomena have an intrinsic meaning structure, and "are characterized by and only recognizable because of their meaningfulness for members in the social world" (Smart,

1976:74). Social life provides its own account of the in­ telligibility of things: individuals in daily life have their own practical ways of describing and explaining the social world. Sociologists must necessarily rely on these common sense meanings and interpretive methods in formulat­ ing their own accounts of the social world. According to

Schutz (1962), the sociologist's description of social reality is uniquely different from the natural scientist's description of physical reality.

The observational field of the social scientist--social reality--has a speci­ fic meaning and relevance structure for the human beings living, acting, and thinking within it. By a series of common- sense constructs they have pre-selected and pre-interpreted this world which they ex­ perience as the reality of their daily lives. It is these thought objects of theirs which determine their behavior by motivating it. The thought objects constructed by the social scientist, in order to grasp this social reality, have to be founded upon the thought objects constructed by the 49

common-sense thinking of men, living their daily life within their social world (Schutz, 196 2:59).

In other words, the constructs of the sociologists must be consistent with the constructs of common sense experience of social reality. It follows then that an important cri­ terion for assessing these sociological descriptions is that these accounts must appear understandable and plausible to the members involved.^

This interpretive type of inquiry assumes that social reality is made up of the meanings which actors give to their actions and situations; therefore, the methodological aim of this type of sociology is the interpretation and understanding of people from their own frames of reference. However, this subjective interpretation of symbolic meanings involves more than introspection and empathy; it is also arrived at by making reference to the described typifications.

According to Schutz (1962), and more recently Garfinkel

(1967) and other ethnomethodologists, the most distinguishing characteristic of the social world is that it is organized around typification schemes and that sociology should concern 2 itself with these folk typologies. Social communication and interaction presuppose a typification process; social typifi- cations are used as common schemes of interpretation that make concerted social action possible. As Schutz (1962:17) notes: In all the other forms of social rela­ tionship (and even in the relationship among consociates as far as the unrevealed aspects of the other's self are concerned) the fellow man's self can merely be grasped by a "contribution of imagination of hypo­ thetical meaning presentation "... that is, by forming a construct of a typical way of behavior, a typical pattern of underlying motives, of typical attitudes of a personality type....

Although an understanding of the participants' definition of the situation is an important starting point, later ana­ lysis attempts to go beyond these subjective meanings.

Bittner (1973) has argued too that phenomenological sociology must move beyond the descriptions of social situations as they appear to the participants, noting that the failure to do so must be regarded as an abortive phenomenology. Al­ though phenomenology and the sociologies of everyday life attempt to remain open to the phenomena themselves, this is not to imply that social life is to be understood solely on the grounds of what participants think it is. Mehan and

Wood (1975:19), for example, state the following: "All reali­ ties may upon analysis exhibit a coherent system of knowledge, but knowledge of this coherence is not necessarily part of the awareness of its members."

During the analysis phase of the present work a number of rules or premises will be identified that are viewed as basic to the production of playful social interactions. As will be demonstrated, adult social play depends on the mutual acceptance of certain rules for doing play. Although 51 players art in accordance with these rules, they nevertheless may not be able to articulate all of these rules of play.

The analysis of playful forms of social interaction, how­ ever, reveals that various rules and assumptions are pre­ supposed by players, thereby making playful interactions possible. These rules must be socially recognized during play, and are displayed through the actual ways playful occasions are successfully accomplished and maintained.

In summary, a sociology of everyday life must attempt to critically analyze the typification schemes and other interpretive procedures that individuals use in their daily lives to organize their social experiences. Typification schemes and other common sense methods are used by persons

(laymen and social scientists alike) as resources for describing, understanding, and otherwise organizing social settings. However, these typifications as systems of mean- 3 ing can be studied as topics in their own right. As topics of analysis, these common sense schemes of interpretation must be critically examined. By setting aside (or "bracket­ ing") everyday preconceptions about social reality, the researcher is then able to analyze the social world from a new approach, an approach that allows one to examine the 4 very assumptions that structure the experiences of indivi­ duals in the world of daily life. The end result of such an exami nation is the identification of various tacit rules 52 and "background assumptions” (Garfinkel, 1967) that players and others necessarily use in organizing their social worlds.

Theoretical Foundations

As previously suggested, the various approaches which guided this research process share a common theoretical foundation. This foundation is built on the following four premises: (1) the situational determination of meanings;

(2) the problematic nature of social reality; (3) the social construction of meanings; and (4) the fusion of thinking and feeling. Each of these premises will be discussed in detail, with particular attention being addressed to the ontological implications of this theoretical foundation. Following this discussion, the methodological implications of this theoretical foundation will be noted. As will be demonstrated, the theoretical foundation of the various sociologies of everyday life offer a critique of, and an alternative to, conventional sociology's approach to the social world.

Situational Determination of Meaning

The first theoretical premise of the various sociologies of everyday life relates to the fundamental interdependency of human actions and their situational context. There 53 exists an intrinsic connection between meaning and action such that the nature of meaning can be clarified only by making reference to human actions. In other words, the mean­ ing of social actions do not inhere in the actions themselves, but rather "meanings are conferred upon social events by interacting individuals, who must first interpret what is going on from the social context in which these events occur"(Schwartz and Jacobs, 1979:8).

Douglas (1970:37) refers to this contextual determina­ tion of meaning in his discussions of the "integrity of the situation," calling this reference to the situation the basic principle of phenomenological sociology. According to

Douglas, "The basic idea of this principle is that concrete human events are always to some degree dependent on the situational context in which they occur, and can be ade­ quately explained only by taking into consideration that situational context." This conception of explanation parallels that of Weber's (1949) "adequacy at the level of mean ing."

Ethnomethodology has also insisted on the "situated,"

"contextual," or "embedded" character of social activity

(of. Zimmerman, 1978). Ethnomethodologica1 concern with the "integrity of the situation," or the contextual nature of events and objects, manifests itself in the concept of 4 "indexicality." Indexicality refers to the idea that the 54 meaning of objects and events are intrinsically tied to the context in which these meanings arise.

Without knowledge of a context social objects and events have vague and equivocal meanings. For example, given that social play has its origin in an ongoing interactional pro­ cess, to recognize playful interactions one would have to have an understanding of the total situation from which such play emerges. In order to interpret an action as playful one would need to know such particulars as who is involved, what is their relationship to one another, what is the

setting of the interaction, and how does this action relate

to the total social process. Without such knowledge, the meaning of a particular action cannot be decided. This is

so because actions in one context may be recognized as play­

ful, yet the exact same actions in another context may have

entirely different meanings, and be interpreted as something quite else.

Problematic Nature of Social Reality

The second underlying theoretical premise of these socio­

logies of everyday life is the notion that social life is 5 partially problematic, and oftentimes even unpredictable.

Although there are social situations that are highly routine

and predictable, individuals cannot always predict with

exact certainty what will happen in any given social 55 situation. Douglas (1980:11) notes this feature of daily life in the following way;

Our own feelings, thinking, and actions are problematic because we cannot totally predict what situations will arise. We therefore must always remain open to changing situations. We must adapt par­ tially to concrete situations as they arise or emerge, independently of our earlier feelings, perceptions, thoughts, or antici­ pations of situations and actions.

Social reality is precarious, and according to Mehan and Wood (1975:23), because all realities are fragile they are all capable of dissolution. Garfinkel's (1967) "breach­ ing experiments" demonstrate just how easily social reality can be disrupted. In particular, ethnomethodology suspends belief in a stable system of meanings that underlie social order. The social world is no longer regarded as having a pre-existent objectivity which is simply taken for granted.

This suspension thus renders intersubjectivity problematic.

Questions must then be raised as to how we come to know other people's minds; indeed, questions must be raised as to how social reality itself is possible.

The above questions are addressed in ethnomethodologi- cal studies by focusing attention on the very ways individuals accomplish a sense of reality through social interaction.

All realities are to be seen as the product of "ceaseless social interactional work" (Mehan and Wood, 1975:20). Such work accomplishes a sense of an external and objective

. T 6 soc.1 a 1 wor J d . 56

Another feature of social reality that renders social life problematic is that social reality is far from homo­ geneous. Schutz (1962:97) suggests that "there are several, probably an infinite number of various orders of realities, each with its own special and separate style of existence."

Among these orders of realities, Schutz identifies such finite provinces of meaning as the world of everyday life-- which Schutz views as the paramount reality--the world of dreams, the world of religious experience, the world of science, and the play world of the child. Each of these worlds: (1) has its own cognitive style; (2) manifests a unity of lived experience; and (3) cannot be reduced to 7 or transformed into another.

Goffman (1974:26) criticizes Schutz's notion of the paramount reality of the everyday life-world, noting that the identification of a primary framework is considerably more problematic. According to Goffman, individuals organize their experiences according to a number of basic frameworks, sometimes applying several frameworks at any given time. The aim of Goffman's frame analysis "is to try to isolate some of the basic frameworks of under­ standing available in our society for making sense out of events and to analyze the special vulnerabilities to which these frames of reference are subject" (Goffman, 1974:10).

Relevant to this discussion of the problematic nature of social reality is Goffman's concept of "keying." Keying 57 involves a systematic transformation of a given activity

"into something patterned on this activity but seen by parti­ cipants to be something quite else" {Goffman, 1974:10) . Such keying may introduce only slight changes in the activity, however, participants would likely experience the activity very differently. Take, for instance, the activity of mock, or playful, fighting. Players themselves may easily recog­ nize that their actions are to be regarded playfully; others, however, might conclude that a "real" fight was in progress.

The above illustration is but one example of how the meanings of social actions may be misunderstood. The question of how people are able to make sense (or play) together is extremely complex. To some extent shared understandings must be viewed as problematic in that individuals never know with absolute certainty what is really happening in social situations.

Social Construction of Meanings

The third premise of the sociologies of everyday life can be seen as an extension of the preceding two premises, as well as what has been previously stated regarding how these approaches to the study of the social world are to be defined.

The fundamental focus of these investigations of the everyday social world is on the various processes that 58 members of society employ in accomplishing a meaningful and orderly interpretation of the social world. It was noted, for example, that typification schemes are utilized in common sense reasoning to create and preserve a sense of reality. That is to say, basic to the sociologies of every­ day life is the conception of social interaction as an in­ terpretive process. Implicit in these statements is the assumption that the interpretation of social reality is dependent on human activity, that social reality is con­ structed and maintained in social interactions.

As noted, social life is never completely predictable; individuals must to some extent create meanings in particular social settings. These social meanings do not inhere in ob­ jects and events themselves, rather meanings are constituted through intersubjective communication and action. Given that

"reality is socially constructed" (Berger and Luckmann, 1966:

1), the sociologies of everyday life attempt to analyze the various processes through which this occurs in social interaction.

Fusion of Thinking and Feeling

The preceding three premises of the sociologies of everyday life have emphasized the more rational, cognitive, and symbolic features of daily social interactions. What is conspicuously absent from this discussion is a 59 consideration of the more non-rational aspects of social

life. According to Douglas and Johnson (1977), it is impor­ tant to study all forms of human experience, and not just

the rational side of human existence. One approach that

attempts to account for an individual's total experience

of being in the social world is existential sociology.

Existential sociology acknowledges the primacy of the

affective elements of human experience in everyday social

interactions, and can be viewed as "a framework for under­

standing the non-rational aspects of human life, especially

the situated nature of emotions" (Manning, 1973:335). Exis­

tential sociology begins by recognizing the total ensemble

of human actions, which includes not only thoughts and

symbols, but also feelings, emotions, and moods.

Feelings and emotions interact with thoughts in complex

ways. Johnson (19 75:145-176) refers to this interaction as

"the fusion of thinking and feeling. 11 It is this fusion of

thinking and feeling which defines the context in which

individuals situate themselves. According to Kotarba

(1979:357), "Being-within-the-world means that feelings and primordial perception precede rationality and symbol use, and, in fact, activate them. Prereflective perception... is the basis for our awareness of self and the world...."

Individuals are always engaged in feelings, and always experience moods of some kind. Existential sociology’s 60

omph as is on the importance of feelings and moods in every­ day life is especially relevant to the study of adult social play, since feelings and moods are important ingredients of play. Given that human consciousness is always conscious- 0 ness of something, the consciousness of the player is very much directed towards the achievement of certain emo­ tional states. From the perspective of those engaging in playful forms of social interaction, experiences such as

joy, excitement, engrossment, silliness, and a sense of fun are to be considered essential parts of the intentionality

of play. As we shall see, play is defined by these feelings

and moods in very important ways.

Moreover, existential sociology's emphasis on the spon­

taneous and creative dimensions of human experience is

extremely relevant to the present study. Like the other

sociologies of everyday life, existential sociology stresses

the changing and emergent nature of human experience and the

social world.

Summary

The commitment of this dissertation to approach play on

its own terms--by identifying and observing actual cases of

adult social play in everyday life situations— was related to

a number of approaches to the social world that Douglas (1980)

has labeled "the sociologies of everyday life." The major 61

theoretical assumptions of these sociologies of everyday

life were identified, and the relationship of these assump­

tions to the present study of playful adult social interac­

tions was discussed. Specifically, the following assump­

tions about the nature of the social world were explicated:

(1) the meanings of social objects and events are tied to

the siuaaled context in which these meanings arise;

(2) social meanings are problematic in nature; (3) social meanings are constructed and are dependent on human acti­

vity; and (4) human social existence is dominated by the

fusion of thinking and feeling.

As can be seen, the sociologies of everyday life differ

from conventional sociological theories in calling for an

alternative set of theoretical assumptions about the nature of the social world. In particular, these sociologies of everyday life "bracket" (or suspend) the assumption of

everyday life and conventional forms of sociological

theorizing that there exists a meaningful external world in­

dependent of social interaction. By not regarding intersub­

jectivity and social reality as ontological givens, the

sociologies of everyday life raise questions about how in­

dividuals accomplish a sense of reality through social in­

teraction. Instead of viewing individuals' subjective mean­

ings as taken for granted resources of sociological inquiry,

these subjective meanings which create the reality of the

social world are treated as topics of inquiry. In this way 62

the tacit assumptions that structure the experiences of in­

dividuals and organize their social worlds can be identi­

fied and examined.

In their recognition that social phenomena are unlike natural or physical phenomena, the sociologies of everyday

life criticize conventional sociology's acceptance of the natural scientific paradigm, and specifically reject the positivist's view that there is only one general set of cri­

teria for scientific validity. The sociologies of everyday

life call for a methodology that is grounded in the under­ standing of everyday life, a methodology that is appropriate to the interpretive and meaningful social world.

The examination of this methodology is the subject matter of the following chapter. In Chapter IV the specific research techniques of this investigation of playful forms of adult social interaction will be identified. It is here that a rationale will be provided for why these research techniques were chosen, and why methods inherited from the natural and physical sciences are inappropriate to the study of the lived- experience of adult play in the everyday social world. 63

NOTES - CHAPTER III

Schutz (1962:44) refers to this principle governing the con­ struction of scientific models of human action as "the postu­ late of adequacy." Goffman (1974:9) acknowledges too that his choice of perspective is "one that participants would easily recognize to be valid."

2 Tiryakian (1968) refers to these folk classifications as "existential typologies," noting that such typologies are not limited merely to the scientific frame of reference. In this regard, "typologizing, in the sense of structuring the world or perceiving it by means of categorical types, is a basic orientation of human agents to their situation" (Tiryakian, 1968:184). Typologizing must be seen then as a basic human activity.

^Zimmerman and Pollner (1970) have suggested that traditional sociological approaches are characterized by a confounding of topic and resource. The world of everyday life is employed as an unexplicated resource for sociological investigations, yet this familiar common sense world is seldom a topic in its own right.

4 This contextual determination of meaning requires "the ana- lyzability of actions-in-context given that not only does no concept of context-in-general exist, but every use of 'con­ text' without exception is itself essentially indexical" (Garfinkel, 1967:10).

^Lyman and Scott (1970:1) have taken this premise to its ex­ treme in arguing for a "sociology of the absurd." They claim: "The world is essentially without meaning. In contrast to that sociology which seeks to discover the real meaning of action... this new sociology asserts that all systems of belief, in­ cluding that of conventional sociologists, are arbitrary." 64

Ethnomethodological studies have identified a number of in­ teractional or interpretive practices by which everyday ac­ tors establish a "sense of social structure." These prac­ tices include "the reciprocity of perspectives," "et cetera," and the use of "normal forms." These and other practices are discussed in greater detail in Chapter IX.

7 Schutz (1962:2 31-2 32) argues that the transition from the paramount reality of everyday life to other provinces of meaning is accompanied by a "leap" or "shock" which radi­ cally modifies our consciousness.

8 Phenomenology refers to this orientation of consciousness to that which it is conscious of as the ”intentionality of consciousness." CHAPTER IV

DOING THE STUDY: ETHNOGRAPHIC AND EXISTENTIAL METHODS

"Respect the nature of the empirical world and organize a methodological stance to reflect that respect" (Blumer, 1969:60).

Whereas the aim of the preceding chapter was to outline

the various theoretical approaches which guided this re­ search, the purpose of the present chapter is to identify

and defend the various research techniques that were employed

in this investigation. Specifically, the research goal of

this dissertation was to discover how a sense of playful­ ness is achieved in everyday adult social interactions.

Another important objective of this chapter is to exa­ mine the various research questions which necessarily guided

this investigation, with particular attention being paid to

the process of developing and modifying an appropriate re­ search design. Throughout this chapter, efforts will be made to document both the selection and formulation of research problems, and the actual research experience itself.

For reasons to be made evident later in this chapter, the employment of a qualitative methodology was considered to be most appropriate for this investigation. According to

Filstead (1970:6), qualitative methodology refers

65 66

to those research strategies, such as parti­ cipant observation, in-depth interviewing, total participation in the activity being investigated, field work, etc., which allow the researcher to obtain firsthand know­ ledge about the empirical world in question. Qualitative methodology allows the researcher to "get close to the data," thereby develop­ ing the analytical, conceptual, and categori­ cal components of explanation from the data itself— rather than from preconceived, rigid­ ly structured, and highly quantified techni­ ques that pigeonhole the empirical social world into the operational definitions the researcher has constructed.

Although many of the underlying theoretical assumptions of this methodological stance were identified in the preced­ ing chapter’s description of the "sociologies of everyday life," the main features of this approach to the social world may be briefly summarized. Qualitative sociologists:

(1) investigate particular social phenomena without

preconceptions of their nature;

(2) attempt to observe and experience firsthand what

happens in everyday social situations;

(3) analyze the social world from the participant's

perspective; and

(4) report their findings in the natural language of

social participants.^

Given that the participants' subjective points of view are central to qualitative methodology (Schwartz and Jacobs,

1979:5), qualitative sociologists in their attempts to gain access to the life-world of other individuals seek to dis­ cover such subjective phenomena as the motives, meanings, and 67 emotions that make up the participants' "definition of the situation" (Thomas, 1928:584). This "definition of the situation" consists of the actor's ongoing perception and interpretation of the social interaction that he and others participate in. Blumer (1966:540) describes this feature of social situations by noting that in interaction

the participants fit their acts together, first by identifying the social act in which they are about to engage and, second, by interpreting and defining each other's acts in forming the joint act. By identi­ fying the social act or joint action, the participant is able to orient himself, he has a key to interpreting the acts of the others and a guide for directing his action with regard to them....

This "definition of the situation" is to be regarded as a necessary component of organized social interaction (cf.

McHugh, 1968), and the methodological aim of qualitative inquiry is to discover the participant's ways of defining and organizing everyday social experiences.

One final implication of this methodological approach must be considered. The commitment of qualitative methodo­ logy to analyze the social world from the participants' per­ spective dictates that the research report should contain a significant amount of description. Lofland (1971:4) argues that in order to capture the participants in their own terms, "the report should contain direct quotations from the participants as they speak and/or from whatever they might write down." For this reason, examples and illustrations of what participants themselves describe as 68

playful social interactions will be extensively utilized

throughout this dissertation. It is not only believed that

such exposition will yield a more meaningful picture of the social world of adult play by allowing readers to grasp the

reference in terms of their own experiences, but the exten­

sive use of examples and illustrations allows readers access

to the data from which generalizations and conclusions will be drawn. in this way, readers are able to join in the process of analyzing the data, and of offering an alterna­

tive interpretation should one appear more plausible.

Research Strategies

Employing a qualitative methodology, the topic of spon­

taneous forms of adult play was approached and described by a variety of research strategies. Direct personal observa­

tions of naturally occurring playful interactions among

adults were viewed as a necessary and essential ingredient

of this research process. Furthermore, personal participa­

tion in a wide variety of playful social situations served

as another important resource. These first two research

strategies comprise the basic methodological stance of parti-

pant observation.

Other techniques of data collection employed in this

study include the use of still photographs, audio-tapes, in­

formal interviews, group discussions, journalistic materials, 69

informants' accounts, and experiential descriptions (cf.

Kleinman, 1968) of individuals (primarily college students) who either observed or participated in a wide variety of playful forms of social interactions. Each of these research strategies will be described more fully in the following dis­ cussion of how four particular research techniques contri­ buted to the present investigation of adult social play. It is extremely important that the reader have a clear under­ standing of how the ethnographic descriptions that will be reported on later in this dissertation were accomplished, and what this researcher’s role was in the production of the descriptive work.

Essentially, the data collection process of this inves­ tigation of adult social play can be divided into the follow­ ing four stages:

(1) early observations of self and others involved in

face-to-face interactions;

(2) limited observations of public displays of adult

play;

(3) unstructured informants' accounts of play episodes;

and

(4) structured informants' accounts of play episodes

that involved standardized questions regarding

crucial features of the organization of social play,

including a question concerning the affective dimen­

sions of the play experience. 70 Each of these stages will now be described in greater de­

tail in a discussion of this study's use of the techniques of participant observation, informants' accounts, experien­

tial descriptions, and photography.

Participant Observation

The specific aim of the strategy of participant observa­ tion, or field research, is to develop the ability to see and experience a situation in participants' terms {cf. Bruyn,

1966:15,21; Williams, 1967:61; Lofland, 1971:4,7; Johnson,

1975:X; and Douglas, 1976:17). Although field research de­ mands that research procedures be specifically adapted to

the setting and the phenomenon investigated, such research typically requires that the scientific observer maintain a

face-to-face involvement with the members of a particular social setting in order to observe their everyday actions.

The actions of individuals in face-to-face interaction are structured and regulated (Goffman, 1964), yet, as Chappie

(1970:223) notes, "The elements of 'social' organization, the structuring of the relationships of individuals are rare­

ly looked at from the point of view of direct observation."

Unlike most field research, the present investigation did not seek to observe any particular group of individuals, nor were observations limited to any particular social setting. Rather, this investigator attempted to examine 71

the social production of play among as many groups of adults 2 who could be observed playing.

Initially this investigation of adult social play was

intentionally quite exploratory— at the beginning of this

project no specific research hypotheses or theories were

tested. Consistent with the methods of a phenomenologically

informed sociology, the first methodological goal of this

research was an accurate and detailed description of the phenomenon in question. Bruyn (1970:284) notes that with regard to this goal

the phenomenologist is very much like the participant observer in so far as he approaches his subject with every effort to eliminate his preconceptions about it. He has no hypothesis to direct him; he takes special pains to conduct his research with a totally open mind, open in depth to all the stimuli that impinge upon his con­ sciousness during his investigation.

In other words, the first goal of this research process was

to examine the phenomenon of adult play as it actually exists, rather than in terms of a priori conceptualizations or from the assumptions of pre-formulated theory. The commitment of this research from the start was to study adult play on its own terms by observing naturally occurring instances of this form of social interaction in everyday life situa- 3 tions. In summary, the first stages of this research pro­ cess can be described as extremely open-ended, highly ex- 4 ploratory, and without focus. 72

I began by reflecting on my own direct personal ex­ periences of play--what play meant to me. I reflected on what T considered to be past experiences of social play that X personally had participated in, and I consciously examined current experiences that I recognized as playful.

While interacting with others I would ask myself such ques­ tions as "Is what we are now doing together playful?" and

"If it is playful, why?" I would also ask those others in­ volved in the interaction about their impressions of what it was that just happened. Most of these early observations were limited to myself and my closest circle of friends.

Mot only was the use of introspection and self-observa­ tion an important source of data, but it was an invaluable resource for formulating specific research questions. For example, I recorded the following notes shortly after be­ ginning this project.

Steve was telling me about his job and all the problems he was having with those he worked with. As I was listening to him it seemed to me he was getting carried away, exaggerating things to the point of absurdity. After a while I began to laugh because I thought he was only joking and that he was making up the whole story. After discussing my interpretation of what occurred between Steve and me, I realized that my understanding of his ac­ tions was not correct, and that I had mis­ read him. I thought he was kidding around and not being serious, and yet he claimed that he was serious. 73

These discussions with others also pointed out some of

the weaknesses of my own observations and typifications of

adult social interaction. For example, I made the following observation and recorded it as an instance of spontaneous adult social play.

Today while walking across the Oval at the university, I observed (from a distance) a group of people at play. They were in a circle, holding hands, and moving round and round. At first they went slowly, but gradually they went faster and faster, un­ til some actually fell on the ground. 1 watched them for several minutes, thinking to myself that these people were surely acting like a bunch of kids, that they were obviously having a good time. I concluded that they were just fooling around, and that this was surely an instance of adult play.

Later that day in a discussion with another sociologist I

was asked the question, "What do you mean by adult play?"

I answered by giving as an example the above scene that I had

just witnessed, thinking that this was surely a good illus­

tration of adult play. However the other person was not con­

vinced. She responded by declaring, "Maybe the group of people you saw were actually members of a dance class and they were practicing some dance exercise." Furthermore, she

argued, "Are you defining play by what you think it is, or by what the participants would say they were doing?"

These early observations and reflections about play

raised important research questions. Specifically, the

following questions began to emerge: 74

(1) What is play and how is it recognized in social

si tuations?

(2) Given that people may have different understandings

of social situations, and different definitions of

what is and what is not play, how is the mutual un­

derstanding of play socially achieved?

I began to realize just how complex and problematic it was for me to make sense of other people's behavior; I became aware of just how complex the question "Is this play?" really is.

It was noted in the last chapter that the sociologist must necessarily rely on common sense meanings and that the answer to the question "What does this social activity mean for me, the observer?" requires as a prerequisite the answer­ ing of the questions "What does this activity mean for the ob­ served actors and what did they mean by their actions?" Yet, at the same time, both the observer-researcher and the actor tend to employ the same interpretive procedures in describ­ ing everyday activities (Cicourel, 1974:39), The observer- researcher, like the actor, must rely upon similar typifica- tions in recognizing behavioral displavs. Thus, how I as an observer-researcher recognized play was similar in important ways to how play participants themselves recognized their own acts of playfulness.

In order to gain full familiarity with this area of adult social life I attempted to expose myself to as many 75 forms of playful interactions as possible. Not only did I record notes on examples of playfulness in my own interac­ tions with others, but I also went to a number of public

Pi aces where I thought adult playfulness would be likely to occur (e.g., bars, amusement parks, state fairs, parades, football games, parties, and other social "happenings"). In­ deed, some observations of adult play were made in these situations, although the vast majority of the social inter­ actions that I observed in these places were far from spon­ taneous and most were not playful. Furthermore, the observa­ tions that I did make in these public settings were different somehow from those that I observed in my own personal life.

After reflecting on this difference I began to realize that these public displays of playfulness were oftentimes staged for the benefit of those who witnessed such playful inter­ actions. It was almost like a theatrical play staged for public performance. In this sense, the audience was an in­ tegral part of the production of social play in public settings. Yet most of the playful acts which I observed or participated in did not involve an audience. In fact, many of the playful events that I personally oarticipated in pro­ bably would not have occurred at all in a public situation, or in the presence of strangers.

Coffman's (1959) dramaturgical distinction between

"frontstaae region" and "backstage region" is most relevant 76 to this discussion. According to Goffman, "frontstage" in­ volves public areas that are observable by strangers, whereas

"backstage" involves more private areas not observable by strangers. In these terms, it was my conjecture that most playful forms of adult interaction have a "backstage" quality, in that adult play is more likely to occur when people are relaxed, and the social setting is more informal. Backstage behavi or

consists of reciprocal first-naming, co­ operative decision-making, profanity, open sexual remarks, elaborate griping, smoking, rough informal dress, "sloppy" sitting and standing posture, use of dia­ lect or sub-standard speech, mumbling and shouting, playful aggressivity and "kidding"... (Goffman, 1959:128).

If adult playfulness is more characteristically a back­ stage kind of interaction, it would be extremely difficult for an outside researcher to observe the playfulness of others. Indeed, oftentimes while observing the playful ac­ tions of individuals I did not personally know, the play ended when the players became conscious of my presence. This was particularly true when I tried to photograph such 5 occasions. This form of adult social life was found to be highly reactive to social observation, and this is why such highly obtrusive techniques such as videotaping were ruled out as a source of data collection. 77

Furthermore, not only is it difficult to observe what

takes place in backstage areas, but indirect observations, by means of questionnaires and interviews, have obvious

shortcomings when they are employed to probe into the most private spheres of human behavior. For this reason, some of the most widely used research techniques in the social sciences could not be used in this study, since they actual­

ly tended to destroy the phenomenon that was being investi­ gated.

The realization that adult play may have a backstage quality raised important data collection problems. I could limit the study to adult play in public situations, and supplement these observations of public play with my own ob­ servations of personal play. Yet I had no way of knowing if my own personal experiences were similar to the personal experiences of others. A decision was made to recruit others to observe and describe instances of adult playfulness that were part of their own personal lives.

Informants' Accounts

In 1976, I was asked to speak to a class on the topic of "spontaneous adult social play." However, before doing so I asked that class members provide me with descriptions of situations that they themselves considered playful. The only instructions for this assignment that were provided were 78

to describe instances of spontaneous play and not formally

organized games or sports. A total of twelve graduate and

undergraduate students generated thirty-one separate obser­

vations of situations that were described as "spontaneous

playful social interactions." Nearly all of these observa­

tions were written from the point of view of the play parti­

cipants, as these were cases of playfulness that these stu­

dents had actually participated in themselves.

These and other accounts of adult playfulness added much to my understanding of how adult play is socially accom­ plished. In particular, I realized that the vast majority of the playful occasions reported were indeed backstage types of social behaviors* For example, the private nature of adult play is illustrated in this account of a student who unexpectedly witnessed the following acts of playful­ ness .

(lb-267) I walked into my room last night and my suitemate's boyfriend was feeding fudge to one of her stuffed animals. She was sitting next to him, giggling. When my presence became known she started laugh­ ing harder and he stopped. He put the fudge back in the pan and was really embarrassed. I could tell he was really embarrassed be­ cause he would not take his eyes off the floor.

And another student confessed the following: "We all stopped when people began to stare at us. I felt embarrassed when people began to look." As an outside observer and stranger, I would never be able to witness personally many episodes of adult playfulness. These written accounts also raised a number of impor­ tant questions. In describing these occasions of adult play the students left out of their descriptions some cru­ cial information. For example, one description started out this way: "Myself, Chuck and Tammy, and Linda were sitting around in Linda's house one night...." Specifically what was omitted from this account was exactly who these people were and what relationship they had with one another. Other students failed to specify where the playful interactions took place, or how the playful events related to what went before them in time. But most importantly, it was not al­ ways possible to tell why the person writing the description thought the interaction was playful in the first place. In order for a reader to fully comprehend the playfulness of these social occasions, observers needed to provide even greater details in their descriptions of what went on during these playful social interactions.

Over the course of the next four years additional ac­ counts of playful interactions were collected from students enrolled in my classes in a wide variety of college settings.

Although many of these descriptions involved a university en­ vironment, these accounts are by no means restricted to this setting. Many students described situations of play at home with their families, at picnics, weddings, on tennis courts, and even at work with fellow employees. Although play occurred more frequently in certain social situations, there 80 was an incredibly diverse number of settings described where these students had engaged in playful social interactions.

It appeared that adult social play could occur just about anywhere.^

All told, over a four-year period, some 1-850 observa­ tions of spontaneous adult play were collected as an exer­ cise in sixteen classes involving nearly 600 different stu­ dents. Students were instructed to write up their observations as quickly as possible after the episode took place, and they were asked to organize their descriptions according to a number of research questions. These questions will be identified in the concluding part of the present chapter, where the relationship of these questions to the problem of recognizing and accomplishing playful social inter­ actions will be examined.

These research questions were related to issues that evolved over the course of the present investigation, and these questions asked for a level of detail beyond that re­ quired for everyday practical understanding. Whenever possible, students were asked to supplement their written records with photographs and audio-tapes. When descriptions were incomplete with regard to supplying the necessary in­ formation, additional information was collected through the use of informal interviews. 81

in order to gain additional information on specific types of adult play, some classes were instructed to pay particular attention to instances of speech play, while other classes were asked to focus their attention on epi­ sodes pf play that occurred in the context of work.

These accounts of play are to be regarded as mini­ ethnographies (Leiter, 1980:161), in that the writers were communicating their understandings of the playful events.

The ethnographic details reported in the accounts were used by the writers to make various features of these playful settings observable to the reader. In almost all cases, these mini-ethnographies described and interpreted what happened during episodes of spontaneous adult play from the point of view of the participants, and only occasionally

from the point of view of an outside observer. However, even those who were non-participating observers experienced 7 some level of participation in the play experience.

This can be seen in the following comments made by observ­ ers ;

As I observed my brother and father play­ ing I felt very happy and carefree. I laughed with them because I knew they weren't serious and that they were just teasing each other.

Just watching them was very funny and en- j oyable. 82

Although I didn't participate in the prank directly, I was actually part of it be­ cause just my being there added to the em­ barrassment of the guy.

Moreover, although adult players sometimes exclude others

from participating or observing, play may also be expan­

sive, in that others are drawn into it. This can be seen

in the following episode.

(lb-59) The other day my roommate and his girlfriend got involved in a shaving cream fight. It started out in the hall as a small skirmish with no real serious in­ tent to continue. I watched and thought it was silly for college kids to be doing this. As I was going into my room they both suddenly attacked me and drew me into the war. I was surprised how much fun it was to do it.

This reference to the experiences of the observers leads

us now into a discussion of another important technique

of data collection— that of experiential descriptions.

Experiential Descriptions

After a good deal of reflection on my own personal ex­ periences of play, and after reviewing several hundred ac­

counts of the playful interactions of others, this researcher

became increasingly aware of the importance of the more

affective dimensions of the individual's experience of play­

ing. For example, a number of references were made in the

accounts to the feelings, emotions, and moods of the play

participants.* The social interaction was defined by these 83

feelings and moods in very essential ways. It became ob­

vious from these accounts that it was not only what people

did but how they perceived, interpreted and felt about what

they did, or what had been done to them, that lead them to

conclude that play was occurring in the social situations.

In other words, the subjective dimensions of the play ex­

perience, particularly the nature of personal feelings and

the attitudes of the players, are important ingredients of

the recognition of play in social situations.

A decision was then made to add another research ques­

tion to the present project. Individuals were asked to re­

port on the feelings that they had experienced while en­

gaged in playful social interactions. Specifically, the

following research question was raised: "How did you feel

while playing, or while you observed others at play?" Once

again players weie asked to record their feelings as soon

after the experience as possible.

In certain respects, this particular question was more

difficult for individuals to answer than some of the other

research questions. A frequent response to this question was "I really can't describe these feelings" or "I can't

put these feelings into words." Another student complained

that the assignment itself interfered with her enjoyment of

the play experience. 8 64 (5a-141) I didn't think this assignment was particularly fair. Every time I was having fun I would say to myself, "Write it down for sociology." And after doing that I didn't enjoy the situation in the same way -

It is important to realize that these experiential descriptions constitute the players' reflections about parti­ cular playful social interactions that they themselves participated in. In this sense, these descriptions are to be viewed as reflections about play, and not the actual lived-experience of play itself. These experiential descrip­ tions are, nevertheless, important as they suggest the significance and meaning of playful social interactions from the point of view of the players themselves. A summary and an analysis of these experiential descriptions will be the subject matter of Chapter X, and an attempt will be made there to describe the lived-experience of adult social play.

Still Photography

Another research strategy that was employed in this in­ vestigation of adult social play was the use of still photo­ graphy. Although there exists no universally agreed upon method for using photography in social science research, according to Collier (1967) and Curry and Clarke (1978:20) visual imagery can be utilized as an important part of the research process. 85

With regard to the present study of adult play, the use

of still photography served three important research pur­

poses. First, photography was used as a form of recording

and record keeping. For example, photographs were some­

times taken of the physical setting of the observed inter­

action, or other features of the play situation so that this

researcher could return later to the photographs and trans­

late these visual records into written notes. And sometimes

photographs were used in addition to written records simply

as an alternative way of describing the same social situa­

tion.

The second use of photography in this study involved

the collection of visual images that could be used to

substantiate the claim that a playful social interaction

had indeed taken place. Goffman (1979) notes too that

photographs may be utilized to provide such a documentation,

or what he refers to as an "instance-record." "An instance-

record is evidence (which a mere illustration is not) that

an instance of the practice did occur as pictured on the occasion of the picture taking" (Goffman, 1979:20) .

Another important way that photographs are utilized in

this dissertation is to visually display issues related to

the recognition of social play itself, specifically issues

related to the problematic nature of interpreting social

scenes and behaviors. In this regard, photographs are like social actions--they may be ambiguous and subject to a 86 variety of personal interpretations (and misinterpretations).

As Becker (1980:26) notes, "Every photograph can be inter­ preted as the answer to one or more questions." By way of example, the reader can refer to the photograph that appears on the following page. The ambiguous nature of this photograph relates in part to the absence of a caption, which, as Goffman (1979:14) suggests, frames a picture by instructing the viewer to attend to certain aspects of the 9 picture in a particular way.

Moreover, after viewing this photograph, how would you answer the question of whether play is or is not occurring in this social situation?

Two types of photographs can be found in this disser­ tation. Most of the photographs taken by the author were in public settings, and involved the technique of opportunistic sampling. Sorenson and Jablonko (1975:152) describe this sampling technique and its rationale in this way:

Seize opportunities. When something interesting happens pick up the camera and shoot. Opportunistic filming, a freewheeling yet indespensable approach to visual documentation of naturally occurring phenomena, takes advantage of events as they develop in unfamiliar settings.

Some degree of opportunistic filming is useful in filming any natural event. The world in its dynamic diversity con­ tinuously churns out transformations. We can never fully anticipate what is going to happen when or how it will occur.... 00 88 The second type of photograph that is used here con­ sists of candid or caught pictures taken by observers or participants in playful social interactions. Sometimes the people involved in the photograph are unaware that a picture was being made of their actions? at other times, players are posing for photographers as a way of record­ ing or remembering some playful event that has just taken

Pi ace. These candid photographs were taken in more pri­ vate social situations, and these candid photographs are an important source of data, because they make publicly available features of playful situations that originally were private in nature. This researcher gladly accepted these photographs, for as Collier (1967:43) notes, "We may photograph freely in the outer rings of public gatherings..., but as we move inward the ground becomes more treacherous, and we should accept the fact that there may be inner sanctums we never will be able to observe with the camera."

Perhaps the most important function that all of these photographs serve is that they represent a visual display of the phenomenon that is examined here. By examining these photographs of adult social play, the viewer to a certain extent can make certain inferences as to what was going on in these playful social scenes when the photograph was actually taken (cf. Goffman, 1979:13-14). 89

Research Questions

The next topic to be considered related to the speci­ fic research questions that were asked in structuring obser­ vations of adult social play. These questions very much related to various issues surrounding the recognition and social accomplishment of adult play. Furthermore, these research questions are essentially the analytic questions from which intrepretations and generalizations will be pur­ sued.

For purposes at hand, Weber's definition of social action provides a useful starting point in delineating the nature of human actions which are social in nature.

According to Weber (1964:88), "Action is social in so far as, by virtue of the subjective meanings attached to it by the acting individual (or individuals), it takes account of the behavior of others and is thereby oriented in its course." Thus, those engaged in playful forms of inter­ action with others must perform behaviors directed towards these others in their environment.

Given that my attention has been directed towards social forms of adult play, the crucial question that is ad­ dressed here is how such interactions are accomplished. Here the concern is with organization; specifically, how it is that participants in adult play are able to organize their 90 behaviors and activities for each other in order to create

a shared understanding of what it is that they are doing to­

gether.

Goffman (1974:8) has pointed out that individuals in­

volved in face-to-face interaction are confronted with the

question: "What is it that's going on here?" How this

question is answered may be presumed by the actual ways

mutual understandings are achieved through the assumption

of some shared consensus of what the participants are doing

in the situation. Individuals create a sense of what is

happening by constructing the types of environments that

their mutual understandings lead them to expect. Social

action in general, and social play in particular, is depen­

dent on a great deal of interactional work. Individuals

involved in concerted behavior must constantly inform and

make clear to one another and themselves what is going on

by mutually constructing recognizable social scenes and

events.

Given the above kinds of considerations, a number of questions were formulated in an attempt to provide an ade­ quate description of various play episodes. Central to all of these questions is a concern for how playful inten­ tions are communicated as behavior displays, and the necessary interpretive work that individuals engage in while making playful sense of what they and others do. A useful analytical approach to this problem of how social activities and events are organized is provided by

Speier (1973) in his overview of some of the formal ele­ ments of interactional events. Ethnomethodological studies have conclusively demonstrated that the social meanings of an individual's behavior are of an indexical or occa­ sioned nature. This notion of indexicality refers to the crucial role that the situation (setting) plays in pro­ ducing the social meaning of any given social behavior or event. The meanings of social actions must then be said to emerge out of the social occasions in which they'^are considered and interpreted. All interactions can be said to take place within the confines of some describable setting, and, according to Speier (1973:34-5), "A setting supplies its participants with an interpretive basis as they routinely interact, a frame of understandings shared and enforced by them.... It is an omniprevalent back­ ground consideration to any and all interaction." Hence, the setting is of crucial importance in the determination

of how a sense of play is socially accomplished.

Although it has been maintained that the notion of

setting (as physical environment) is an important element

that must be considered in analyzing any interactional event, it is useful for analytical purposes to specify addi

tional elements that make up the context of the interaction

Therefore, it is possible to distinguish other elements 92 that rontnbute to the organization of meaning in socia] act ion.

One such element relates to the ways individuals or­ ganize their behavior into recognizable activities for themselves and others. Individuals tend to formulate, name or otherwise reference a context in situ through words and/ or gestures. (Often such naming can be observed to appear at the beginning of the social interaction.) By providing a name for the situation, individuals are thus able to describe for one another what is presently happening. In addition, such formulations reflexively organize the con­ text in which next actions take place.

Another element of the context that must be examined re­ lates to who is involved in the social action. Here ques­ tions must be asked regarding the labels individuals use in defining how they are socially related to one another.

Speier (1973:37), following Sacks (1971) notes the follow-

The key issue to keep in mind then, about terms that label persons into social positions is that the manner in which such terms are used by cul­ tural participants is decided in each and every case of human interaction. The relevance of this term over that particular term is always enforced by participants when doing things together. It is never simply an issue of which is the one and only correct term, but rather it is always an issue of which, among many com­ peting terms, is the relevantly correct one for the occasion. 93 The next element of the context that must be considered is how the interaction developmentally unfolds over the course of time. "Temporal orientations are omnipresent in human interactions" (Speier, 1973:42). Given that the mean­ ing of an action or behavior may very much depend on what precedes or follows it in time, individuals involved in social interaction must be oriented to such temporal dimen­ sions. Furthermore, such transitional points as beginnings and endings may be extremely crucial to how individuals create a sense of what they are doing together in the social situation.

Finally, as previously noted, contexts are frequently formulated by individuals through gestures, including such non-verbal behaviors as body positioning and movements, facial expressions, and physical spacing and distancing.

Individuals may be said to be displaying as well as moni­ toring such behaviors in others in order to reach an under­ standing of what is going on in the situation. In this way, the intentions of others and ourselves are made observably public.

All of the above elements contribute to an understand­ ing of social action, and can be said to be essential fea­ tures of face-to-face interaction. For social interaction to take place, individuals must attend to the various be­ havioral, temporal and spatial organizations which make then concerted actions possible. By focusing attention 94 on these various elements of social interaction it is possible to provide an adequate description of how social action in general, and social play in particular, are accompli shed.

Mindful of the above elements comprising the organiza­ tion of meaning in social interaction, the following ques­ tions were asked in organizing observations of adult social play.

(1) What is the context (setting) of the interaction?

(2) Who is involved, and what is their relationship

to one another?

(3) How does the play begin? (How is the transition to

a playful state made?)

(4) How does the play end?

(5) What is it about the situation or the players'

behaviors that leads you to conclude that play is

occurring in the situation?

As can be noted, questions related to how social play gets done are questions confronting both observers and partici­ pants of such forms of social interaction.

In addition to the above questions, one other question was asked concerning the nature and significance of the individual's personal experience of play. As previously noted in the discussion of experiential descriptions, in­ dividuals were asked the following question: 95

(6) How did you feel while playing, or while ob­

serving others at play?

Summary

A number of research problems emerged during the course of the present investigation. These problems related to the question of how playful social interactions are recognized and accomplished by adults. Another research concern was to provide a description of personal experiences of play— what play means to adult players.

Given the above research problems, the employment of a qualitative methodology was judged to be the most appropri­ ate research strategy. The objective of this chapter was to identify and defend the various research techniques that were employed in this examination of naturally occurring forms of playful interactions among adults. Briefly, these techniques included participant observation, the use of still photographs and audio-tapes, informal interviews, and ethnographic and experiential descriptions made by individuals (primarily college students) who either observed or participated in a wide variety of playful forms of social interaction.

Another important objective of this chapter was to iden­ tify the various research questions which guided this in­ vestigation* These questions were formulated in response to 96 tht- above research problems, and these questions were used to organize the data collection process. Specifically, the following questions were asked about playful social inter­ actions: Who is involved?; How does the play begin, and how does it end?; How is play recognized?; and, What feelings are associated with the play experience?

The following four chapters will present data from four major areas of adult social play. Chapter V examines instances of adult play in work settings, which is certainly one of the most important and pervasive realms of adult interaction. Chapter VI presents data on play activities that are described as having a game-like character. The concern of Chapter VII is with one of the most frequently occurring types of adult play--speech and language play.

Finally, Chapter VIII presents data on practical jokes, and other harmless pranks that adults play on each other.

The purpose of each of the following chapters is to present data on four major types of adult play. It is im­ portant to note that this typology of play is not intended as a definitive classification of existing forms of adult play. Rather, these types are identified only as a set of initial distinctions useful in presenting data about parti­ cular examples of adult playful social interactions. Although the major objective of each of the following four chapters is to present data of actual cases of playful social interactions among adults, a preliminary analysis of the organization of each of these types of play will be briefly considered in the context of each of these chapters.

A more extensive analysis of all the data is the subject matter of chapters IX and X. 98

NOTES - CHAPTER IV

According to Schwartz and Jacobs (1979:4), "The difference between qualitative and quantitative sociology can be stated quite simply in terms of the notational systems used to describe the world. Quantitative sociologists assign numbers to qualitative observations. In this sense, they produce data by counting and 'measuring' things. Qualitative socio­ logists, on the other hand, report observations in the natural language at large. They seldom make counts or assign numbers to these observations. This simple difference in commitment to notation systems corresponds to vast differences in values, goals, and procedures for doing socio­ logical research."

2 In a review of the literature, this researcher later learned that there have been a limited number of research studies of adult sociability. However, these studies have limited their observations of sociable interactions to cer­ tain occasions or physical settings. For example, two re­ search studies have been written on parties (Riesman, Potter and Watson, 1960 and 1966). This "Sociability Project," as it later came to be called, was expanded to other sociable settings: "parties, luncheons, coffee breaks, and other occasions on which people have come together in order to enjoy each other's company; or, perhaps, are trying to enjoy each other’s company because they have come together" (Watson and Potter, 1962:256). Several other studies have attempted to examine sociability and playtime activities in drinking establishments (Cavan, 1966; Roebuck and Frese, 1976; and Clough, 1979). Unlike the above cited studies, the present investigation of adult play seeks to examine instances of all kinds of interactions containing the ele­ ment of piay.

^Given that no attempt was made to circumscribe the pheno­ menon of adult play by definition, a very conscious effort was made to avoid what others had written about this topic. An important methodological premise that guided this study can be stated as follows: the nature of adult social play is to be discovered in social settings where play is ac­ tually produced, and not through library research. 99

During the earliest phases of this research process, I occasionally felt that I should do more library research, especially during those times when I experienced utter con­ fusion as to what it was that I was doing. But rather than consulting the "literature" to resolve these issues, an even greater attempt was made on my part to become more fully immersed in observing and experiencing the phenomenon that I was attempting to investigate.

4 Blumer (1969:37) is critical of most sociological inquiry, stating that it "is not designed to allow the researcher to develop a close and reasonably full familiarity with the a- rea of social life under study. There is no demand on the research scholar to do a lot of free exploration in the area...." 5 Byers (1964:83) argues that the camera is not an inherently frightening or interfering instrument, and states that "It is not the camera itself that interferes or disturbs, it is the photographer using one who has not learned to put his camera activity into social situations easily and comfort­ ably." My response to this is that this may be true of many social situations, but not true of most situations of spon­ taneous adult play. The backstage nature of adult play creates a situation where the very presence of any observer (including a photographer) interferes with the social pro­ duction of play. For this reason a decision was made to photograph players from a distance using telephoto lenses. The ethics of photographing people without their knowledge is indeed questionable, yet this researcher concluded that it was more ethical to photograph people without their know­ ledge than to jeopardize (spoil) their playing.

6In 1977, I attended the Annual Meetings of The Association for the Anthropological Study of Play in San Diego, Cali­ fornia. In the San Diego airport I noticed the following sign: "Please Do Not Joke About Bombs and Guns— We Take All Such Jokes Seriously." Obviously there are limits to adult playfulness. This topic of the limits of play will be taken up and examined in Chapter IX.

7 Loizos (1967:182) reports that even in observations of ani­ mal play, observers often find it difficult to remain objec­ tive, and that they experience a certain pressure to join in.

Q Fry (1963) reported a similar problem in his attempts to record himself smiling. "I found that I became too self- 100

conscious- I would become aware of an impending smile and prepare to record it. But, in my anticipating it, it would fail to happen. I had entered a different mood. The inten­ tion of recording the smile contributed to the moment in such a manner as to alter its nature and puncture the humor" (Fry, 1963 :4-S) .

9 Berger and Mohr (19 82) have poignantly illustrated the natural ambiguity of the photographic image. When they asked individuals to explain a photograph, they discovered a wide variety of explanations and meanings, all of which differed from "What was happening” from the photographer's perspective. Most relevant to the present investigation of adult social play, Berger and Mohr (1982 :92) conclude by asking the following question; "Yet it might be that photographic am­ biguity, if recognized and accepted as such, could offer to photography a unique means of expression. Could this am­ biguity suggest another way of telling?" CHAPTER V

MAKING WORK PLAY

This was no time for play This was no time for fun This was no time for games There was work to be done. -Dr. Seuss

The objective of this chapter is to examine particular

instances of adult play that occur in work settings. Be­

ginning with a discussion of our culture's dualistic concep­

tion of work and play, data will be presented which will

raise serious questions about the presumed dichotomy of work

and play.

Because the vast majority of observations and experien­

tial descriptions used in this study of adult play were done

by college students who were seldom involved in full-time work experiences, there were only seventy accounts of play

which took place in work-related environments. Although many

of these examples are related to jobs, not all work takes

place in the context of paid employment. Thus, consideration

will also be given to playful variations of activities that

participants themselves regard as "work." Furthermore,

additional data will be provided from recent ethnographic

accounts done by anthropologists in various work settings

101 102 throughout American society.

As will be shown, there are many occasions where indivi­ duals spontaneously play on their jobs. In fact, workers as players may engage in a variety of joking activities, horse­ play, and practical jokes throughout the working day. More­ over, many of these play forms are repeated, and may even be­ come routine features of some work settings.

The Work Society

Kando (1980) has described American society as the “work society," noting that historically this was the result of a number of cultural, natural, and economic conditions. Fore­ most among these conditions that contributed to the develop­ ment of a work-oriented society was the cultural context of

Puritan Protestantism. This Protestant ethic exalted work, while it detested idleness and prohibited all forms of amuse­ ment. Work became a duty, and as Weber (1958:5 3) noted, the spirit of capitalistic societies involves "the acquisition of more and more money, combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment...."

As previously noted, play is often defined in terms of what it is not. From the perspective of the Protestant ethic, perhaps one of the most important things that play is not is work. Moreover, not only is play not work, but the two terms are seen as being polar opposites. Traditionally, 10 3 contrasting play with work has produced a number of conse­ quences for how we ordinarily perceive play. The following oppositions can be cited as prime examples:

(1) if work is serious and important, then play is

trivial and insignificant:

(2) if work is productive, then play is unproductive

and inconsequential;

(3) if work is for adults, then play is for children;

(4) if work is disciplined and compulsory, then play

is free and spontaneous; and

(5) if work is encouraged, then play is to be avoided.

In this way, play and work can be seen to define one another by a process of dialectical contrast.

There have been a number of noteworthy exceptions to the prevailing tendency of viewing play and work as opposites.

Marx's conception of work and alienation represents one such exception. According to Marx's humanistic conception of work, work too can be intrinsically satisfying and not be imposed by external circumstances alone (cf. Giddens, 1971:12). In fact, Marx's notion of unalienated labor transcends the play/ work antithesis by suggesting that such labor may ideally be

"something that gives play to one’s bodily and mental powers"

(Marx, 1964 : 89) .

Along these same lines, anthropologists (Bohannan,

1963; Norbeck, 1971; Salter, 1978) have argued that percep­ tions of play and work are very much related to culture. 10 4

The previously discussed complex of values and beliefs re­ ferred to as the Protestant ethic formed the basis of Ameri­ can culture's dualistic conception of play and work. How­ ever, this separation of play and work has been found to be frequently absent in non-industrialized cultures. Unfor­ tunately, this taken-for-granted separation of play and work has made it almost impossible for members of Western indus­ trialized societies to recognize the possibility that what is regarded as work can in fact be play, and that on some occasions that which is normally perceived as play can be experienced as work. As Csikszentmihalyi (1975:202) notes,

"One way to reconcile this split (between play and work) is to realize that work is not necessarily more important than play and that play is not necessarily more enjoyable than work."

Instead of viewing play and work as mutually exclusive activities, the data that is to be presented here raises serious questions concerning the traditional play/work dicho­ tomy. All of the following examples of adult play occurred in social settings where individuals were working.

Playing on the Job

Sociologists who study the work world have traditional­

ly directed their attention toward the following six themes: 105

(1) the changing nature of work, including the increas­

ing division of labor and occupational specializa­

tion {Caplow, 196 4; Durkheim, 196 4; Miller, 19 81) ;

(2) the social nature of work and related phenomena

such as increasing leisure time (de Grazia, 1964;

Faunce, 196 8);

(3) the study of individual occupations (e.g., Sprad-

ley and Mann, 1975);

(4) the relationship between occupations and systems

of social stratification (Noscow and Form, 1962:

3) ;

(5) the management of labor, with particular emphasis

on work conditions and worker productivity (Gard­

ner and Moore, 19 50); and

(6) the experience of working, including the experience

of alienation (Blauner, 1964; Terkel, 1974).

Despite the fact that these and other topics have been examined extensively by sociologists, these studies provide

little or no details on how workers routinely construct or­

ganized events in work environments. As Speier (1973:160) notes, the sociological literature on work and occupations

provides "almost no data at all that present how work rou­

tines of the most mundane sort are accomplished as interac­

tional phenomena.'1 Following Speier's recommendations, the

present chapter is concerned with how individuals manage to

accomplish a sense of play while working. 106

Sociological investigations of work have also focused attention on the formal organizational levels of such acti­ vities. Actions that failed to conform to these formal models of organizational structure are regarded as informal, and this informal organization is said to develop in re­ sponse to various failures in formal systems of communication

(cf. Bittner, 1965). According to Handelman (1976:434) this formal/informal dualism resulted in according "primacy to formal organization in the social life of 'serious settings> instead of analyzing their coherence and unity as an inte­ grated whole fashioned by members of the setting in question."

Moreover, a second consequence of this arbitrary dualism

"was to prevent researchers from perceiving how expressive behavior... could come to signify the integration of a work setting to much the same degree as could formal directives"

(Handelman, 1976:434).

The present examination seeks to overcome this dualis- tic relationship between play and work by stressing the im­ portance of pursuing integrated, as opposed to segregated, studies of play and work. In short, a sociology of work necessarily entails a sociology of play.

Very little research has attempted such integrated descriptions of the work environment. One noteworthy ex­ ception was a study done by Roy (1959-1960) ; however, this study has been largely ignored. Roy observed workers' be­ haviors in a relatively small industrial setting, noting 107 that in such repetitive work environments there are many times when workers played on their jobs. Roy concluded that these various forms of rule-breaking (e.g., horseplay, pranks, and joking) on the job actually functioned to alle­ viate boredom, and other manifestations of worker alienation.

Although Roy was not specifically concerned with how these play forms were socially organized and accomplished, he nevertheless did note that certain groups of workers en­ gaged in such actions throughout the working day, that these actions were frequently repeated, and that the workers ob­ viously enjoyed these times of fooling around on the job.

A number of the observations made in the present inves­ tigation of adult play were made in work environments similar to the Roy study. For example, the following account de­ scribed a series of spontaneous pranks played in a factory which produced automobile tires.

(6a-41) I work in this tire room where they have about a hundred machines all controlled by one builder to each machine. One night I was steadily working when this piece of rubber comes flying by my head. I looked around and saw the guy beside me with a big grin on his face. A few seconds later I picked up a piece of rubber and threw it at him. Then another one came back at me. Well, this went on until break time and we both left our machines. I came back a little earlier than he did so I decided to adjust his machine a little. I moved his ply light over just a little bit where he couldn’t run his ply on right. As soon as he figured out what happened he came over and cut my turret off. Next I set the speed on his machine up a little. All of a sudden his machine starts going faster and 108

faster until he couldn't control it. He looked over at me and I was just dying laughing. He then took another piece of rubber and threw it at me. I was afraid the supervisor would catch us so I let him get away with that and proceeded to build more tires.

And sometimes such horseplay and pranks are even insti­ tutionalized in some work settings.

(5b-112) This play observation was one which I observed while working in the factory. One day when the workers learned that one of the men in the de­ partment was going to get married, they decided to give him a shower to celebrate the occasion. This particular morning the line stopped temporarily. Immediately, all the employees in the department proceeded to carry their victim to the shower. Before they were finished a water fight had developed and almost everyone was completely soaked. I later learned this was a very common sight in this department. It seemed like someone was getting a shower for some odd reason almost everyday.

Playing on the job is not limited to factory workers.

It turned out that quite a few of the participants and ob­ servers involved in this study of spontaneous forms of adult play were nurses or nursing students. Despite the rather

"serious" context and constraints of most medical environ­ ments, nurses too are able to find occasions where they can engage in playful interactions.

(5b-107) The setting of this interaction was the Fairhaven Home for the Aged, where I work as a nurse's aide. Two nurses' aides were taking a linen cart down the hall, one in front of it pulling it, and the other in the back pushing. As they were going down the 109

hall the one in the back jumped onto the cart and rode it down the hall. I knew it was play because both the participants were laughing, and trying to show off for the other aides who were watching. I thought the inter­ action was funny because it was humorous to see adults in their forties and fifties riding down a hall in a linen cart.

Numerous other episodes of playing on the job were docu­ mented, including two co-workers throwing a styrofoam air­ plane around a drugstore, and a make-believe game of base­ ball at a Pizza Hut where a rolling pin was used as a bat and pizza dough was used as a ball.

One of the most frequently observed examples of play­ ing on the job involved various joking relationships among certain groups of workers. Name-calling, cursing and mock insults were very characteristic of such relationships.

For example, a nurse described an instance of two nurses trying to out-insult the other.

(4a-125) The first time I worked this floor two of the nurses were really cutting each other down. I didn't know what to do. I just sat there and stared at them. They were really nasty. For example, they called one another "fat slob," "witch," and "super dud." Nobody else paid any atten­ tion to them. All at once it was over and they started laughing. They all thought it was funny because I took them seriously. I had no way of knowing they were best friends.

Although such mock insults are oftentimes mistaken for ex­ pressions of hostility and aggression by outsiders, these behaviors actually connote friendship and personal Pilcher's (19 72) observations of the joking behaviors of dock workers is most relevant to this discussion of jok­ ing behavior. Pilcher describes various examples of name- calling, particularly the use of nicknames, which are nearly always derogatory (e.g., Bignose, Cesspool, Jowls, and

Snake). Pilcher stresses that these names are seldom given to persons who are not well liked, and that these names are used only in the work context. This type of play is general­ ly only recognized by the workers themselves.

After the men begin work, the behavior begun in the pre-work period changes in tone. Although the shift is slight among those men who perform their tasks on the dock, there is a very clear change aboard the ships. All forms of profanity become more frequent and more serious in tone. The insults are more often directed toward individuals, are more serious in nature, and the mock assaults although less frequent are more realistic than ever. while the tone of the banter becomes lighter on the docks, and is often clearly play­ ful even to outsiders, it becomes more serious on the ships. Again, outsiders often mistake the insults and horseplay on the ships for real hostility and aggression (Pilcher, 1972:107).

In spite of the many ways that work settings inhibit play, many workers manage to fool around on their jobs.

Spontaneous play and games are a characteristic part of some work experiences, and workers routinely manage to blend both work and play. For example, a worker behind the counter at a sandwich shop participated in such playful Ill happenings as:

(5a-58) We sometimes pretended to misunder­ stand orders or repeated something back totally different. At clean-up, we'd sometimes create little races and see who could do this or that first. The loser would owe the other a beer, or would have to stay and clean longer. Sometimes we'd actually say "Ok, ready go!" then start pushing mops around real fast and throwing chairs up on tables.

Playing at work is not always antithetical to getting the job done. As was seen in the last example, making a game out of cleaning up still accomplished this particular work task. Many of the accounts of workers who participated in play episodes stressed just this: that although they were playing, they were still working. This point is made in the following account of a laboratory technician.

(5b-4) In the medical laboratory field there are difficult jobs and easy jobs. While working at a hospital there was a game we played to resolve who would get the arduous job of cross-matching blood forpatients scheduled to have surgery. (We were all licensed and competent per­ sonnel so we weren't playing games with people’s health.) Bloodbanking was not the favorite job of any of us, so we would choose a number from 1 to 24 and turn on one of the lab centrifuges. Who­ ever came the closest to the number on which the centrifuge stopped was quickly resigned to his job for the evening. We went through this ritual each Sunday n ight.

Although most of these playful episodes were inter­ spersed throughout the workinq day, many of these spontaneous forms of play occurred at certain junctures in the working 112 day. Most notably, playful exchanges were likely to take

Pi ace right before work started, or near the end of the work­ ing period. One of the most common times for playing on the job was when work was slow or monotonous. As one worker/ player stated:

(Sb-59) I was having fun during this play episode. I had never acted this way at work before, and the play probably wouldn't have even taken place if a customer had been present. It was play because it was so out of place, but we still had to keep our "professional image" by keeping an eye out for customers.

Almost always these various play forms took place when super­ visors and other "bosses" were absent, and ended when those in charge arrived on the scene.

Making Work Play

Not only were workers found to engaga in various forms of pranks and horseplay, but sometimes the work task itself is accomplished playfully. As previously noted, playing on the job does not always mean that work goes undone. Workers performing instrumental tasks sometimes attempt to do these tasks in a way that provides an alternative to the more for­ mal conception of the daily work routine.

One example of playing on the job that deviated from the normal "professional" model is the following description.

(4a-2) The setting of this playful event occurred in the pharmacy where I am em­ ployed. Picture in your mind hundreds of 113

pills— how about thousands. The major goal is counting out a required amount of pills for prescriptions. This goes on continuous­ ly for about three or four hours. After a few hours of this one seeks to find some type of variation in counting which we did this afternoon.

The object was to add some variety to the counting and still fill the prescription correctly. One of the pharmacists played a guessing game. He took a bottle of 1000 pills and tried to pour out as close to the prescribed number of pills as possible. The other pharmacists joined in and they even attempted to pour the pills out with their eyes closed. They got braver and were even pouring behind their backs. This became quite a playful event and was accomplished with amazing speed and accuracy. The play got a lot of laughs and broke the boredom of being a professional pharmacist.

Many other instances of playing on the job were ob­ served that occurred during repetitive and "boring" work ex­ periences. As one player remarked, "Sometimes it was real necessary to play these little games just to break up the monotony." Most of these activities were described as just something to do while the workers were bored.

Being bored on the job was found to be related to the monotony of the work task, the workers' experience of time as moving too slowly, or the simple fact that the workers had no work left to do. Thus, many instances of playing on the job occurred during these periods of boredom, with workers attempting to make the job more bearable, or simply to make work-time pass more quickly. 114

Not only do workers play to reduce boredom and mono­

tony, but another important reason for playing while working

is to make the job experience more enjoyable. Just as play­

ers experience pleasure while playing, players may also ex­

perience pleasure and enjoyment while working. In this

sense, making a job enjoyable may sometimes involve trans­

forming work into a play or game-like situation. Indeed,

many examples of playing on the job made such transforma­

tions. Thus, a woman described how a routine job of brick­

laying may be played with and actually experienced as fun.

(6 a - 2 0 ) My father is a brickmason and I help him very often. Well, we went to stock out a house Saturday morning, and the bricks were at each end of the house. So we each took a set of tongs and opened a stack of bricks. Daddy said, "Let's have this house stocked by 11:00." So we began and the point was to see who could stock out their end of the house first. I stocked out my end first because dad had to stop to put up corner posts. I told him I won, but he said he had more to do than I did. I helped him finish. It was fun because we played and got the work done.

Similarly, two farmers acted as if their shovels were

guitars and played along to the music on a radio; this play­

ful action was said to bring enjoyment to the arduous job

of shoveling soybeans into a truck. And a mother described how she transformed the unpleasant job of washing her baby's

ears into a more plesant job.

(4a-48) I started pretending to see various vegetables in her ears, like potatoes, beets, carrots and onions. She loved it and laughed. In this way we were having fun doing a not so pleasant job. Now ear 115

washing is the highlight of her bath.

Finally, a college woman described how a sorority changed

the dreadful task of writing invitations to their alumnae

into a playful occasion.

(6a-52) We sat down and began the dreaded job and everyone was very seriously busy at work. Two of our sisters just started laughing and racing to see who could write the fastest and therefore write the most invitations. The craze spread and before long everyone was racing. In the midst of all this fun we didn't realize we were all working and doing the dreaded job. I couldn't believe how much fun invitation writing could be.

As can be seen it is possible to transform a variety of work activities into play and game-like experiences. Like play, such work activities are experienced as fun and en- j oyable.

Summary

All of the above examples illustrate various ways in which both paid employment and other work-related tasks may be transformed into playful activities. Although some of

these episodes of playing on the job interrupted the on­

going work process, other examples were provided where work­ ers successfully turned work into play and managed to accom­ plish work objectives while playing.

The previously discussed research findings of Handel- man (1976) and Pilcher (1972), as well as the works of 116 Coser (1960), Sykes (1966), Brown et a l . (1973), and Handel- man (1974), have emphasized the integrative functions of playing on the job. According to these functional approaches to the study of play, playing on the job provides a means for releasing tension, relieving pent-up emotions, and con­ trolling and preventing aggression. Most importantly, play relationships serve as a symbol of group membership and per­ form the integrative function of helping to create and main­ tain group solidarity.

All of the above functions of playing on the job may indeed be true, and to a certain extent the data presented in this chapter could be used to replicate and support the above research findings. However, that was not really the objective of this chapter, and according to the accounts of those who engaged in play activities while working, such functional explanations were not really a significant part of their motives for playing. From the players' perspective, work was transformed into play to make jobs more bearable, and, in some cases, to make jobs actually enjoyable.

In conclusion, the data presented in this chapter suggest that our culture's traditional ways of viewing play and work as separate activities that are polar opposites are far too simple and must be severely criticized. More­ over, sociological investigations of work which are based on the arbitrary dualism of formal/informal organizations fail to identify the many ways that both play and work are interwoven in certain work settings. Handelman (1976:434) makes a similar recommendation when he states that both work and play '’should be considered cognate modes of expression whose contrastive realities complement one another to compose a unity of experience." What is needed are more efforts to overcome these traditional dichotomies by examining every­ day work experiences in such a unified manner. By realizing that both play and work are interactional events, it is then necessary to examine the many ways these activities are re­ lated and socially achieved. As demonstrated here, sometimes work activities are accomplished quite playfully. 118

NOTE - CHAPTER V

^An important rule of these mock insults is that they are accomplished in a most serious manner. In this sense, the accomplishment of such insults is very similar in form to pranks and practical jokes- A more detailed discussion of the organization of harmless pranks and practical jokes will be taken up in Chapter VIII. CHAPTER VI

"PLAYFUL GAMES": CREATING NEW GAMES

THIS STONE COMMEMORATES THE EXPLOIT OF WILLIAM WEBB ELLIS WHO WITH A FINE DISREGARD FOR THE RULES OF FOOTBALL, AS PLAYED IN HIS TIME, FIRST TOOK THE BALL IN HIS ARMS AND RAN WITH IT, THUS ORIGINATING THE DISTINCTIVE FEATURE OF THE RUGBY GAME A .D . 1823 {Quoted in Knapp and Knapp, 1976:18)

There is a tendency in both common sense and scienti­ fic discussion to use the words "play" and "game" inter­ changeably. Even among scholars who have sought to differ­ entiate types of play and games, there exists little consis­ tency in their use of the two terms (Huizinga, 1950 ;

Caillois, 1961; Piaget, 1962). Not only are these words of­ ten treated synonymously, but game is often thought of as the object of the verb to play. For instance, Goffman (1961:

35) states the following: "In the literature on games, a distinction is made between a game, defined as a body of rules associated with a lore regarding good strategies, and a plav, defined as any particular instance of a given game being played from beginning to end." Thus one frequent de­ finition of play is simply: to take part in a game or sport.

119 120

For the purpose at hand, a distinction will be drawn, however, between the two terms "play" and "game." As viewed by play participants, a delineation is oftentimes em­ ployed to distinguish between certain kinds of games, or to make a distinction between how certain games are actually played. Numerous accounts of adults who had engaged in various playful activities described these activities as having a game-like character. Like games, these playful en­ counters sometimes exhibit such characteristics as rules, equipment, sides, strategies, and even criteria for deter­ mining winners. However, unlike "official" formalized games, these playful encounters were accomplished, as well as ex­ perienced, differently. For lack of a better term for de­ scribing these differences, I will adopt a typology that was frequently employed in actual accounts that attempted to specify this distinction. As viewed by many players and ob­ servers of such playful encounters, a distinction will be drawn between "serious games" and "playful games."

"Serious Games"

Like the term "play," there are many theories and defi­ nitions of the term "game.” Examining games cross-culturally, the anthropologists Roberts, Arth and Bush (1959:597) con­ clude that games are characterized by competition, two or more sides, and criteria for determining the winner. A somewhat similar definition can be found in Von Neumann and 121

Morgenstern1s (1947) economic theory of games. Von Neumann and Morgenstern, using the analogy of economic transaction, argue that games share a number of structural features.

These features include: (1) number of players: (2) rules of procedures; (3) results or pay-offs; and (4) strategies employed xn game play. According to this view, a game con­ sists simply of the totality of rules which describe it.

Along these same lines, Garfinkel (1963:197) recommends that games be defined by their basic rules. According to

Garfinkel anyone can consult a book of games for a descrip­ tion of these basic rules. By way of example, Garfinkel illustrates the basic rules of "Ticktacktoe" in the follow­ ing description:

Play is conducted on a three by three matrix by two players who move alterna­ tively. The first player makes a mark in one of the unoccupied cells. The second player, in his turn, places his mark in one of the remaining cells. And so on. The term "ticktacktoe player" refers to a person who seeks to act in compliance with these possible events as constitutively expected ones (1963:191).

As can be seen from the above illustration, basic rules can be said to have the following features: (1) they fur­ nish criteria for legal play; (2) they specify the range of game-possible actions; (3) they are known over the course of the game (and are not altered by the actual course of play); and (4) breaches of basic rules violate the nature of games as orderly activities. In other words, basic rules "serve each player as a scheme for recognizing and interpreting the 12 2 the other players' as well as his own behavioral displays as events of game conduct" (Garfinkel, 1963:190).^

Although Huizinga (1950) tends to use the terms "play" and 'game1' interchangeably, and although he can be criticized for limiting his attention to more competitive forms of games, his work Homo Ludens nevertheless remains an important resource for anyone interested in the phenomena of play and games. According to Huizinga (1950:11), "The rules of a game are absolutely binding and allow no doubt. Indeed, as soon as the rules are transgressed the whole play-world collapses. The game is over." Thus, for Huizinga, games involve competition and predetermined rules, and, above all, 2 the essence of a game is that the rules be kept.

Huizinga also recognizes that games can be played too seriously, as is sometimes the case in sports where there is a tendency toward over-seriousness. "In the case of sports we have an activity nominally known as play but raised to such a pitch of technical organization and scientific tho­ roughness that the real play-spirit is threatened with ex­ tinction" (Huizinga, 1950:199). Under these conditions, sport has become a thing, sui generis, neither play nor ser i ousness.

In conclusion, all of the above authorities have ar­ gued that games are competitive activities with formalized rules, that these rules are predetermined and are unalter­ able over the course of the game, and that breaking the rules violates the nature of games as orderly activities.

Nevertheless a contrast can be made between these "serious

games" with basic rules and more spontaneous forms of gaming

encounters. Although there are generally no official names

for these types of games, players themselves refer to these games as being "not too serious," "just for fun," or "play­

ful rather than serious games." As will be demonstrated, games like most other forms of social interactions may be

transformed into playful occasions too.

"Playful Games": Playing with Games

As previously suggested, "serious games" have, among

other qualities, predetermined rules and involve competition

Above all, the rules of such games are taken quite seriously

these rules are not subject to negotiation, and in the case

of sports, the rules may be actually enforced externally

by judges or referees. As will be demonstrated, "playful

games" tend to be more idiosyncratic and non-structured, and

frequently allow players to spontaneously develop and/or

alter their own rules. "Playful games" allow for a greater

flexibility of actions, a greater freedom to actually create

new games. Although not always, "playful games" may even

lack competitive elements, or as is sometimes the case,

such games may actually attempt to play with the notion of

competition itself. Although it is not possible to specify

and describe in detail all the myriad possibilities of 124 "playful games," an examination and an analysis of three hun­ dred such games revealed at least four common types of play­ ful games experienced by adults. Although these types of games sometimes overlap, for present purposes of discussion and analysis, these "playful games" will be examined in the following order: (1) spontaneous games: (2) silly and ridi­ culous games, including adults playing children's games:

(3) playing at playing games: and (4) combination games.

Although many forms of "playful games" involve speech and other verbal elements, a discussion of playing with words and spontaneous word games will not be considered fully in this chapter, but will be taken up in greater detail in the next chapter.

Spontaneous Games

As previously noted, formalized "serious games" tend to have predetermined and elaborate rules that typically speci­ fy in detail, time, place, objects, goals, and numbers of persons involved in the game. Spontaneous games, on the other hand, oftentimes have no predetermined and rigid rule structure. Rather, spontaneous games are comprised of a variety of "playful games" where the participants spon­ taneously make up the rules as they go along, and where rules may be altered spontaneously during the course of playing. Sometimes spontaneous games emerge in situations

that already have a playful and amusing character. The 125 following account illustrates the emergence of several spon­ taneous games among a group of female college students.

(lc-96) One day five other girls and I walked downtown to eat dinner. On the way we came across a tennis ball hidden underneath a pile of leaves. Almost in­ stantly and simultaneously the six of us came to life. Shelly picked up the ball and threw it to someone and without any­ one deciding I became the subject from whom the ball would be kept away from. Once I got the ball everyone jumped on top of me. We stopped for a while and then almost as if we had planned it we all jumped up and ran down the hill. Once we got to the sidewalk we started playing foot­ ball with the tennis ball. The funny thing was no one made up any teams, they just formed themselves, as did the end zones and sidelines. The play ended when someone scored (or said they scored) a touchdown in front of the restaurant. It was fun to do things so spontaneously.

Spontaneous games may also occur in more routine and mundane circumstances, as is suggested in the following de­ scription .

(5b-46) The other morning, when my hus­ band and I were stripping the sheets off our bed, a game developed. It wasn't suggested between us, it just began. We both took one side and began racing to see which of us could make up their side of the bed first. My husband tried to get me to slow down by telling me he thought he heard the doorbell. His ploy didn't work and I finished first. So when we started to put the pillow cases on the pillows, he said that the first one to get the case on the pillow would be the winner. (This was the first verbalization that this was in fact a game.) Since I had a fat, fluffy pillow, he finished before I did and won the game. I then gathered the sheets to be laundered, thus ending the play. 126

Numerous accounts were provided by participants in­ volved in other similar episodes of spontaneous games. What was most characteristic of this type of "playful game" was

the players’ flexibility of actions and the improvisation- al nature of the rules, and, in particular, how rules were simply made up and changed as the game went along.

Although the rules of spontaneous games were typically found to emerge and sometimes change over the course of these games, one common organizing principle that was employed by participants was to create a common goal. Like "serious games," the objective of many spontaneous games is fre­ quently to win by accomplishing this goal. The following two examples of spontaneous games have this objective.

(lc-121) After dinner at our annual Thanksgiving get-together, which con­ sists of three families, we discussed how commercialized Christmas has become. We began talking about the qifts that were given to Jesus that were mentioned in the Bible. At first we could only think of a few, but then when everyone began to think about it many more came to mind. I decided to keep track of who could list the most. It turned out that my aunt won; she had listed eight.

(lc-30) Last night my friend Sue and I took the elevator in our dorm to our floor. We got off the elevator and saw an empty salad bowl on the floor. I started to kick the bowl down the hall. Sue said, "Let's see who can kick it to the room the fastest." So the both of us are kicking this bowl around at 2:00 in the morning. We were laughing so hard! Sue ended up winning our little game. 127

As might be imagined from this last example, the goal of winning a spontaneous game is sometimes quite different from winning a more "serious game." One observer who wit­ nessed a spontaneous game of "Bottle Frisbee" noted just how the gaming situation of a "playful game" differs from a

"ser1 ous game."

(3a-54) I could tell that the situation was a playful one as opposed to a serious one by the expressions on the two guys' faces. It was obvious that this was far from being any type of competitive game, but instead was merely something to pass a little time. I noticed that if one of the guys broke one of the rules that were es­ tablished, the other would hardly care.

A number of other observations of spontaneous games revealed that competition may not always be the objective, or the only objective of such games. Although many of these games have a stated objective of winning, or accom­ plishing a certain goal, a competitive attitude may or may not be present during these spontaneous games. A number of players provided such comments as:

The game was just for fun, so no one really won or lost.

There wasn't any competitive undertones. It was for fun only.

We all had a good work-out and didn't care who won or lost.

There was no sense of competition, just a sense of oneness. 128

This suspension of the competitive impulse is perhaps most pronounced in the next type of "playful games": silly and ridiculous games.

Silly and Ridiculous Games

The second type of "playful games" is comprised of a variety of adult games that can be best described as simply silly and ridiculous. Also included under this category will be instances of adults playing games that are ordinari­ ly as sociated with childhood.

Like "serious games," silly and ridiculous games may have rules, sides and even criteria for determining winners.

Unlike "serious games," and similar to many instances of spontaneous games, winning and a competitive attitude is not an integral part of these games. In fact, as will be demonstrated in the following examples, silly and ridi­ culous games to a certain extent make a mockery out of com­ petition itself.

The first example of a silly game took place in a rather unlikely context, a college classroom.

(lb-164) I was in my 8:30 English writing class. I had gotten up late and had not had time to eat breakfast. I had not eaten dinner the night before and consequently I was starving. My friend who was sitting next to me was in the same state of mal­ nutrition. We were supposed to be think­ ing about a topic for our next assignment. The room was very quiet and before I could suppress it my stomach let out an incredi­ ble loud growl. My friend looked over with her hand over her mouth trying to suppress a giggle. The next second I found myself 129 turning my head and looking at her in the same manner. Her stomach had just growled with almost as much intensity as mine. She looked over at me and at the same time pulled a piece of paper out of her notebook. She began drawing columns with headings on them like "loudness," and "length." I finally caught on that we were going to have a contest with our stomach growls. We each growled many more times during the hour and ranked our growls on the piece of paper. We were both laughing and pretending to be quite competitive, each trying to in­ tensify his growl. We both felt a little silly while playing this game.

As the student noted, this was a rather silly occasion, yet theypretended to be playing a "serious game" by acting as if they were really competing to win.

This experience of feeling silly or ridiculous can be found too in this next example.

(5a-91) One Friday evening my boyfriend Steve and I went to the Waterworks Restau­ rant. We listened to the band for a while and then decided we would order something to drink and get some popcorn to munch on. After it arrived I took a few bites and said, "I bet I can put more popcorn in my mouth than you can!" He replied, "That's because you have a bigger mouth." "Funny," I said and then again said, "No, come on, let's see who can get more in." Counting as we went, we each put a single piece of popcorn into our mouths. Soon we began to look like chipmunks and both of us began to laugh. I knew we were playing because we were doing something out of the ordinary. I felt ridiculous and kind of thought I shouldn't be doing this.

Other silly games that were observed included such ridiculous playful encounters as: a contest to see who could chew some very hard and sticky fudge the fastest; a 130 challenge to see who could not blink their eyes for the longest period of time; a contest of tossing pretzels into each others' mouths; a contest to see who could burp the loudest? and a bumble gum blowing contest (see Plate II).

Although a more thorough discussion of speech play will be taken up in the next chapter, one example of a silly game involving speech is described in the following account.

(lb-22) My friend and I were sitting in a car waiting for my mother and aunt to return from an errand. To occupy our­ selves we made up a game where everything we said had to begin with "pi." For in­ stance: "When are they coming back" would be pronounced "Plen plare pley ploming plack." It was so dumb and silly, we would laugh at how ridiculous it sounded.

As may be noted, many of these silly games have a child­ like character. When a group of men play "King of the

Mountain" like little boys, a group of women playfully romp and toss leaves at one another like little girls, or a group of adults play such children's games as "Jacks,"

"Pick-up Sticks," "Tiddlywinks," and "Hopscotch" (all of these cases were actua 1 ly observed), there is certain to be an awareness on the part of the participants or ob­ servers of such occasions that what is happening is taking

Pi ace within the frame of reference of playfulness, or childishness. Indeed, perhaps what makes these playful games just so ridiculous and humorous is the incongruity of adults re-creating such childhood gaming situations. As one woman commented: "People were so amazed to see two Plate II. Bubble Gum Blowing Contest 131 132 grown w o m e n getting such enjoyment out of something so silly end simple."

Playing at Playing Games

Just as the competitive element of games can be played with, as is oftentimes the case in silly and ridiculous games, so too can games themselves be played with. Adults can play at playing games, but are not really playing a game at all. Caillois (1961:9) provides us with the following hypothetical example of such "playful games": "One easily can conceive of children, in order to imitate adults, blind­ ly manipulating real or imaginary pieces on an imaginary chessboard, and by pleasant example, playing at 'playing chess 1." Caillois' example involves children, but could not adults engage in such "playful games" too? Apparently so, as can be seen in the following observation.

(2b-49) The setting is a fraternity party. A girl and a guy are seated at a card table in the corner of the living room. The guy begins to play poker, but without cards! The girl follows his lead and also pretends to play cards. Soon after the start of play two more guys--curious and interested-- approach the card table and seat themselves. The first guy who opened the play collected the "cards" and redealt them, including the two newcomers in the game. They all held their hands in position as though they held a hand of cards. They also pretended to make bids, pass the play, and shuffle the cards. They continued to play cards for 10-15 min­ utes. The play ended with the participants in laughter and a small crowd of fascinated onlookers around the table. 133

Although the above description of playing at playing a game of poker suggests that such make-believe games are not entirely limited to children imitating adults, this particu­ lar type of “playful games" was rarely reported or observed.

In fact, only two other cases were identified; one where a group of male college students was playing football with an imaginary ball; and another where a similar group was playing lacrosse with imaginary sticks and ball. Actually this latter case, according to the observer, involved a group of football players "who were entertaining a crowd of onlookers by mocking the preppie game of lacrosse."

Combination Games

The fourth and final type of "playful games" that will be examined are combination games. Specifically, this exam­ ination will focus on those kinds of creative games where players, for a variety of reasons, change the rules of

"serious games," or where players combine elements of one or more games with other games. Perhaps one of the easiest ways of inventing a new game is to alter the rules of an existing game, or to adopt elements of an existing game to a novel situation. Any or all of the previously discussed features of "serious games" may be used as a resource for creating new games, or modifying games. Thus, players may change such elements of a game as the prescribed number of 134 players, rules or procedures, objectives or goals, and even the strategies employed in game play. In addition, players may also choose to alter the type of equipment and other physical objects employed in playing a game, as well as the physical environment itself where a game is normally played.

Actually, as will be shown in the following descriptions, there exist endless possibilities for altering existing games and creating new games.

The first example of creating a new game from an al­ ready existing game involved a variation of the game of back­ gammon. After complaining that the "official11 version of the game allowed for too much luck or chance, the players experimented with increasing the number of dice thrown.

Instead of rolling two dice, they rolled four. They then continued to play this new altered form of backgammon after concluding that this newer version was actually a better game because it involved more strategy and skill. Hence, a slight changing of the rules was introduced, all without too drastically changing the nature of the game itself.

Another illustration of changing the rules of an exist­

ing game involved the following fairly radical revision of the game of tennis.

(lb-192) Neither my friend nor I could play tennis but we signed up anyway for one of the indoor courts. We tried playing a regu­ lation game but we were not good enough to continue. So we put in a few new rules. Since nobody else was around we had complete freedom to do what we wanted. We each had to stay on our sides of the net, but we were allowed to roam over the entire fieldhouse. Also, as long as the ball was hit before it stopped bouncing, it was still in play. No score was kept but we kept at it for nearly an hour.

It should be noted that these players had freedom to change the game because no one else was around that would have been annoyed by such variations. Most likely, if there were a

"serious game" of tennis going on in the next court, such antics would not have gone unchallenged. Similarly, it was reported that when several friends made up some rules while hitting golf balls on a practice green of a golf course

(e.g., you had to get down on your knees before you putt, or you had to putt with a sand wedge), they were told by the clubmanager to quit fooling around or get off the putting green. Swimmers likewise reported that they became annoyed with the horseplay of others when such fooling around inter­ fered with their efforts to swim laps in the pool. Apparent­ ly the physical settings of "serious games" create a power­ ful constraint on individuals to play by the official rules, which may account for why the vast majority of "playful games" occur in other environments.

Sometimes players will change a game because of the built-in constraints of existing game regulations. For example, a number of game alterations were observed relating to the prescribed number of game participants. Sometimes you simply don't have the necessary number of game 136 participants to start a game, as in the following descrip­ tion .

(lb-299) I recently participated in a form of play that was an impromptu derivative of football. We had made plans to have a Sun­ day afternoon game at the high school foot­ ball field. Expecting to meet eleven others, little did my three friends and I expect that we would be the only ones to show up. We had all come to play football and weren't going to leave until we did.

We conversed a few minutes while tossing the ball around, and a game-plan began to emerge. We all became excited at the possibility of playing and a formula for three-man football was born. The game entailed a two-on-one set up that was switched from offense to defense every touchdown. We still con­ sidered scoring important and agreed that high score wins.

Along these same lines, there was even a description of a spontaneous game change at a university varsity rugby prac­ tice. The game "Crazy Funk," as it was called, was invented when:

(lb-58) There weren't enough guys to hold a real practice. So we divided into two teams and decided as we were playing to do away with inbound pass-ins because we lacked people. Crazy Funk was designed to let everyone play and get a good work-out. It was for practice and fun only.

Just as games may sometimes be changed because you don't have enough players to start a "serious game," so too may games be changed to accommodate a larger number of play­ ers than the game normally requires. For example, I per­ sonally participated (and, to a certain extent, orches­ trated) the following new games. 137

(PO-1) This scene occurs in the basement of my house where a party is happening. Two people are engaging in a game of ping- pong when six or seven people come into the basement and begin to crowd around the table. The game continues for several minutes unti] I suggest that perhaps the game can be modified so as to include a larger number of participants. A new game is announced: "Rotating Ping-Pong." Some­ one asks, "Are we going to keep score or are we going to just play?" The action be­ gins with three people at each end of the table (however there are only four paddles) and the object of this game appears to be much like the regular game except that the three persons on each side must rotate shots and pass an available paddle to the person who doesn't have one in time for this person to receive the next shot. Suddenly the game shifts again when some­ one else suggests that perhaps the two re­ maining spectators can be worked into the action. I then suggested that the players must rotate all around the table; that is, after hitting the ball one is to move towards the other end of the table. After a short period of discussing how we might play such a game, the play starts and everyone is running (and slipping) wildly from one end of the table to the other. This game continues for nearly ten minutes until one of the players announces he is going for another beer. Exhaust­ ed and expressing much smiling and laughter, nearly everyone stops and goes back upstairs to join the rest of the party.

Another variation on this theme of changing a game by incor­ porating additional people into the game involved the game of chess. As described by the observer, the following situa­ tion took place.

(4a-10) This took place at a friend’s party. Two guys were playing chess and eventually four others were watching who wanted to play. The only problem was there was only one board. The six 138

players split into teams of three. Each player would take a turn, but there was to be no consultation among players of the same team. There was also a designated play­ er for each team who was the only one who could checkmate. The game ended in a stale­ mate but all had a good time.

These last several examples of "playful games," as can be noted, involve more than simply altering the rules of

"serious games." Frequently, elements of different games may be introduced into the game, thus changing the nature of the game itself. Just as you have "designated hitters" in baseball, one may introduce a "designated player" into a

"playful game" of chess.

Variations in the games of football, golf, and basket­ ball were observed, all involving the use of a frisbee. The games were altered to varying degrees to accommodate the use of a frisbee instead of the appropriate ball. For example, during a game of "Frisbee Golf," the rules of the game of golf were modified in the following manner: (1) try to reach the goal in the prescribed number of shots; (2) farth­ est person from the hole throws first; (3) you can play com­ petitively by using individual scores or cooperatively by throwing from the best frisbee throw on each shot; and

(4) hitting a person is a two-shot penalty.

Other playful variations of games were also observed.

Borrowing some rules from the game of football, a group of players on a basketball court were observed creating a game 139 of "Tackle Basketball." After fouling one another at every chance, including pushing one another onto the floor, the game ended abruptly when one of the players got hurt. Ob­ viously not all attempts at combining games are totally successful.

In conclusion, among the many reasons that were found to underlie various attempts at altering old games and creating new games, perhaps the most important motivation was the desire on the part of the players to make the game more interesting, fun and enjoyable. So, for example, if the game is too slow, hard, or boring, players will mutual­ ly agree to change the nature of the game, thereby creating a new game. Apparently one of the major ruling principles surrounding these types of "playful games" is if it isn't fun, stop playing the game.

Rules for Changing Rules

Not all playful, emergent games are successfully accom­ plished. When players begin to bend and change rules, or

combine rules from different games, the situation can easily get out of hand, as was seen in the above game of "Tackle

Basketball." Furthermore, some attempts at creating new games were observed where changing one rule led to changing other rules, until finally, players began to break all the

rules and the game simply broke down into complete anarchy. 140

For instance, one woman wrote the following account of her playful introduction of several rule changes into a "serious game" of "Crazy Eights":

(3a-10) I started making up my own rules. I started picking up extra cards, putting down extra cards, playing out of turn, changing suit sporadically, and basically just screwing up the whole set of the game.

At first the guys were a little ticked that I wasn't taking their game seriously. But gradually they started loosening up and pretty soon they were making up their own rules too. The game went on in this totally unorganized, chaotic manner for about five minutes. It then ended with everyone throwing the cards at each other. Once everyone got in on the play it was fun, although short-lived.

Perhaps it is not good strategy to begin playing a "playful game" in the middle of a "serious game," as some game parti­ cipants may not see the playfulness of these changes. More likely they will define such changes as cheating and as unfair play.

Actually "playful games" were found to break down for a variety of reasons. Most notably, "playful games" stopped when: somebody got hurt; the game became too hard or im­ possible (that is, the desired goal or objective could not be achieved): not everyone would go along with the pro­ posed rule changes; the rule changes were too ambiguous or not understood by everyone involved; and, as previously noted, there were too many rule changes and the play got too fantastic or out-of-hand. Hence, sometimes changing the 141 rules produce games that simply don't work, and when nobody wants to play anymore, "playful games" end. In short, not all "playful games" are fun, and "playful games" that are not fun tend to be short-lived.

Conversely, "playful games" that were successfully accomplished (as defined by participants and their desires to continue playing) also shared a number of common fea­ tures. Most importantly, such games were experienced as engrossing, enjoyable, and fun. But what was it about the gaming interaction that created these feelings? Apparently there are certain tacit rules followed in changing the rules of "serious games" into "playful games."

First, there must be consensus among the game parti­ cipants to change the rules. Usually not everyone contri­ butes suggestions for creating a new game; however, for the

"playful game" to emerge and continue everyone must agree and go along with these changes. For instance, one player made the following statement about a game of "frisbee foot­ ball": "We made up rules as we played. We had to change rules about scoring and out of bounds, but that went very democratically." "Playful games" tend to be very democra­ tic and fair in this sense.

A s e c o n d rule for creating "playful g a m e s " is for players to go slowly, making sure everyone understands the new variations. As DeKoven (1978:45) notes: 142

...there can be no game if there is not agreement on its rules. We can even play with confusion, if we want to, but we can't play from confusion. We can select a game which leads us into chaos, but we must first surround that chaos with some order and clarity.

Successfully accomplished "playful games" tend to proceed with a degree of caution (although players sometimes pro­ ceed with reckless abandon); typically, players begin by changing one rule or some other element of a game first, and then may change other elements only when there is a recogni­ tion that these changes are indeed realizable.

Finally, another rule for changing rules of games is to be open and flexible about other rule changes. Perhaps the first version of a new game produces a game that isn't worth playing. if theydecide to continue playing, players must then evaluate what went wrong and come up with alterna­ tive variations. If these changes appear to be successful, players must then decide where to go from there. Usually the rules are changed until a game is successfully accom­ plished. Surprisingly, when such games are created and accomplished, there is a tendency to play this new game in exactly the same way on subsequent occasions. As one play­ er commented: "It was interesting to watch this game evolve and become one of our favorite things to do!" 143

Summary

In this chapter it was noted that in the scientific literature the terms "play" and "game" are used interchange­ ably, and that there is little consistency in how these terms are defined and used. However, based on how play is defined and experienced by game participants, a distinc­ tion was made between "serious games" and "playful games."

Whereas "serious games" were found to have predetermined and unalterable rules, sides, and competition, "playful garner" were characterized by a greater freedom to change existing rules, and a suspension of competitive attitudes.

An analytical distinction was drawn from an examination of a wide variety of these "playful games." Four types of

"playful games" were identified: (1) spontaneous games;

(2) silly and ridiculous games; (3) playing at playing games; and (4) combination games. Spontaneous' games were found to typically emerge during playful occasions; such games seem to just start and players proceed by spontaneously making up and sometimes changing the rules of these emergent games. Silly and ridiculous games were comprised of a vari­ ety of frivolous and child-like game situations. Playing at playing games involved players acting as if they were play­ ing a "serious game," while not really playing this game at all. The last type of "playful games" were conbination games which were comprised of a number of games where players 144 creatively changed the rules of "serious games," often by borrowing and combining elements of one g a m e with another.

Having fun is the goal of all of these types of "playful games."

Finally, the paradoxical topic of "rules for changing rules" was examined. Here it was noted that not all "play­ ful games" are successfully accomplished. Indeed, such games may break down for a variety of reasons, and partici­ pation in these games may not be all that fun. "Playful games" that aren't fun were found to be short-lived.

On the other hand, successfully accomplished "playful games" were found to share a number of common features. A number of tacit rules were identified for changing "serious games" into "playful games." Among these tacit rules for accomplishing "playful games," the most important are that players must recognize that the rules of these games are open and flexible, and that players must also agree with and have some understanding about how the game is to evolve.

It was also noted that successfully accomplished "playful games" may sometimes be transformed into more "serious games," in that they may be played exactly the same way on subsequent occasions. 145

NOTES - CHAPTER VI

Ethnomethodological studies of actual rule use in both game and everyday life situations suggest that there exists a necessary and an essential incompleteness to the applica­ tion of rules in covering all the problematic possibilities that may arise in these situations (cf. Mehan and Wood, 1975:74-97). A study of how players use rules will be a topic taken up in the conclusion of this chapter.

2 Fry (196 3:29-30) has suggested that the essential playful­ ness of children's fantasy-producing activities is replaced in adulthood by games with rigid structures and elaborate rules. Although fantasy may underlie the adult game (e.g., chess’ medieval warring field), adults don't usually find chess to be playful. Nevertheless a playful attitude could be displayed in chess by pursuing a goal of one's own or by superimposing one's own rules on the basic rules of the game (cf. Riezler, 1941:506). However, such play as Fry has suggested and Garfinkel (1963) has vividly demonstrated is likely to produce disruption and confusion for unsuspecting "serious" game participants. If continued, such antics may even lead to open conflict and hostility. CHAPTER VII

TALKING NONSENSE AND OTHER TYPES OF SPONTANEOUS SPEECH PLAY

"A good pun ought to be drawn and quoted" (Roland L * Holter).

The following chapter presents additional data on the topic of the organization of spontaneous forms of adult play.

Elsewhere (Bowman, 1978), this researcher has described situ­ ations where the structures and procedures of play emerge over the course of the social interaction. It was concluded that such play forms should be regarded as dynamic in nature, with participants actively engaged in creating and negotiating these playful occasions. Above all, it was argued that the study of the organization of spontaneous forms of social play should put primary emphasis on how such play states are achieved through a communicative process.

The concern of this chapter is with the eommunicational

ingredients of spontaneous forms of adult play. Although not all communicative exchanges occur through a verbal mode, the

focus of the present chapter is limited to speech or con­ versational communication. Nonverbal elements of interaction will not be explicitly covered in this discussion.

After making a distinction between playfulness expressed

through language (i.e., talk) and types of playfulness

146 147 created by actively manipulating language, consideration will then be directed towards an examination of cases of naturally occurring instances of adult speech play. As will be demon­ strated, any of the organizational levels of language may be manipulated for playful purposes.

Furthermore, given that speech is an interactional event, major emphasis will also be placed on the topic of sociolinguistic rules and the role of such rules in the production of speech play. Many essential features of con­ versational cohesion, such as topic selection and the dis­ tribution of talk between participants, as well as the ob­ jectives of speech, are all potential resources for playful interactions. Finally, it will be demonstrated that one of the ways of recognizing as well as accomplishing speech play is the disruption (or suspension) of the conventional order­ liness of ordinary talk.

Play Materials

The topic of spontaneous forms of adult speech play was approached and described through a variety of methods. In addition to personal observations and a limited number of audio-tapes, information about speech play was collected from some five hundred accounts written by individuals who were personally involved in such play experiences. These accounts provide us with first-hand descriptions of what went on in these social situations by supplying such details as the 148 context (setting) of the interaction, who is involved, and how these types of play are routinely recognized and accom­ plished. Moreover, these accounts provide us with a unique subjective orientation to the experiences they describe. Be­ cause the accounts are written from the point of view of the social participants themselves, necessary background informa­ tion on the intentions of the players as well as the purpose of the conversation can be ascertained.

The Importance of Talk

Much of the understanding of what is happening in a social setting is achieved through talk, and perhaps even structured by it (Speier, 1973). Cicourel (1974) has noted that talk is important for participants in that it provides information about the appropriateness of occasions. Thus, talk is seen as being reflexive in that particular forms of speech will give a setting the appearance of something re­ cognizable and intelligible (Cicourel, 1974:55).

Bateson (1972:80) in his elaboration of the concept

"metacommunication" describes a situation involving monkeys engaged in play fighting. Bateson observed that their actions and signals were similar, but not identical, to those of combat. Hence the accomplishment of play fighting pre­ supposes a recognition that "this is play." Similarly, speech acts are subject to similar transformations. For example, although verbal forms of play fighting may appear 149 to be serious to unsuspecting observers, for participants such exchanges are intended to be playful.

In certain respects, talk may be seen as being more vulnerable than other activities to playful transformations.

Garfinkel (1967), as well as others, has suggested that speech is essentially indexical, in that part of its mean­ ing and intelligibility requires contextual information.

For hearers to disambiguate the meaning of whatever is said, they must consider the possible meanings of the words as well as their grammatical relationships. Nilsen and Nilsen

(1978:6) describe this process in the following way: "In order to sift out the inappropriate meanings, they must use the compatibilities and incompatibilities of the various words as well as whatever is known about the real world."

Furthermore, to hear talk as either an instance of play­ fulness or a statement of fact requires making a reference to other features of the conversational context. In order for participants to decide the meaning of the contents of speech, consideration must be also given to how it was said.

In the words of Farb (1973:38), "A speech act is made up of both form and content; in other words, how something is said is part of what is said."'*' 150

Playfulness Expressed Through Language

As previously noted, states of playful interaction are achieved through a communicative process, and typically this involves conversations of various kinds. Conversations may be defined as communicative acts of speech among individuals involved in face-to-face interaction (Speier, 1972:398). An examination of various accounts of adult play reveals that playfulness is often expressed through speech. Even if play- intention signals are not explicitly verbal in form, the types of activities that adults engage in while playing frequently involve talk. For example, this can be readily observed in the following account where two friends engage in a mock 2 verbal fight.

Martha: Well, let's ask Susan who she'd rather play with. Susan: Of course, I'd rather play with Martha. Dorothy: O.K. I ’d rather not play than play with you, Susie. Susan: Good, why don't you play with some of your friends, Brinley? Dorothy: What do you mean? Susan: Oh, Lipster and "the Dude" and all those winners. Dorothy: At least I have friends. Susan: I wonder what you do to get them! Dorothy: I happen to like my friends and I don't DO anything. Susan: That's not what A.T.O. says. Dorothy: Listen, I'm sure that Crawford has a few good ones about you. Susan: Maybe it's your skin-tight pants. Dorothy: You bitch! Susan: Brinley, I'm only kidding. Dorothy: I know— but you're still a bitch.

Dorothy concluded her description, stating: 151

The play ended when we both started laugh­ ing. Throughout the play it was important that neither of us cracked a smile. I don't think that Martha realized we were merely playing until we started to laugh.

Another illustration of play expressed through speech can be observed in instances where adults pretend to be some­ thing they obviously are not. For example, two individuals can talk "as if" they are at a racetrack when in fact they are eating dinner in their apartment.

(la-6) In the apartment above mine there is person who has a very large dog. Very often the dog runs back and forth across the apartment and when he does that the walls of our apartment shake. We now call the dog a horse.

One day when I was having dinner with one of my roommates, the dog began running around. I said to her, "It sounds like a racetrack up there." She immediately picked up the subject and began to "play" the part of the announcer at the horse races. She began a monologue that went something like this: "In the third race of the evening the competition is great! They're off and running and Sugar has taken the lead. And now they're coming into the final stretch and Friday is gaining the lead...-"

And^ individuals can pretend they are "popular" as in the following conversation between two college students who discover their names are not present again on the message board.

A: Oh, look at all the messages for us. How are we going to answer them all? B: I think we better get a secretary. I don't know where to start. A: It's so hard being this popular. I mean when the girls call you wanting to go out, how can you turn so many of them down? 152

B: I know, last weekend when I had twenty girls at my door, I had to be fair, so I didn't go out with any of them.

Similar examples were also described where participants en­ gaged in playful conversations about such pretend topics as being wealthy, being Chinese spies, living in a coal mining town, and being members of a family on television. Actually adults, like children, can make-believe they are a number of things, and express this sense of play through their speech.

A more obvious form of speech play involves talking non­ sensically (or what some participants described as "silly talk"). The following two examples represent conversations where the intention of the speakers is to produce talk that is unintelligible.

A: I just bought a pair of new jeans. B: I don't know how you can say that. My parents don’t spoil me! A: My eyes aren't brown, they're blue. B: He called me the other night to ask me out.

Kathy: I walked into a store today and walked out. Friend: My shoes are red. Kathy: The clock is running away. Friend: Well, the earphones are brown. Kathy: But the car turned the ninety degree turn in 0.5 seconds. Friend: But the noodles I bought in China turned sour.

Usually the talk involved in these types of play becomes more and more exaggerated (or ridiculous) to the point where laughter breaks out. 153

The contents of these types of conversations are ob­ viously playful for participants, for as one player noted,

"It was apparent that we were playing because if it were serious it wouldn't have made any sense." Furthermore, players report that they experienced a sense of fun, excite­ ment, and enjoyment as a result of engaging in these types of conversations. Indeed, the purpose of such conversations is beyond the mere communication of basic information

{cf. Nilsen and Nilsen, 1978) .

Playfulness expressed through language is one of the _ ways players produce recognizable playful scenes. As was shown, the content of these playful conversations often makes use of make-believe topics and nonsense. Other ways that participants identify such play forms will be taken up later in a discussion of the various ways playful conversations differ from ordinary conversations. Now let us consider ways that language itself can be manipulated.

Playing with Language

Regardless of its purpose, language can be defined as

"a hierarchical system of arbitrary symbols related to each other by rules and used by humans for communication and socialization" (Nilsen and Nilsen, 1978:3). A delineation of this system reveals the following four organizational levels of language: phonology (sounds), morphology (words), syntax (grammar), and semantics (meansings). As will be 154 demonstrated, any of these organizational levels of language can be manipulated for playful purposes.

An examination of the data reveals a number of ways individuals can establish a sense of play through the sounds of their speech. Sometimes playful sounds can be inserted into a conversation, even though these sounds have no apparent meaning. This can be seen in the following account.

(lb-123) At dinner with all my roomates one night, we were talking regularly like we always do. Susan, the roommate who al­ ways gabs, was telling us about a phone call she had gotten from her mom. She said, "Mom said she had played golf yesterday and blah, blah, blah." She kept repeating blah, blah, blah.... Then one of my other roommates jokingly said to Susan, "Did she really say blah, blah, blah?" Then two of my other roommates started in on the blah, blahs and then all of a sudden they were all having this mock, silly con­ versation using blah, blah, blah instead of real words. After laughing crazily they all quieted down and resumed normal con­ versation .

A number of other accounts described similar episodes of making strange noises and speaking "crazily." Another college woman reported the following play episode that followed several hours of studying.

(1C-88) Rick has this habit of making strange noises and speaking as if he is synthesized. Lisa and I were laughing so hard at him we could hardly catch our breath. Then Lisa began to speak back to him in a similar voice. Then we all began to make funny noises together. It evolved into an intricate pattern that sounded as though we had practiced beforehand. 155

Sometimes playful manipulations of sounds can become game­ like in character, as in the following.

(2a-30) About a month ago on our dormi­ tory floor we started saying people's names with a W at the beginning instead of the correct letter. So my name would be Wenny Wembold instead of Jenny Rembold! It began because so many people on our floor have last names which begin with the letter R. So someone was saying all the names which began with R and her speech slipped and they all came out with W's in­ stead of R's. So now we all just do it for fun. We call Lisa Wisa and Cary Wary. This play has not ended.

Furthermore, another person reported: "I have two friends who, whenever they get together, give each syllable of every word the same amount of stress. Their conversations are therefore amusing even when they are about a serious topic."

Other cases of playing with sounds involved numerous example of spontaneous rhyming and repetition. Although the rhyme in the following conversation began quite unin­ tentionally, it is, however, playfully continued.

(lc-39) I was in the vegetarian cafeteria line the other night and I asked the worker for some "cheese and peas, please." The girl behind me started laughing and said, "You mean please cheese and peas." Then the worker said, "Cheese please and please peas." We all started laughing, then continued on through the line acting crazy!

Similarly, another student wrote the following account:

(lb-79) Six of my suitemates and I were just sitting in our living room when one of them began to tell a story about what had just happened to her. She explained how she had put down some books, a small painting and a large can of candy corn in the parking lot so she could unlock her car door. While unlocking 156 the door two children came by and kicked over the can. She then said, "I could kill that kid who kicked my can of candy corn." Immediately everyone started laugh­ ing at the rather lengthy alliteration she had just recited.

Then the play began. We all began creating our own alliterations, trying to make them as long, if not longer, than hers. The rules sprang up as quickly as the play itself did. They were that you had to have at least five words in one sentence that started with the same sound or letter, and tongue- twisters that everyone had heard before were not allowed.

Another frequently reported type of language play in­ volved talking in accents. For example, individuals de­ scribed instances of talking as if they were German, English,

French, Chinese, Jewish, babies, sexy, rich, hillbillies, or from New Jersey, Boston, or the South. And sometimes a series of incomprehensible sounds are stated and assumed to be a foreign language, as in the following.

Jon : Ching Chang we wong tong? Kim: Ai ding ying yang kin:

The following account describes a conversation over the tele­ phone between two adults who talk in a baby-like voice.

M r . Frye: who's this? (in a real baby-like voi ce) Lori : O h ...ahh...this is Lori. (Right away I knew who it was.) Mr. Frye: Oh, it's my Lori. How's my sweet­ heart doing? Lori : I'm pretty good. How are you? (I also started to talk baby-like.) Mr. Frye: Well, I'm fine since I'm talking to you: I was wondering if you wanted to go down to the ice cream shop and get a malt with me? Lori : is this a real date? 157

Mr. Frye: It sure is and I hope you'll go with me. Lori: Well, wait a minute and I'll go ask my mommy I

I then laughed on the phone. The man on the phone was a neighbor, and while most people would think he was crazy or something, once you get to know him you tend to play along with him until you realize what you're doing.

Another level of language play involves word and sentence play. By far the most numerous examples of this type of lan­ guage play involve the use of puns. A pun exists when a word or phrase unexpectedly and simultaneously combines two unre­ lated meanings (Sherzer, 1978 ;2-3). A lT:iost always the pun involves words that sound similar to other words. Puns may occur both intentionally or accidentally in conversations, and as Sacks (1973:135) has noted, "Puns are recognizable, though not always recognized." Each of the following puns represents words or sentences that were recognized as exam­ ples of playful conversations.

1. Two students who are friends are walking across campus.

Lisa: You sure walk funny, kind of like a duck. Dave: That's a fowl thing to say. Here, take a gander at this.

2. One woman who is complaining to two others about the noise they are making, states the following:

Carey: All I can hear are your loud voices. Your voices penetrate the walls. Lisa: Oh, but your voice carries. 158 3. A couple is passing a football around and one of them dives for the ball and lands in the middle of a bush.

Sheila: Are you all right? Tom: Yea, I'm O.K. Just a little bushed.

4. A man is watering his house plants when a friend walks into the room.

John: Your fern is really looking good. Todd: You better "be-leaf” it.

5. A man is introducing his friend to the pilot of the airplane.

A: Huh, I can spot you pilots a mile away. There goes one now (pointing up). B: Oh yea, what's so special about pilots? A: Nothing, pilots are just plain people, with a special air about them.

The last illustration involves a case of more than one pun in the conversation. Occasionally puns may act as ini­ tiators for further speech play, and sometimes a playful competition develops where one person tries to out-pun the other, as in the following cases.

6. A man and a woman are in the middle of a conversation about how they would land­ scape a golf course.

Tom: I couldn't use bushes because when­ ever you ask them how they're feeling, they always say they're bushed. Amy: And evergreens are always pining away for something, so you can't use them ei ther. Tom: If I didn't like elm trees I could always ask them to leave. Amy: You could always spruce up the course. Tom: Yea, people would really go for that. Amy: But who knows, some might get teed of f. 159

7. Two men are teasing a woman at a party when she jokingly threatens to throw an egg at them.

Jim: I think we should make an exit. Friend: You're "eggsactly" right. Jim: But that would be a poor "eggsam- ple of courage. Friend: "Eggsplain." Jim: We would "renegg" on our masculinity. Friend: "Eggscuse" me.

All of the above examples (no pun intended) illustrate how all of the various components of language can be mani­ pulated by puns. Furthermore, all of these conversations in­ volving puns, as well as the previously mentioned cases, are considered obviously playful by the participants.

Playful Versus ordinary Speech

Speier (1973:59) has noted that speech involves far more than sentence production. "It is social exchange and social coordinations: Talk is interactional." Let us examine now some of the ways speech play is recognized and accomplished through social interaction.

Speech must be considered more than a system of grammar, since its production also requires sociolinguistic rules.

For example, various studies in conversational analysis and the ethnography of speaking have attempted to describe some of the basic features of ordinary conversational exchanges.

Some of the more important properties of conversations recog­ nized by members of our society are: 160 (1) Conversations have beginnings and endings.

(2) The number of parties involved in conversation

can vary.

(3) The distribution of talk between participants

is regulated.

(4) Generally one party speaks at a time.

(5) Conversational systems are highly sensitive to

cohes ion.

Although members of our society may not be able to clearly state the above properties, they will, nonetheless, recognize something unusual about conversations that do not have these features. Indeed, one of the ways that playful conversations are achieved is the disruption (or suspension) of one or more of these conversational features.

As noted, one property of ordinary conversation is that one party speaks at a time and that extensive interruptions are to be avoided. Therefore, the sequence of talk in a two- party conversation is alternating and would be described by the formula ABABAB, etc., where "A" and "B" are the parties to the conversation (Schegloff, 1968:1076). An examination of the following transcript produced from an audio-tape of a playful conversation reveals that this feature is routinely violated. (The symbol // refers to interruptions.)

Steve: Give me the Okie, just give them to me.' David: Hey, Steve, I haven’t harmonized with you on "Home on the Range" in a long // Steve: Well // David: How about // Steve: If you, if you, if you // 161

David: Wait, wait, wait, wait. Let me bring over the old kazoo.

As can be seen, a great deal of overlapping and interruptions occur in the above talk.

Perhaps one of the more obvious ways that playful conver­ sations are socially recognized and achieved occurs when the meaningfulness of what is said during conversational talk is disrupted. In the previously mentioned examples of nonsense, the various speech utterances did not seem to fit together; that is, what was said in one turn of talk did not make sense with the previous turn of talk. The following account illus­ trates a case of speech play involving non-cohesive (although repetitive) turns at talk.

A: When you go downtown, could you buy me some gum? B: Well, how about when I go downtown. I'll just buy you some gum. A: What you could do is buy me some gum when you go downtown. B: Or better yet, I could buy you some gum when I go downtown. A: No, no. I got it. When you go downtown, you could just buy me some gum. B; Great idea.

The point to be made about this conversation, as well as the examples of overlapping and interrupting talk, is that no par­ ticular attempt is made to correct or remedy the observably disruptive effects that such talk have in these conversations.

Finally, another recognizing feature of playful conver­ sations relates to the objectives of speech. Whereas ordinary conversations tend to be concerned with the practical communi­ cation of basic information, playful conversations do not 162 necessarily have this concern. Like other play forms, speech play can be characterized by its emphasis on process rather than goal. In short, speech play is used primarily for fun

(cf. Sherzer, 1976:20).

Summary

The primary concern of this chapter has been with the various communicational ingredients of spontaneous forms of adult speech play. An analytical distinction was made between types of playfulness expressed through language {or speech) and types of playfulness created by language (or speech) manipulation. It was demonstrated that how something is communicated through speech must be considered an important part of what is said. Specifically, it was pointed out that one of the ways of recognizing as well as accomplishing speech play involves the disruption (or suspension) of the conventional orderliness of ordinary talk. Topic selection, the distribution of talk betwen participants, and other essential features of conversational cohesion, as well as the objectives of speech, were all found to be potential re­ sources for playful interaction. 163

NOTES - Chapter VII

Gumperz and Hymes (19 72:303-304) similarly argue that speech has a form beyond that of grammar: "intelligibility depends upon the way in which something is said, inseparable from what is being said: in short, that members of a speech community share knowledge of ways of speaking as well as of grammar, that communication requires sociolinguistics as well as semantics...."

2 Labov (1972) has described the ritual verbal insults char­ acteristic of black adolescents in New York. These insults are typically outrageous and vicious ("Your mother eats rat heads."), yet they are obviously false. The topic of ritual insults will be examined more closely in Chapter IX, where the social organization of such mock verbal insults will be examined in a discussion of the limits of playful social interactions. CHAPTER VIII

PRACTICAL JOKES, PUT-ONS AND OTHER PLAYFUL DECEPTIONS

The aim of this chapter will be to discuss major issues related to the establishment of the play frame. Specifically, these issues relate to the question of how and when a parti­ cular stream of ongoing social activity comes to be defined by participants (and observers) as playful in nature. Based on studies of naturally occurring forms of playful inter­ action among adults, this researcher has found that a regu­ lar feature of many types of social play is that they are easily recognized as such, and that the participants can be said to share a common understanding of what is happening.

Many of these instances of play are designed to be seen from the very start as playful, with players explicitly informing one another that what is going on in the situation should be regarded as playful in nature. Here play-intention signals tend to be explicit, and generally unambiguous.

The concern of this chapter, however, is with another type of play, one that must be considered more problematic for participants in that ambiguity and even deception may surround the establishment of the play frame. Examples of play where individuals may experience difficulty in deciding

164 165 what is happening in a situation include practical jokes,

pranks, put-ons and other seemingly harmless deceptions that

individuals play on each other. Here individuals may be de­

ceived by others and unknowingly influenced to have a false

impression about what is happening. (That is, they do not

recognize that play is occurring in the situation.) Al­

though a basic assumption underlying such deceptions involves a belief that those who will be taken in by the deception will view the episode in the "spirit of play," this is not always the case. Sometimes problems may arise as to whether or not such deceptions should in fact be regarded as play­

ful. And sometimes disputes may arise concerning the appropriateness of a playful definition of the situation.

Play Materials

The topic of practical jokes was approached and described through a variety of methods. In addition to personal obser­ vations, introspection, and a limited number of journalistic accounts and still photographs, information about practical

jokes, put-ons, harmless pranks, and the like, was collected

from some two hundred accounts written by individuals who participated in such play forms. These accounts provide us with first-hand descriptions of what went on in these play situations by supplying such details as the context (setting) of the interaction, who is typically involved, and how these types of play developmentally unfolded over time. These 166 accounts also reveal a number of other required features that are routinely employed to organize and successfully accomplish these playful deceptions.

Furthermore, these accounts provide us with a unique subjective orientation to the experiences they describe.

As will be demonstrated, it is not only what people do but how they perceive, interpret, and feel about what they are doing or what has been done to them that leads them to con­ clude that play is occurring in the situation.

The Organization of Practical Jokes

As previously noted, many instances of adult social play must be regarded as open in form, since play-intention sig­ nals are usually explicit and the participants easily recog­ nize that their actions are obviously playful in nature.

However, this is not always the case. Other types of play can be identified where the organization of play may be far more complicated, and the recognition of play may be considered far more problematic for some participants. Types of play included in this latter category include practical jokes, put-ons, and other seemingly harmless deceptions and pranks.

Elsewhere, Goffman (1974:87) has labeled such playful de­ ceits "benign fabrications," and Tallman (1974) has provided a typology for the study of practical jokes.

An examination of such deceptions reveals that struc­ turally speaking such playful deceits divide participants 167 into two sides: those who perpetrate and are aware of the deception and those taken in by it. As can be seen in the following put-on, each side generally has a very different view of what is happening in the situation.

(lb-155) I was talking to a friend when I made an outrageous statement that I thought for sure she would not believe. (I told her that I was going to Alaska when she asked me where I was going for vacation.) However, she believed me. So, seeing my chance, I continued along in my little de­ ception, building my story to include an uncle stationed in Alaska and maybe the possibility of me getting a high-paying job working on the Alaskan pipeline. She bought it all. Finally, I couldn't keep a straight face any longer, so I told her 'it was all a lie.

Further confusion as to what is happening in the situation is illustrated in the following account of a college student who witnessed this episode.

(lb-264) It seems that there are few room­ mates on my floor who have gotten along with each other well the whole year. One pair that does get along is envied by others on the floor and oftentimes become counselors to others about their problems.

I walked by their room and they were having a huge fight over a few small matters. Other good friends of theirs who had been in the room were leaving because it was such an un­ pleasant situation and they didn't want to get involved. Everyone was expressing shock and disbelief as they walked out. I couldn’t believe it.

I opened up their door and looked in. They were sitting on the bed laughing hysterically. I couldn’t figure out what was going on. Everyone had told me they were fighting. When I asked them about it they said they had planned out this big argument to see the 168 others’ reactions, and that they weren't really fighting at all.

Although the "lie" occurred somewhat spontaneously in the first example, practical jokes and related pranks may be elaborately planned by those who will be involved in sus­ taining the fabrication.

The Jokester

Typically, the jokester's role in planning the decep­ tion is one of constructing a situation in such a way that the "victim" will be "set up" to make false assumptions about what is happening in the situation. In order to do this the jokester must maintain a "straight face" so as not to arouse suspicion about what appears to be happening.

However, this presentation of a normal appearance^ may be the most difficult part for the jokester to accomplish.

One person described this predicament in the following way:

"We had a terible time keeping a straight face, the corners of our mouths kept turning up." And when the laughter can no longer be suppressed and kept inside, the deception generally ends, as in the following account.

(PJ-5) When we had gone this far, Nadine and I swapped glances. This was the hard­ est part of all--controlling the humor of the situation. When I couldn't hold it any longer, I just burst into laughter. Stunned and embarrassed, Mike just stood there speech­ less . 169

Since laughter frequently occurs when a frame of re­

ference is suddenly and unexpectedly changed (Schefflen,

1972:72), the laughter tends to give the deception or prank

away. For those taken in, what they once considered real

is now questioned and they begin to recognize that they are

indeed wrong about what they thought was going on in the

situation. As in other play forms, a systematic transforma­

tion of what appears to be going on in the situation now

takes place.

As is often the case, the intention of those who per­

petrate the prank or deception is usually one of wanting to

see the surprised and sometimes foolish reactions of their

"victims." A nurse who had been duped into believing two

other nurses were having a serious argument, wrote the follow­

ing: "I was set up to see my reactions. They all thought

it was funny because I took them seriously. I didn’t know it was play. I had no way of knowing they were best friends.

I really felt foolish." And a college dormitory resident wrote the following about his prank of carefully sneaking up

on an innocent bystander and letting out an incredible

scream in an attempt to make the person jump. "The victim

loses all control of himself and it is hilarious to watch

someone who is actually this terrified."

As can be seen in these illustrations, the jokester's

intention is to have fun and to amuse himself, and sometimes

others, by the surprised and sometimes foolish reactions of 170 his victims* A basic assumption of those who perpetrate the deception is that since no serious harm was intended, the whole episode should be taken in the spirit of play. The laughter that tends to characterize the endings of such decep­ tions and pranks can be seen to instruct those taken in to take it as a joke. Of course, what seems like a harmless prank to one side may appear quite differently to the other.

The Victim

Those tricked by a practical joke or prank are almost always described as "victims," a rather curious designation for these presumed fellow play partners. As previously noted, victims are not generally aware of the deception while the practical joke or prank is being carried out.

As unknowing participants in play, their roles seem largely to be confined to acting naively and unsuspectingly. However, when the deception is revealed to them, they are expected to get over their initial shock and uncertainty and come to regard the situation as play. This is illustrated in the following account where the victim is surprised by a

Hallowe'en prank.

(PJ-10) All of them kept telling me to look underneath the sheet. So eventually I did, only to be smashed in the face with a pie by my girlfriend. I reached up and cleaned two spaces for my eyes to see what happened, only to see a crowd of people really enjoying the whole thing. This led me to believe that they weren't serious. 171

I really didn't know how to react at first. There seemed to be an unwritten law saying that I couldn't be a sore sport, yet I was beginning to challenge the validity of it. I guess the playing around came to an end as everybody laughed it off which seemed easier for them.

Another victim describes her reaction to a fraternity prank

in similar terms.

(lb-175) I was one of the unsuspecting freshmen who was kidnapped and taken down the mud slide forcibly. The fraternity members invite you up to their house, but make sure you come in the front door. When you are in the house they pick you up and carry you outside to the mud slide. My first reaction when I was picked up was real confusion. I did not know what was going on. When I was carried outside I saw the mud slide and immediately began to fight my kidnappers. I did not want to go down the mud slide. Next thing I knew, I was being soaked with freezing cold water. After I was halfway down I was laughing and actually enjoying it. Many other girls went down and the majority seemed to enjoy it. Only a few girls were truly angry. The guys had a great time doing it.

Having been made aware of the above event, the follow­

ing year I had the opportunity to personally witness the mud slide (see Plates III-V). The above account did indeed re­ present the vast majority of the women's reactions. However,

there were notable exceptions. For example, I did witness one case where one woman's fighting and screaming were particularly intense; it took three fraternity members to

finally subdue her and drag her to the edge of the slide.

As she was forced onto it she repeated the following state­ ment quite adamantly the whole way down the slide: "I am t o * 172 ki •H ' i

Plate III. Beta Mud Slide (Sequence 1)

Plate IV. Beta Mud Slide (Sequence 2)

Plate V. Beta Mud Slide (Sequence 3) 173 not going to have fun, I am not going to have fun." And she didn't. When she reached the bottom she left immediately, letting it be publicly known that she was infuriated by the whole incident.

Not only are the participants of practical jokes and pranks divided into two sides according to their prior know­ ledge of the prank or deception, but their experiences and reactions may also differ in important ways.

As is suggested in some of the previous accounts, some victims do get angry, and in so doing, refuse to accept a playful definition of the situation. This can be seen more explicitly in the following account:

(4a-83) My husband was to go out of town for the week. It was Friday and after I helped him load up his suitcases in the car and said good-bye to him, I went off to school.

After I came back home I went upstairs. When I got to the top of the stairs, I glanced in my husband's room and someone was sitting at his desk. I screamed and started to run downstairs. Then I realized it was my hus­ band. I heard him laughing. Kis trip was cancelled at the last minute and he thought he would play a trick on me. So he came home and hid his car where I wouldn't see it. Then he went upstairs to wait till I came home so he could scare me. Well, he did scare me and while he might have thought of it as playing I didn't. In fact, I was mad at him. I felt like my heart was going to jump right out of my chest and I felt also like I would faint. When he realized I was mad and didn't think it was funny or playful, he apologized and agreed not to do it again.

This is clearly a case where the victim disputes the appropriateness of a playful definition of the situation. 174 Is This Plav?

These latter accounts raise a number of interesting questions regarding the appropriateness of the play frame

to these types of social interactions. For example, is it

play when the victim of a playful deceit refuses to laugh it

off and remains angry? Can it be said that an individual is

playing even when he isn't aware of it? And can an indivi­

dual be forced to play against his will?

How individuals reach a shared understanding of what is happening in the situation must be considered partially prob­

lematic, given that they can't always predict exactly what will happen. This is certainly true when they play together.

Individuals never know with absolute certainty how others will respond to their play invitations, especially in the case of practical jokes and other pranks. How then can those who carry out such playful deceptions be assured that victims will see the playfulness of their actions?

Whereas the vast majority of the accounts that were available for this study were written by those who perpetrated or witnessed the practical jokes and pranks, only a limited number of accounts were available from victims. Perhaps this

in itself can be taken as evidence to suggest that for many victims the joke or prank is not regarded as all that playful.

No doubt that this is sometimes the case; however, these accounts also document other possibilities. 175 Making Sure It's Plav

A number of things are routinely taken into considera­ tion by those who wish to involve others in playful pranks and deceptions. The most notable of these is the fact that such jokes are usually limited to close friends and family members. Preferred victims of jokesters are people who are familiar to them, people who are likely to know that no harm was really intended, and thus are likely to take the prank playfully. This is not to say that all close friends and relatives are potential victims, only that jokesters are likely to know which are likely candidates. Such playful pranks may be quite typical and even expected in some rela­ tionships, as long as they aren't harmful or destructive. A woman describes a harmless prank that frequently takes place between her husband and herself.

(4a-45) My husband sometimes teases me by taking my pillow after we have gone to bed. He waits until I have to get up for some­ thing, then while I am gone he moves it. When I return to the room it is dark, I lie down and to my surprise my pillow is gone. It causes a strange falling sensation. He laughs as soon as my head hits the bed, I know then that he has fooled me again. He then returns my pillow or runs the risk of losing his.

He originated this play, but I do it to him whenever I get the chance. There is never any anger involved.

In general, jokesters are able to anticipate the reac­ tions of their victims, as can be seen in the following two accounts. 176

(5a-42) She was kind of startled and sur­ prised. She gotembarrassed but then broke out laughing. That was a pretty tricky idea we had. I had a real good time doing it because I just knew what she was going to say. She said, "Oh, Ronald."

(5b-86) I was a bit afraid that we would get into trouble for this joke, but I also knew that if she found out who did it, she would probably take it good-naturedly. I knew this was all just play because everybody was always playing these sorts of tricks on our boss.

Another account, written by a woman who observed a surprise baby powder attack succinctly summarizes how a potential victim is selected.

(lb-198) Why was she chosen for the attack? Three reasons: (1) she is the best friend of the attacker; (2) she is likely to be the most playful of the people present; and (3) from past experience the attacker knew that she wouldn't get mad--that she was basically crazy too.

Furthermore, certain occasions (such as Hallowe’en,

April Fools' Day, birthdays and wedding ceremonies) are fre­ quently identified as settings where playful deceits and pranks routinely take place. An April Fools' Day account provides a list of some favorite pranks of students living in a dormitory.

(5a-106) My one roommate and I were in a slap- happy mood, so we decided to pull some April Fool pranks. There are twenty-five of us living here and we're all friends. Anyway, our pranks included putting saran wrap tightly over the toilets, salting and short sheeting beds, switching drawers from dresser to dresser, changing the time on the clocks, fill­ ing glasses of water and turning them upside- down, and tying shut a set of sliding doors. We also loosened a couple of light bulbs. 177

Finally, weddings are also occasions where pranks may be in­

stitutionalized. The prank of "decorating" the bride and groom's car was described quite frequently (see Plate VI).

(5b-15) While the groom and bride were open­ ing their presents, we went out and got toilet paper, shoe polish, paper, and rice and decorated their car. We hadn't planned on doing it till the last minute. We all commented on how fun it was. Then the bride and groom came out of the church and they saw their car. They were a little upset, but they got over it. I felt great while doing this but I can just see my car now when I get married.

A good number of the accounts also noted that the inten­ tion of many jokesters is to get even with those who have played pranks on them. As will be illustrated, the most pre­ ferred victims of practical jokes and the like are the prank­ sters themselves.

On Getting Even

It was previously noted that a basic assumption under­ lying playful deceits and pranks is that since no harm is in­ tended, the episode should be taken in the spirit of play.

For this reason, these jokes frequently serve as initiators of other play episodes with victims seeking playful revenge.

As in other forms of more spontaneous play, roles are not usually fixed, but may shift back and forth among partici­ pants (Bowman, 1978) . Thus, victims of one practical joke may conspire to get even with those responsible for the pre­ vious joke, as can be seen in the following accounts of the Plate VI. Prank of "Decorating" Newlyweds' Car 178 179 vi ct inis .

(5a-113) It was April Fools' Day and I had not played any tricks on anyone yet. I immediately thought of my best friend who had played a trick on me last year on April Fools' Day. I then thought up a plan where I could seek revenge.

(5a-205) When all the guys on the floor decided I had enough they carried me upstairs where they untied me. Only one person cut me loose while all the others ran into their rooms and locked their doors. They all thought I was mad, but I wasn't. I knew that I would get even and I did.

And one prankster wrote the following: "I knew then he was

going to get even with me which would have been only fair."

Certain pranks and practical jokes may be repeated and

routinized among members of the same group. This cycle of

revenging such pranks may continue almost indefinitely, as

if a playful "war" has been declared by both sides.

(lb-10) This is the account of the general war my roommate and I have with the guys down the hall. This particular skirmish started with my roommate pennying the guy down the hall into his room just to see if he could get out. He did get out rather easily so we pennied them in moretightly the second time. While they were trying to get out we filled an empty record jacket with shaving cream and slid the open end of it under the door. We stomped on the billowed record jacket and the result was shaving cream all over their room. They finally got out and promptly pennied us in our room. Not having the tools to get out, we finally asked them to let us out. As they opened the door, I filled my hand with shaving cream and smeared it o'/er one of their faces. That quickly generated a large wrestling match where everyone ended up with shaving cream all over us to say nothing of the hall.

This analogy to war is also suggested by the various "truces" that are negotiated to bring a series of pranks to an end. 180 Others described their relationship with some friends as one of constantly playing pranks and practical jokes on each other. One individual's life was one of constant surprises and he stated that anytime something unusual or unexpected happened he would know that what was really happening was a prank. Thus, when he was confronted with the following situation, he mistakingly took the situation as a prank.

(5a-207) Mark and I have pulled a number of pranks on each other's jeep. A month ago I went to my jeep and my doors were gone. There was nothing I could do about that so I started the jeep up and took off only to find that Mark also hooked up my tow chain to a "no parking" sign.

Just recently I had my jeep towed and my first thought was that Mark pulled it away as a little joke. Unfortunately, it was the police department who towed me and the fine was not a joke.

Apparently such mistakes are not all that infrequent. For example, when New York State lottery personnel notified one hundred winners that they had won $1,000 in the March lottery, the majority of winners could not believe the per­ son calling. The calls were made on April first (Columbus

Pi spatch, April 1, 1977).

Summary

This chapter has considered a number of issues related to the question of how a sense of play is accomplished in social interaction. A very general typology of social d a y 181 was offered, and the relevance of this typology to the prob­

lem of how play-intent ion signals are communicated was out­

lined. However, tne major concern of this study was with the organization of practical jokes, pranks, and other playful deceits. In these types of social play, participants were

found to be either aware of the prank or deception, or to be taken in by it. Not only was each side found to have a very different view of what was happening in the situation, but their experiences and reactions to these playful deceits differed in significant ways. Whereas victims expressed confusion, surprise, and sometimes anger, perpetrators tended to have far more fun.

Jokesters were also found to routinely take into consi­ deration a number of factors before carrying out their play­ ful acts. In particular, the context of the interaction, the type of relationship they had with their victim, and past experiences were considered crucial elements. Prac­ tical jokes and pranks were also found to be typical fea­ tures of some relationships and situations. And like other types of social play, as long as others involved are not harmed, practical jokes, pranks and the like are the kinds of activities that certain types of individuals experience as enjoyable and pleasurable. 182

NOTE - CHAPTER VIII

In the essay "Normal Appearances," Goffman (1971) observes that individuals, when interacting with others, are con­ cerned with presenting a normal appearance, so as not to arouse suspicion or fear. CHAPTER IX

THE ORGANIZATION OF SOCIAL PLAY

"It is not necessary to wait for the day of leisure to reach high noon to see that already people are playing harder than ever, longer than ever, and in new ways. Fun is breaking out all over" (Klapp, 1968:182).

The previous four chapters have presented data from four major areas of adult social play: (1) playing at work;

(2) inventing new games; (3) speech and language play; and

(4) practical jokes and other harmless pranks. In no way should these types be taken as being exhaustive of the total range of adult play. These types were identified for pur­ poses of description and comparison, and as a means for re­ ducing the diversity and complexity of the play phenomenon to a coherent level. Furthermore, these types are not to be regarded as mutually exclusive categories. (For example, one could easily imagine a playful practical joke involving speech taking place within the context of work.) Finally, the description of these four types of social play are in­ tended to sensitize the reader to some of the occasions where adult playful social interactions would likely arise.

In the context of the previous four chapters nearly one hundred examples of actual adult playful social interactions were described and partially analyzed. The goal of the

183 184 present chapter is to complete this analysis- To accomplish this goal, a number of generalizations will be made from the data presented in Chapters V to VIII, and, when necessary, additional data will be provided. In order to bring some order to this process of data analysis, reference will be made to the first five research questions that were outlined in Chapter IV.

Specifically, this analysis of the organization of spontaneous adult social play will be broken down into an­ swering the following five questions:

{1) What is the context (setting) of the interaction?

(2) Who is involved, and what is their relationship to

one another?

(1) What is it about the situation or the player's be­

haviors that leads observers and participants to

conclude that play is occurring?

(4) How does the play begin?

(5) How does the play end?

It is important to remember that these questions were for­ mulated in response to the research problem of explicating how a sense of play is both recognized andaccomplished in everyday adult social interactions.

One final concern of this chapter is to identify and analyze the tacit rules, "background assumptions" (Gar-

finkel, 1967), or "interpretive procedures" (Cicourel, 1974) which make the world of play socially possible. Here the 185 seemingly paradoxical topic of rules of play will be exa­ mined. All of this analysis is directed toward the problem of how the world of play is socially constructed and main­ tained in the face of alternative provinces of meaning, and the overwhelming reality of everyday adult life.

The Context of Adult Social Plav

This study's examination of a rather large number of cases of adult social play has revealed that such play is a ubiquitous phenomenon. Play was found to take place in a wide variety of social situations. To list but a few, adults were observed playing in the following diverse physical settings: a movie theatre; restaurants; college classrooms; tennis courts; in a car; parties; a home of the aged; and even in a hospital emergency room. Goffman (1974:49) notes this feature of play in his statement that "brief switchings into playfulness are everywhere found in society, so much so that it is hard to be conscious of their widespread occurrence." Despite the fact that play may be potentially found everywhere in society, there are, as will be noted throughout this chapter, some important contextual limits.

In Chapters II and III, it was argued that the meanings of social actions and events are contextually dependent.

Without knowledge of the context, many social behaviors and actions would have vague and equivocal meanings. This is 186 especially true of adult playful social interactions. Play

is defined by context in very important ways. As previous­

ly suggested, there are certain types of social settings where adult play is expected to occur as a matter of course and without question. For example, a woman describes her playfulness at Disney World in these terms:

(5b-56) As we walked through Disney World I noticed some "life-size" Disney characters in the crowd. I ran over to Dopey (of the Seven Dwarves) and began talking to him. Of course he could not answer, but that didn't bother me. I even offered him some of my popcorn. My husband, I noticed, had been playing with Grumpy and Doc. He came and joined me and we all posed for pictures.

I felt like a kid while playing. I didn't mind playing in the middle of Disney World, because people around you are more apt to accept your silliness because it's a place to play.

It was observed in Chapter VIII that playful deceits and pranks are routinely practiced on such occasions as

Hallowe'en, April Fools' Day, birthdays, and wedding cere­ monies. All of these occasions provide a context for the recognition of playful social interactions.

Other settings where spontaneous play is expected in­ clude parties, public drinking establishments, and other festive occasions- As one student remarked, "The situation was clearly a playful one, which is all that's to be ex­ pected at a fraternity party on a Friday night." Elsewhere, these types of play settings have been referred to as periods 187 of "time-out."'*' According to Roebuck and Frese (1976:48),

"time-out playtime settings are festive occasions where one is supposed to exhibit intimate, sincere, spontaneous, ex­ pressive behavior in order to have fun, relax and enjoy oneself."

Cavan's (1966) study of public drinking establishments emphasizes the importance of sociability in these settings, and according to Cavan the latitudes of behavior are much greater in bars than in other more serious settings. In these settings, patrons have an increased freedom— within limits--to engage in a number of improper acts without sanction. Bars are one of the few public settings where a- dults can legitimately engage in playful activities in the presence of strangers.

Many of the accounts of playful social interactions that were provided by college students occurred in the context of parties. One factor that contributes to the "time-out" quality of these social occasions is the use of alcohol and 2 other drugs. MacAndrew and Edgerton (1969) note that in every society in which drinking occurs it is generally pre­ sumed that alcohol produces recognizably different be­ haviors. In this altered state of consciousness, adults presumably can do certain things (in this case, playful acts) that they might not ordinarily do, and they are not held accountable for their actions. 188

...not only can the drinker explain away his drunken misbehavior to himself ("I never would have done it if I had been sober”), those around him too can decide, or can be made to see, that his drunken transgressions ought not— or at least need not--be taken in full seriousness ("After all, he was drunk").

Other occasions where acts of playfulness may be legi­

timately expressed are celebrations and other social happen­

ings. Adult play was found to be present in celebrating weddings, New Years, birthdays, and anniversaries. For

college students major athletic victories may provide occa­ sions for collective displays of playfulness. One example of a victory celebration can be observed in Plate VII. Here students at the University of North Carolina celebrate their basketball team's national championship by painting the streets "Carolina blue." Despite the fact that these stu­ dents are engaged in the "deviant act" of vandalizing public property, the context of this victory celebration apparently provides a license to do things with impunity. Of course,

this license has very definite limits, and is subject to differences in interpretation. For example, this research­ er observed a victory celebration after a football game at

Ohio State, during which a student "playfully" stole the hat of a Michigan fan. He was immediately arrested. After his arrest, he complained to the police officer, stating,

"Come on, this is ridiculous, I didn't mean anything by it."

As can be seen in Plate VIII, the police officer failed to Plate VII. College Victory Celebration

191 accept the student's playful definition of the situation.

Just as there are situations where adult play is typi­ cally expected to take place, there are other contexts where play is discouraged, if not prohibited. One type of con­ text where adults don't ordinarily play is work. As was noted in chapter V, workers typically do not play in the pre­ sence of either supervisors or customers.

There are other contexts in American society where adult play would be judged inappropriate or would not be recognized. One such context relates to the following de­ scription .

(5a-78) Four of us friends were boat­ ing on the Ohio River when the song "Miss You" began to play on the radio. Strangely enough the beat of the song was in rhythm with the movement of the boat.

We got into the dual beat of the music and boat so much we all stood up in a line and danced around the boat. We were all laughing and hollering. We were really enjoying ourselves when suddenly a Coast Guard boat approached us. Our great time ended after re­ ceiving a ticket for unsafe operation.

Some social settings and relationships are regarded as being too serious for playful social interactions. As a teacher I find that the physical setting of a classroom very much constrains playful social interactions. Personally, I find it difficult to be playful in that setting, and 192 sometimes when I do playful acts, the students fail to recog­ nize it as playful.

Another illustration of a "serious" context is that of a hospital emergency room. A nurse described the following case of play that was misunderstood and taken seriously.

(4a-8) My cousin Dr. King works in the Emergency Room. Now Barney is the type of person that you have to pay close attention to because he has a habit of bullshitting you with a very calm, serious face.

Late on Wednesday night, a tall, well- built Japanese-American male limped in. He had been in a karate tournament and had injured two of his toes in a kick. After the customary X-rays (the toes were not broken), Barney told the patient he should just take it easy for a day or two. The patient, upset because this wasn't the first time he had sprained his toes, asked if there was anything he could do to build up the muscles in his toes to avoid hurt­ ing them. Barney sat there as though thinking about it, and said, "You know, there is a good way you can do this. Just walk up to a brick wall with bare feet and ram your toes as hard as you can into it at least four times, and do this three times a day and in about two weeks your toes will be really strong."

The patient sat and listened to every word he said, believing it and taking mental note of the directions. He asked him to repeat how often he should do this .

Seeing that he actually believed the doctor, we had to convince him that the doctor had only been kidding, and that if he did this little exercise he would end up with severely broken toes. 19 3

These last two illustrations raise interesting questions about just how play is recognized in social situations, a topic that will now be explicitly considered.

The Recognition of Adult Social Play

Meaningful social interaction presupposes that indivi­ duals are engaged in a communicative process of mutual under­ standing. Likewise, playful communication and interaction take place when participants act as if they recognize that what is going on in the situation is to be regarded as play­ ful in nature. The mutual recognition of play itself must be viewed as an important part of the play context. This is so because play acts as a frame or a context which provides information and meaning about how other social objects and events within that frame are to be interpreted.

An important type of contextual dependency is exhibited in situations where verbal communication or other non­ verbal signs are employed to somehow alter the way later communication is interpreted. Bateson (1956:1972) refers to this type of reflectiveness about what is going on in the situation--a process of communicating about communica­ tion— as "metacommunication," and notes that "this phenome­ non, play, could only occur if the participant organisms were capable of some degree of metacommunication, i.e., of exchanging signals which carry the message 'this is play'"

(1972: 179) . 194

Both Bateson and Goffman (1961; 1974) argue that in or­

der to understand an action or a social event as play, it

must be framed by the message "this is play." Miller

(1973:92) too stresses that play is not a type of activity,

but rather a "context.... It is a mode of organizing be- 3 havior, one way of fitting activities together."

According to Bateson (1972) the message "this is play" establishes a paradox of the Russellian or Epimenides' type.

In his essay "A Theory of Play and Fantasy," Bateson (1972:

184) diagrams this paradoxical frame in this way:

All statements within this frame are untrue.

I love you.

I hate you.

It is obvious that the first statement in this frame is self­ contradictory— if this statment is true, it must be false, and if the statement is false, then it is true. The first statement also affects the other two statements bounded by this frame in such a way that if the first statement is true,

then the others must be false; likewise, if the first state­ ment is false, then the others must be true. A similar para­ dox is present in the message "this is play."

Paradox is doubly present in the signals which are exchanged within the context of play.... Not only does the playful nip not denote what would be denoted by the bite for which it stands, but, in addi­ tion, the bite itself is fictional. Not 195

only do the playing animals not quite mean what they are saying but, also, they are usually communicating about something which does not exist (Bate­ son , 1972:182).

As previously argued, the ntetacommunicative message

"this is play" must be considered an essential part of the

process of how a sense of play is accomplished. Looking

again to the play episodes that have been provided, what

features can be said to indicate nonliteralness, or signal

a transition to a state of play? In other words, what are

the required features that play participants must collabora-

tively locate and make available to others in the situation

in order to accomplish a sense of playfulness?

One easily recognized feature of these playful occa­

sions is the contradictory and/or unexpected nature of some

of the participants* behavior.

It was quite apparent that it was play, because they don't normally do this sort of thing.

At the time I couldn't believe he actually did something like that. It was so unexpected.

An account of such unanticipated actions typically must be

made. In most situations observers are usually able to

classify the activity in question at a glance ("It was ob­

viously play "); sometimes, however, observers must rely

on the developmental character of the actions in order to decide what is happening (Sudnow, 1972). In other words, 196

if it is not obvious from the beginning that the developing

episode is to be regarded as playful, then the possibility exists that an incorrect reading or misinterpretation will

take place. Play is recognizable but not always recognized.

Another required feature of spontaneous forms of adult play is that verbal or nonverbal play signals be present over the course of the interaction. Play, like other forms of communication, must be regarded as dynamic in nature; those engaged in playful social interactions must be reminded that

"this is play." Perhaps the most obvious metacommunicative signal is the frequency of smiling and laughter. These sig­ nals provide us with information about the emotional states of other individuals. As Merleau-Ponty (1964:52-53) notes:

Anger, shame, hate, and love are not psychic facts hidden at the bottom of another's consciousness: they are types of behavior or styles of conduct which are visible from the outside. They exist on the face or in the gesture, not hidden behind them.

The play world is expressed in our bodily attitudes, and we

understand the playfulness of others directly in their be­ haviors. One important source of information about the emotional states of other people is their face (Millar and

Millar, 1982: 89) . Facial expressions are used to recognize

the playfulness of others, as can be noted in these descrip-

11 ons .

It was obvious from their faces that they were enjoying themselves. They 197

would smile and wink at us to signal that their "fight" was harmless--all in fun.

When I looked shocked, he shot me an inconspicuous smile which told me I should play along.

I knew it was play because as they threw the leaves out of the car they were all laughing, screaming and smiling during this process.

Such signals act as social displays and can be said to con­ vey information relevant to classifying the participants1 relationship to one another.

Other recognized "invitations to play" signals which were observed include explicit verbal statements {"Let's just playi") and nonverbal cues such as exaggerated and/or repeated movements, and a decrease in the social distances between play participants. These signals are generally operative throughout the play episode, with each act of play inviting more acts to follow.

This section has identified some of the most common ways that the context of play is socially recognized and achieved. In this next section the following question will be examined: "Who is involved in adult playful social interactions?" This question, as well as other questions that will be taken up later in this chapter, also has implications for how a state of play is recognized in adult social interactions. 198

The Participants of Adult Soci a 1 Play

Play signals were said to convey information relevant to classify'ng the participants' relationship to one another.

Another important way of recognizing play is to examine who is involved in these playful interactions. Of particular importance is the type of relationship these individuals 4 have with one another.

The answer to the question "Who is involved in the play­ ful interaction, and what is their relationship to one another?" nearly always includes individuals who are friends, or individuals related by blood or marriage. This can be seen in the following comments:

I realized that these four girls were playing because they're all friends.

He didn't get mad because we are all friends and we were just play­ ing around.

Speech play is a hard thing to put your finger on, for with us it is a continual thing. We've all been friends so long that we are con­ stantly doing it without realizing it.

Also, in their ethnographic descriptions of play, college students always referred to their fellow play partners on a first name basis, thus suggesting a certain level of famil­ iarity, of intimacy. 199

Just as play is frequently recognized by the close rela­ tionship of the players, close relationships, in turn, are frequently recognized by the ability of individuals to play together. A number of individuals provided comments that their abilities to play together revealed just how close the relationship was. This can be seen in the following descrip­ tion:

(2b-81) I kiddingly said, "Well, to tell you the truth. I'm damn sick of you all." (I said it in a real sar­ castic voice, not meaning it of course.) We all laughed. We hadn't really kidded around with each other yet, and it helped us all to know we were friends.

Only occasionally did individuals report playing with strangers. And during such times, players frequently re­ ported that they felt uncomfortable and self-conscious, and that they were making fools of themselves. They also com­ plained that they were never sure how unfamiliar people would respond.

Another way of determining who is involved in acts of playful social interactions relates to the use of social 5 typifications and personal ideal types. Not only are there certain contexts (and types of social interactions) where adults may or may not be expected to play, but certain indi­ viduals may or may not be identified as types of people who are particularly playful. Of special relevance to the pre­ sent discussion are types of individuals who are recognized as playful. As was noted in Chapter VIII, certain 200

individuals are labeled "practical jokesters." This can be

seen in the following comment: "I have known Jim for three years and I have always known him to be a jokester." Other

individuals were identified as clowns or fools.^ Some

suggested that they always played whenever they got together with a certain group of individuals. And one college woman

confessed,"My roommates and I are well known for doing

crazy things."

These typifications are also important for how indivi­ duals recognize that play is occurring in social situations.

Unfortunately, such typifications do not always lead indivi­ duals to a correct assessment of the situation. This can be seen in the following example:

"Candid Camera" became so much a part of American culture in the 1960's that when a man hijacked a plane that producer Allen Funt was traveling on, the passen­ gers stood up and cheered, assuming— incorrectly— that the hijacking was a stunt staged for television (Newsweek, September 8, 1982).

This section has identified who is typically involved

in adult playful social interactions. As was seen, adults generally play with their friends, and their play is some­

times taken as one sign of their friendship. It was also noted that certain Individuals are sometimes typified as be­

ing playful, and as being initiators of adult playful social interactions. The issue of initiating adult play will now be examined. 201

The Initiation of Adult Socia1 Play

The objective of this section is to discuss issues re­ lated to the establishment of the play frame. Specifically, the following question will be examined: "How does the play begin?" ("How is the transition to a playful state made?")

It is important to realize that the phenomenon under inves­ tigation is spontaneous social play, and that such play has its origin in an ongoing interpersonal process. The question of how play begins must examine how play relates to the social situation from which it emerges. As O'Neill (1974:1) notes, "An opening is never just a beginning except in retro­ spect. We begin in the midst of things...."

An examination of the data suggests at least two gener­ al categories of responses to the above question. First, there are cases where this question is very easily answered.

Typically, such cases tend to employ rather conventional and explicit cues which inform participants that what is going on should be regarded as playful. Here all participants may be said to share a common understanding of what is going on. The second category is, however, more problematic for participants in that ambiguity surrounds the establishment of the play frame. Here some participants may have doubts as to how to define the meanings of the actions in question, or various disputes may arise as to whether a playful defini­ tion is appropriate for a particular situation. 20 2

Bateson (1972) has argued that play can only occur if participants are capable of some degree of metacommunication.

In order to establish a play frame, participants must ex­ change signals which can be said to convey the message "this is play." Employing Bateson's version of the term "frame,"

Goffman (1974) argues that the message "this is play" can be viewed as a keying device. The key "this is play" provides participants with an understanding that a systematic trans­ formation has been introduced to alter the everyday meanings of what participants would say was going on. Similarly,

Handelman (1976:439) suggests that the invocation of play is

"predicated upon the assumption that messages to participants contained within such boundaries are to be understood accord­ ing to hierarchies of relevance which do not hold for activi­ ties defined within mundane or instrumental frames." The possibility of social play can then be said to be dependent upon the players' recognition of this transition from one frame of meaning to another.

The establishment of the play frame involves a systema­ tic transformation and a radical reconstitution of what appears to be going on in a situation for participants.

Various cues must be made available for establishing and ending such a transformation. Any activity framed in a particular way tends to be characterized by various cues which provide boundary markers for establishing beginnings and endings. Hence, in order for social play to occur, play 203 signals should be unambiguous and not be confusing for parti­ cipants if they are to arrive at a playful definition of what is happening In the situation.

Most instances of adult social play have play-intention signals which are explicit, clear, and generally unambiguous.

Typically, such signals occur at the beginning of the play­ ful interaction, a crucial point where it is most important not to be misunderstood. This can be demonstrated in the following two accounts.

(la-1) While walking through the stu­ dent union with my wife I smiled as I bumped my hip into hers. She returned the bump a little harder, and I laughed and bumped again.

(4b-9) One Saturday afternoon I was mowing the grass in the frong yard. My mom and dad were starting to wash their car. I didn't think anything about it and continued mowing. When 1 came around again mom was using the hose rinsing the soap off the hood, and dad was bent over the other side putting soap on it. She sprayed the water too far and splashed dad. He jumped up and she started laughing. He in turn said, "I'll do the rinsing and you apply the soap." Mom said, "All right." I never thought for a minute that dad would then do what he did. As soon as mom turned her back he started after her with the hose. She ran, but not fast enough and he drenched her. He was laughing so hard he fell down and before he could get back up she had gotten the bucket of soapy water and dumped it right over his head. Both of them just sat there and 1auqhed.

As can be noted from the above examples, players ex­ change signals which convey the message "this is play." 204

Such signals may be conveyed through vocalizations (such as

verbal invitations and/or laughter), facial expressions

(smiling) and by other bodily gestures. These signals are

likely to precede as well as accompany play encounters, and

serve to affect the way other social messages are inter­

preted in these situations.

The crucial importance of various play-intention sig­

nals in establishing, as well as maintaining, an appropriate

play frame has been noted. For the sake of clarity, some

players may even ritualize these signals in an attempt to

remove any possible confusion regarding the meaning of these

signals. Bekoff (1972:425-426) in his review of ethological

studies of mammal play, similarly concludes that in any

social communication it is advantageous for behavioral sig­

nals to possess a degree of constancy of form in order to minimize signal ambiguity. Thus, play initiation signals may be ritualized as in the following example.

(4a-3) This play event always takes place in my home and involves certain telephone conversations between my cousin and myself. I answer the phone in my usual manner and I hear this voice saying, "Is this the Clifton residence?" Well, the conversation is always opti­ mistic, with me having won a trip to some God-forsaken area, thirty miles from any civilization. Of course 1 play along with it and get to the point of disbelief, using phrases like, "I can't believe it, I've never won anything in my life, and to win a trip like this... I think I'm going to faint." After we carry on this fic­ titious conversation we have a good laugh and proceed to more serious talk. 20 5

Ritualized invitations to play may include the use of certain verbal cues, such as passwords, or other ritualized openings as is demonstrated m the above account. Even verbal in­ sults (or a "straight face") may characterize the beginnings of a playful exchange for certain individuals.

All of the previous examples illustrate various ways that playful frames of interaction may be initiated. In all of these cases participants readily identified these situa­ tions as playful. However, there are more complex forms of play; play which is not constructed on the premise "this is play," but rather around the more romp]icated question, "Is this play?" (Bateson, 1972:182).

A frequent occurrence that may lead eventually to a playful definition of the situation relates to accidents and other unintentional happenings where no harm is apparently done. Illustrations of such accidents can be observed in the following descriptions.

(2a-36) While a friend and I were walk- down the stairs of my dorm we kept bumping into each other. After a while we started bumping into each other on purpose. Then all of a sudden we started racing down the stairs and ran all the way to the library.

(lb-277) My roommate and I were coming back from dinner one time and it had been a bad day for both of us because we had tests, papers, etc., and hadn't gotten any mail to top it off. When we were walking down the hall to our room she accidentally tripped me as she turned to read a message on some­ one's door. She said she was sorry and I said sarcastically, "It's ok, just 206

don't let it happen again!" After a few steps I deliberately tripped her and made her fall. She laughed and grabbed me by the legs until we were just spazzing out all over the floor. We were tickling each other and laughing so hard that it hurt.

Accidents and other unintentional happenings have the

potential of raising questions concerning an appropriate de­

finition of the situation. Depending on the context and the

relationship of the participants in the situation, acci­

dents which result in little or no harm may serve as occa­

sions for initiating playful interactions. Such accidents may be seen as similar in form to certain play experiences.

First, these types of accidents are similar to play in that no harm is apparently intended. Secondly, such accidents,

as well as many play episodes, occur spontaneously and quite

unexpectedly in situations. Therefore, persons who ex­

perience such accidents may first have to decide on the question "Is this play?" in deciding whether or not the event or actions were indeed unintended and unpremeditated. It

is likely that in some cases this question is answered in

the affirmative, and a playful encounter may be initiated

from an incorrect assessment of the situation. Also, if the accident appears to be humorous, repetition of such a happen­

ing likewise may be seen as funny.

Another type of social play where individuals may ex­ perience difficulty in deciding what is happening in a situa­ tion relates to what is commonly referred to as practical 20 7

jokes, charades, put-ons, and other seemingly harmless pranks

that individuals play on each other. Sometimes there are

disputes as to whether or not such events should in fact be

identified as playful. As was seen in Chapter VIII, what

is considered playful from one perspective may have en­

tirely different meanings from another.

As noted in Chapter VIII, many practical jokes were planned by those who were involved in sustaining the fabri­ cation. Although they are planned, the initial idea to en­ gage in the deception typically occurs quite spontaneously with the belief that those who will be taken in by the de­

ception will view the episode in the spirit of play; that is, that no harm is intended by those who perpetrated the fabri­ cation. For this reason, such fabrications frequently serve as initiators of other play episodes with "victims" seeking playful "revenge."

This particular type of social play involves fabrica­ tions of various kinds. For the fabrication to be success­

ful, those taken in by it must not suspect that things are not what they appear to be. Thus, those involved in sustaining the fabrication are already involved in the pro­

cess of play, whereas those taken in by the fabrication are not yet knowingly involved in play from their perspectives.

However, at the moment those taken in begin to suspect that what is happening is indeed a put-on, as when suppressed

laughter can no longer be concealed, the possibility then 208 exists that those taken in may become willing players. As noted in Chapter VIII, "victims" typically accept a play­ ful definition of these situations. However, those taken in sometimes dispute the applicability of the play frame for that situation.

This discussion of how social play begins was limited primarily to a discussion of two general responses to the question of how a sense of play is accomplished in everyday social interaction. A typology of play was offered, and the relevance of this typology to the problem of how play inten­ tion signals are communicated was outlined. In summary, it was suggested that one major type of social play has quite recognizable beginnings, with players explicitly informing each other that what is going on in the situation should be regarded as playful in nature. A second type of social play, one that is more complicated in form, was identified and found to be more problematic for participants. Here ambi­ guity tends to characterize the establishment of the play frame. In the case of practical jokes and other related pranks, one group of participants were found to be aware that play had already begun, having been involved in the planning of the fabrication and having witnessed others taken in by it. On the other hand, for those taken in by the practical joke, the recognition of the fabrication comes at a later point in time. At this point, those taken in were found to either initiate other play episodes, or they 209 refused to accept the play frame and disputed the relevancy of the playful definition of the situation.

In conclusion, any discussion of how play is initiated must recognize the fact that there are various types of social play, and that perhaps one way of identifying and describing these play types is by identifying and describing at what point in time participants recognize that the play frame is an integral part of their understanding what is going on in the situation.

The Termination of Adult Social Play

Just as there are a number of ways of initiating adult playful social interactions, so too are there a number of ways of terminating such interactions. In this section the various ways that social play ends will be identified.

Many players reported that their play ended in much the same way that it began: the ending really wasn't planned, and it was over as quickly as it began. As one in­ dividual noted, "After both were completely covered, the play stopped as suddenly as it started."

At other times adult social play simply continues until it is not fun anymore- For example, in Chapter VI it was concluded that "playful games" end when they are no longer experienced as being fun. Even successfully created play situations end when players grew tired and even bored with them. As these players noted: 210

The incident lasted only two to three mi nutes and ended when we both got tired of it.

The situation was funny at first, but it grew old fast.

...the novelty wore off so we stopped.

Play was also found to stop when players became physically

tired, and were too exhausted to continue.

Play was found to end for just the opposite reasons too.

Play breaks down if the action gets too far out of hand, and

the players find their actions to be too fantastic, too in­

credible, or producing too much fun. For example, a num­

ber of players noted that their play became so much fun that

they simply collapsed in laughter.

Earlier in this chapter a number of required features

of adult social play were identified. Another way of iden­

tifying required features of play is to examine instances where play action breaks down or actually stops. Bateson

(1972:185) notes that often those engaging in play must be

reminded that "this is play." As previously stressed, play­

fulness must be regarded as dynamic in nature, and as such,

"it must be maintained constantly against other encroaching

states, such as fearfulness, guiltiness, competitiveness,

aggress i vi ty , etc.1' (Bateson, 1956:228) . For example,

couples engaged in play fighting or wrestling have been ob­

served to stop abruptly when one person (or both) begins to 211

play too rough. Play stops when the play becomes too hazard­

ous, and especially whenever anyone gets hurt. Getting hurt

represents one of the important limits of play, as can be

seen in these descriptions.

(lc-87) It was getting somewhat out of hand when all of a sudden a cap hit me in the eye--very hard. It hurt a lot and blinded me for a second. Well, that stopped it all, and the person who hit me apologized.

(lb-226) I returned the slap and we began a mock fist fight or battle. Short­ ly thereafter, he socked me in the nose hard enough that it really hurt. I made a motion to return the punch but a look in his eyes told me the fun and games were over. A seriousness invaded the mood, yet it was nothing awkward, it just brought an end to our play.

Fortunately, not all "battles" end in someone getting hurt, as can be seen in this wrestling match.

(la-2) Going to bed one night I grabbed Shelly from behind with the result that she ran giggling into the bedroom. I threw her on the bed and we engaged in a wrestling match. The wrestling was accompanied by much laughter and mock protests. I noticed that although we were using most of our strength against each other, not every advantage for leverage was exploited. By degrees the wrestling became more sexual until the sexual touching replaced the wrestling totally.

Play was also found to end when others acted annoyed; sometimes when the play disturbed others the players were actually asked to stop. During an interview one person commented that; 212

It's interesting that I would be monitoring that. I was looking around watching how others were responding. I don't want to have fun when the person next to me or behind or in front of me is annoyed, or acts as if annoyed.

Another factor found to be related to the breakdown of play is when players become self-conscious and embarrassed.

This typically happens when a player realizes that others

(particularly strangers) have witnessed their playfulness.

As one player reported, "What was once funny was now em­ barrassing." Spontaneous play was found to break down when players began to reflect on what they were doing. As shall be demonstrated in the following chapter, the lived-experi- ence of playing is free of such reflections and self-con­ sciousness .

Finally, one last factor related to the termination of play was the intrusion of everyday reality into the play world. Thus, players reported that their playful interac­ tions were interrupted by such occurrences as a tea kettle whistling, or the record player stopping. Another player stated, "We played around with it for about twenty minutes, but then the phone rang and we came back to reality."

The Rules of Adult Social Play

In this final section the paradoxical topic of "rules of play" will be examined. Also to be discussed here are the 7 various "tacit assumptions" and competencies that underlie 213

the social play of adults. As will be demonstrated, it is

these rules and assumptions that create the possibility of

adult social play.

A discussion of the rules of play seems to introduce a paradox: presumably the terms "play" and "rules" are con­

tradictory. For example, Opie and Opie (1969:2) state that

"Play is unrestricted, games have rules." Edwards (1973:

48-49) even goes as far as to argue that

If rules were in fact a necessary element in play activity, the elements of volun­ tary commencement and termination of play, that of nonutilitarian engagement, and the element of separation from serious­ ness would all be negated. When rules are interjected into a play act, it ceases to be play and begins to approximate a con­ test, a game, and even sport activity.

While it is certainly true that overt rules govern the con­ duct of games and sports, and that predetermined, formalized

rules are absent in many spontaneous play situations, this

is not to say that there are no rules underlying adult play­

ful interactions. Actually, adult play is guided by rules

in very important ways.^

Unlike games, players cannot consult a book of rules

for an elaboration of the various rules of spontaneous play.

An important ingredient of social play relates to the par­

ticipants' ability to not only recognize the transition to

a play state, but also to abstract from the ongoing inter­

action the various rules of play. 214

Any type of organized social activity depends on the mutual acceptance of certain rules of procedure, and this is especially true of adult social play- However, this analy­ sis of the organization of adult social play has revealed that many of the taken-for-granted rules and assumptions of everyday life may or may not apply during play. For example, in Chapter VII it was concluded that many of the rules of everyday conversations are routinely violated during speech play, and that one of the obvious ways that playful conver­ sations are socially organized involves the disruption (or suspension) of the conventional orderliness of ordinary talk. Furthermore, it was also noted ,in Chapter VI that in some types of "playful games," players change the rules of

"serious games." And it has been noted throughout this chapter that one important way of recognizing adult play is its unexpected nature. As many individuals commented, "You don't normally expect this sort of thing."

Not only must players be able to abstract the appro­ priate rules of play, they must also possess the ability to recognize and create distinctions between play and nonplay situations. Specifically, players must be able to recognize that what they are doing together is related to the frame

"this is play." As previously suggested, play is sometimes simply contrasted with ordinary, or "serious" reality. Yet, it was noted in Chapter III, in a critique of existing theories and definitions of play, that the relationship of 215 play and reality has never been made clear. How exactly do participants recognize something as "real" or "play?"

Ethnomethodologists have attempted to identify some of the most important procedures for accomplishing a sense of

"the world of everyday life" (Schutz, 1962). Cicourel (1974) identifies a number of interpretive procedures that are em­ ployed in everyday social practices. Among the procedures to be considered here in analyzing how everyday practical reasoning is transformed during social play are the use of (1) the reciprocity of perspectives, (2) the et cetera principle, and (3) normal forms.

Briefly "the reciprocity of perspectives" involves the assumption among those engaged in face-to-face interaction that if they were to exchange places with one another, they would each experience the situation in much the same way.

The "et cetera principle" entails glossing over or filling 9 in ambiguous or vague meanings. Finally, individuals employ

"normal forms" to cognitively restore congruity between con­ tradictory perceptions or statements.

Examining the above procedures, it could be argued that the recognition of play is accomplished by modifying, and/or suspending these procedures of everyday reality. For exam­ ple, the accomplishment of practical jokes involves the de­ liberate attempt to deceive others. This would entail a suspension of the reciprocity of perspectives. Moreover, it was noted in previous discussions of speech play that 216 sometimes players purposively create nonsense, and do not attempt to fill in vague and ambiguous meanings. And finally, play itself involves paradox, which can be seen as an inver­ sion of normal forms. By suspending or modifying any or all of these procedures players are able to create a distinction between their play world and the world of everyday life.

One last ability that underlies adult social play re­ lates to the capacity of players to identify the theme of the playful interaction and to contribute to its development.

For example, this ability can be observed in the following description:

(5a-60) My roommate Dave and I were sitting in our room eating cupcakes when I noticed that the price was 3 3d. The following comments were then made.

Dan: Six months ago this only cost a quarter. Dave: I remember when they cost 20C. Dan: I remember when they cost 15C. Dave: I remember when they cost 10C. Dan: I remember when they cost 5C. Dave: I remember when they used to give them away.

In this example, the participants were not only able to re­ cognize that their exchanges were playful, but they were able to abstract out of the conversation the play theme of exaggerating just how little the cupcakes cost.

In conclusion, this section attempted to identify some of the abilities that underlie adult playful social inter­ actions. The following abilities were identified and dis­ cussed : 217

(1) the ability to recognize a distinction between

play and the reality of everyday lifer

(2) the ability to identify the various rules of play;

(3) the ability to abstract out the theme of the play­

ful social interaction, and to contribute to its

development.

Summary

The aim of this chapter was to analyze the organization of adult social play. In an attempt to examine how a sense of play is both recognized and accomplished in everyday social interaction, the following topics were analyzed:

(1) the context (physical setting) of adult social

play r

(2) the recognition of adult social play;

(3) the participants of adult social play;

(4) the initiation of adult social play; and

(5) the termination of adult social play.

With regards to the first topic, play was found to take place in a wide variety of social situations. Certain social settings were found to promote adult play, while other more

"serious" settings inhibited adults from playing. In gener­ al, aduLts were found to play in familiar situations with familiar people.

Not only was adult play defined by context in important ways, but a number of verbal and nonverbal metacommunicative 218 signals were also identified that acted as "invitations to play." Usually these signals are unambiguous and players experience little or no difficulty in recognizing the play­ fulness of their acts. However, sometimes the establishment of the play frame is more problematic, and disputes may even arise as to the appropriateness of a playful definition of the situation.

Play was found to end as abruptly as it begins. Adult play was found to terminate for a variety of reasons. Some of the most important reasons related to the fact that the activity was no longer experienced as fun, someone got hurt, others acted annoyed, or that the players became self- conscious and began to reflect on what they were doing.

Finally, the various competencies that make adult social play possible were examined. Not only must players be able to recognize a distinction between play and nonplay, but they must also be able to abstract out the rules and themes of the playful interaction.

This chapter provided answers for the first five re­ search questions that were outlined in Chapter IV. One re­ search question remains. This question relates to the ex­ perience of playing, a question that makes up the subject matter of the next chapter. 219

NOTES - CHAPTER IX

Riesman, Potter and Watson (1960:1966) have argued that con­ temporary American sociability— as manifested in small invi­ tational parties--is increasingly characterized by a reli­ ance on spontaneity, and a minimal amount of planning and or­ ganization. After interviewing people about their ex­ periences at parties, these investigators concluded that for participants "good parties" are characterized by intimacy, spontaneous festivity, and solidarity.

2 Zimmerman and Wieder (1978) have characterized the mode of sociable interaction among young people engaged in marijuana smoking as spontaneous, noting that "the noninstrumental character of smoking is taken to be expressive of sponta- eity" (1978:203). 3 A similar view is expressed by Millar (1968:21) in her statement that "Perhaps play is best used as an adverb; not as a name of a class of activities, nor as distinguished by the accompanying mood, but to describe how and under what conditions an action is performed."

4 Schutz (1967:23) refers to individuals engaged in face-to- face interaction as the "we-relationship." The "we-relation­ ship involves the possibility of living together simul­ taneously in specific dimensions of time" (Schutz, 1967:162) . 5 Schutz (1962) has observed that all forms of human communi­ cation presuppose intersubjectivity, and that intersubjecti- vity is based on the typifications underlying all social re­ lations .

^Klapp (1949) has analyzed the role of the fool in social groups, and notes that although the fool may be ridiculed, the fool enjoys a certain celebrity, and may have license to do things that other members of the group could not do.

7 Garvey (1974) has described the types of competencies that underlie children's social play behavior. Although important 2 20 differences exist, the following discussion of competencies of adult social play builds on several ideas presented in Garvey's work.

g Following Blum and McHugh (19 71:10 4-10 5), the term "rule- guided" will be used in contrast to rule-governed in stress­ ing that rules are both vague and changing, and that "the use of rules by members is an accomplishment in the hardi­ est sense of the term." g According to Garfinkel (1963:199) this principle is an un­ stated property of the rules of every game. In games, there is the unstated final rule that game participants agree to act in accordance with the rules. CHAPTER X

THE EXPERIENCE OF PLAYING

"The world is not what I think, but what I live through" (Merleau-Ponty, 1962:xvi-xvii).

Whereas the concern of Chapter IX was with the organi­ zation of social experiences of adult play, the concern of the present chapter is with the organization of the indivi­ dual's experience of playing. Specifically, the topic of this chapter is the nature, significance, and meaning of personal experiences of play.

It was noted in Chapter II that there exists little consensus among social scientists on the question of what is play. It could be argued that one reason for this lack of consensus is the fact that social scientific research has for the most part looked at play without examining the ex­ perience of playing. Perhaps one fruitful approach to the problem of defining play is to specify the meaning of play from the perspective of the one who plays. In this chapter, the existential meaning of play--what the play experience means for the adult player--will be described and analyzed.

221 222

Existential Phenomenology and the Lived-World

Although there are a number of ways of doing phenomeno­

logy (Spiegelberg,1965), common to all is "a call for a

consideration of man in his concrete situation, including his culture, history, relations with others, and above all,

the meaning of personal existence" (Stewart and Mickunas,

1974:63). This is particularly true of existentialism, a

version of phenomenology which insists that human experience

is situated in the world, and that the totality of human re­

lationships in the world is to be considered in terms of the

individuals's concrete existence. In this way, phenomeno­

logy attempts to return to the subject matter of on-going

1ived-experience.

The phenomenological investigation of 1ived-experience

is in no way limited to those realities which are objective

in a naturalistic or materialistic sense. Phenomenology

actually points out the limitations of the natural scienti­

fic method of investigating the social world by insisting

that quantitative and other mechanistic approaches and ex­

planations have exaggerated the importance of abstract rea­

soning to the neglect of the more subjective factors of

human experience. Both existential phenomenology and exis­

tential sociology (cf. Tiryakian, 1962; Tiryakian, 1965;

Manning, 1973; Douglas and Johnson, 1977; Kotarba, 1979)

recognize the total ensemble of human actions, which includes 223 not only thoughts and reason, but also feelings, emotions, and moods.

Another important theme of existential phenomenology is the refutation of the subject-object dichotomy. This can be seen in existential phenomenology's stress on the impor­ tance of the body as our basic mode of being-in-the-world.^

Consciousness is regarded as embodied consciousness, and the body provides the situated context for experiencing the world. Fontana and Van de Water (1977), in their summary of the works of existential philosophers Sartre and Merleau-

Ponty, note this feature of the embodied self in the follow­ ing way:

We do not simply feel, sense, or know our history, our temporality, our Being, our reality: we are bodily immersed in them. The body is the ultimate and primary source of all distances, time, and meanings. The body is the measurement of its world (Fontana and Van de Water, 1977:126).

Moreover, the body exists in a social world; that is to say the body exists intersubjectively (Sartre, 19 53:297-298).

Sartre, for example, argues that human existence has both an objective and a subjective side.

Historical situations vary; a man may be born a slave in a pagan society or a feudal lord or a proletarian. What does not vary is the necessity for him to exist in the world, to be at work there, to be there in the midst of other people, and to be mortal there. The limits are neither subjective nor ob­ jective, or, rather, they have an objective and a subjective side. Objective because they are to be found everywhere and are recognizable everywhere; subjective because 224

they are lived and are nothing if man does not live them, that is, freely determine his existence with reference to them (Sartre, 1947: 45-46) .

In this way, the body is not just an object, for it provides the means by which objects are constructed.

In summary, existential phenomenology and existential sociology attempt to view human experience holistically, as it is lived. Existential sociology differs from other socio­ logical formulations in its attempt to account for the indi­ vidual's total experience of being in the social world. In particular, existential sociology stresses lived-experience, and emphasizes the non-rational aspects of human existence, especially in its recognition of the importance of feelings, emotions, and moods in everyday social interactions. As

Manning (1973:210) notes, "man is both in the world in body and emotion. .. . "

The Lived-Experlence of Playing

It was noted in Chapter IX that one of the ways of recognizing play is the awareness of certain emotions and moods in others, as expressed in their bodily attitudes. In certain respects, recognizing the feelings and emotions of others who are involved with us in face-to-face interactions may be easier than recognizing one's own personal feelings and emotions while playing. Paradoxically, it is our most immediate experiences that are often the least recognized. 225

Langer notes this aspect of an individual's feelings, stat­ ing that

It may seem strange that the most immediate experiences in our lives should be the least recognized, but there is a reason for this apparent paradox, and the rea­ son is precisely their immediacy. They pass unrecorded because they are known without any symbolic mediation, and, there­ fore, without conceptual form (Langer, 1967: 57) .

The lived-experience of playing has just this quality of immediacy and total engagement. Players frequently re­ ported that they were totally engaged and absorbed in the experience of playing. When asked to describe their person­ al experiences of play— How did you feel while playing?-- some adults in their experiential descriptions (see Chapter

IV) responded by simply stating "It is hard to describe how

I felt." Many others provided such glosses as:

It felt great.

While playing I felt like we were kind of crazy.

The play really made me feel good.

I felt silly while I was playing, almost like a little kid.

In spite of the fact that many adult players found it difficult to describe in words precisely what they had ex­ perienced while playing, others were able to describe in de­ tail some of their feelings during particular playful social 226 interactions in which they themselves participated. As will be noted in the following discussions of various feelings associated with playing with others, these reflections about the play experience are important in that they suggest the significance and meaning of adult playful social interac- 2 tions.

This next section will describe and briefly analyze some of the most frequently reported types of feelings that adult players experience while engaged in playful social in­ teractions. The following subjective feelings can be ana­ lytically distinguished:

(1) experiences of total involvement and engrossment;

(2) experiences of self;

(3) experiences of others;

(4) experiences of euphoria;

{5) experiences of time; and

(6) experiences of transcendence.

Experiences of Total Involvement

As reported in their experiential descriptions, many players experienced a sense of total involvement. While playing, players are spontaneously involved in the play ac­ tivity, and are immersed in the ongoing experience of play­ ing. Players are carried away by the playfulness of these social occasions, and they are fully engrossed in the emerg­ ing and unfolding form of these play experiences. This 227 experience of engrossment and total involvement is described by individuals in these terms:

It was really fun because we really started getting into the roles of pretending we were Chinese.

I found myself swept up in the excitement. I joined in as though I knew just exactly what I was doing.

While playing this game I felt the play it­ self was so spontaneous, and we were all just totally into it.

And sometimes players become so fully engrossed in the play­ ful social happening that they are not even conscious of the fact that they are playing. For example, one person re­ ported that:

I didn't even realize that this situation was play until the next day when I was thinking about it. I was having such a great time while we were playing, that I didn't even think about it being play.

These and other comments suggest that while playing, players 3 are pre-reflectively involved in the play experience.

It was observed in Chapter IX that when adult players become conscious of the fact that they are playing (e.g. when players become self-conscious as a result of outsiders watching them), their play typically ends. The play state usually does not allow for the intrusion of an outside per­ spective (cf. Czikszentmihalyi, 1975:90). Whenever players ask themselves such questions as "What am I doing?" or

"What would others think of this?" the playful social 228 interaction usually ends or is already over. This can be seen in the following description:

(4a-9 7) There we were, four adults swing­ ing from our children's jungle gym. I tried to do some of the tricks my daughter did. My husband would do five chin-ups, my neighbor would do ten chin-ups. None of us could do any of the stunts that the children could do. The whole situation was a little strange because the kids were sitting on the grass watching us instead of us watching them.

I felt really different while we were playing. But after we had quit playing, I felt a little foolish, because I would think about what we were doing and how silly it must have looked.

The 1ived-experience of play involves total engross­ ment and a pre-reflective awareness. Players were found to be totally and spontaneously immersed in the play activities.

The achievement of such a state of play is frequently accom­ panied by an altered sense of self, a topic that will now be considered.

Experiences of Self

As previously suggested, adults who manage to success-' fully create a playful social interaction report that they experienced engrossment, a sense of total participation and involvement in the play. These feelings of total involve­ ment are very much related to experiences which can be described as a loss of self-consciousness. 229

Many individuals while playing simply lose awareness of themselves; in particular, they are no longer concerned about what others may think about them or their playful be­ haviors. This can be seen in the following comments:

I felt relaxed and not the least self- conscious during this play.

At first, when we were playing I felt a bit self-conscious, but gradually I enjoyed it more and more. I had the attitude that I didn't care about any­ thing other than what I was doing.

While playing I felt great. I was having a good time letting myself go.

This last description is especially relevant to the pre­ sent discussion. This player reported that he let himself go. Players, while playing, experience a sense of freedom-- a relaxation of everyday social constraints. They feel re­

laxed, and uninhibited while playing. This is summarized in the following reflection:

When you play like that, you don't stop to think, you just do. So you aren't worried about how silly you look and sound or how others see you. When it's over many people then get embarrassed, after they look back and think about how others might have seen them.

In other words, when you are really involved in play, you

forget yourself. 230

Experiences of Others

Not only did adult players report a different sense of experiencing themselves, but their relationships with fellow players were also affected. It was noted in Chapter IX that a close relationship usually exists between those involved in playful social interactions. Adults generally play with people who are familiar to them. One way of gaining famili­ arity with others is through play. Individuals reported that their playing together created a sense of togetherness, a sense of oneness.

While playing with members of my family I felt happy and loving.

It made me happy to be playing like this with my husband. It was like we were really close, like we were before we got married.

Others reported that they became a lot closer friends after the play episodes. And the ability to play together was also used as an indicator that a friendship bond still existed between two individuals who had not seen one another in several years.

De Koven notes that playing well together has the power to create a sense of community— a play community.

We are beginning to create a play community--not a forever community with a fixed code, but a temporary community with a code we make up as we go along, a community that we can continue creating anywhere, any time we find the people who want to create it with us (De Koven, 1976:42). 231

Experiences of Euphoria

From the perspective of the adult player, one of the most distinguishing features of play is the experience of euphoria. As can be seen in many of the previously men­ tioned experiential accounts, players reported feelings of great happiness. At the end of the experience, or during a fleeting moment within the experience, players feel a sense of joy and happiness.

I felt so happy when we were playing, even though it was a little out of the ordinary.

It was an exhilarating experience.

While I was playing I felt really good inside. I really enjoyed doing i t.

The intentionality of the player is very much directed toward achieving these states of well-being. It was noted else­ where in this dissertation (Chapters VI and IX), that play episodes fend to end when they are no longer experienced as fun. As one player noted: "The play ended when it was no longer fun. If we didn't have fun we wouldn't have contin­ ued in the first place."

Experiences of Time

Another dimension of the play experience that was de­ scribed related to a special time perspective associated 232

with acts of playing. Play is an experience in the space­

time continuum: that is to say, playing has a time and a

Pi ace. While playing, one steps out of one time into another.

As previously suggested in the discussion of experiences

of total involvement, players report that they were totally

engaged in the play situation, that they were totally im­

mersed in the present experience of playing. While playing,

some individuals lost all sense of objective, or "clock"

time. Many players reported an altered sense of time while playing.i 4

While I played I completely lost sense of time. I really couldn't say how long the play lasted.

The play ended when we all realized what time it was and just how long we had been playing.

We played like that all afternoon, but it hardly seemed that long at the time.

Whereas some individuals described their experiences of play as if time had somehow been suspended, that they had

lost all consciousness of time, others noted that time seemed

to pass either much faster or more slowly than they had

imagined.

Experiences of Transcendence

An awareness of any or all of the previously mentioned experiences lead many players to conclude that play somehow 233 transcends ordinary experience. Play is thought to be dif­ ferent and separate from ordinary reality: repeatedly, indi­ vidual described their experiences of play as something

"out of the ordinary." As one player remarked, "I recog­ nized it as play because it was something definitely out of the ordinary."

Not only does the play experience sweep players beyond their ordinary senses of self and others, but there is also the realization on the part of those who play that they are no longer experiencing their taken-for-granted, everyday reality. This feeling of the player of experiencing some­ thing so different and separate from everyday reality leads many players to conclude that they are actually in another world. This transcendence of the "real world" can be seen in the following two experiential descriptions.

The real world was gone at least for the afternoon.

While it happened, I felt really out of touch with reality, as though I were a child again, or in a dream.

In Berqer's (1969:52-53) terms, the play experience acts as a "signal of t r a n s c e n d e n c e . P l a y e r s move beyond the reality of everyday life and experience a sense of ecstasy--"a standing outside of the taken-for-granted rou­ tines of everyday life" (Berger, 1969:28). One very common experiential description made by players was "I felt like I 234 didn't have a care in the world."

The experience of an altered sense of reality can some­ times lead to feelings of enchantment. The theologians

Rahner (1967) and Neale (1969) have suggested that play has this quality of enchantment, and they lament over the fact that "modern man has lost his faculty of play..-he has be­ come a being without mystery" (Rahner, 1967:5). The German sociologist Weber in his evaluation of the overall trend towards increased rationalization in Western societies wrote of the progressive "disenchantment of the world"— the elimi­ nation of magical thought and practice (cf. Giddens, 1971:

183) . The experiences that have been described here suggest that the experience of enchantment is still part of the adult world, even if it is only experienced during moments when adults manage to successfully create and maintain a sense of playing well together.

Summary

The aim of this chapter was to provide a description and analysis of the more subjective aspects of adult play.

This was accomplished by using the approach of existential sociology.

Existential sociology can be viewed as an approach that attempts to account for the individual's total experience of being in the world. Unlike other sociological formulations. 235 existential sociology views experience as the foundation of social scientific knowledge. In particular, existential sociology's stress on lived-experience, and its recognition of the importance of feelings and emotions was found to be a relevant approach to the present investigation of indivi­ duals' experiences of playing.

Specifically, experiential descriptions of adults who had personally participated in playful social interactions were examined. In response to the question "How did you feel while playing?," players described a number of dif­ ferent feelings that were associated with their experiences of playing. Although these feelings were very much related to one another, for analytical purposes the following six experiences were singled out for separate discussion:

(1) experiences of total involvement (engrossment);

(2) experiences of self;

(3) experiences of others ;

(4) experi ences of euphoria;

(5) experiences of time; and, finally

(6) experiences of trans cendence.

Th i s chapter investigated the lived-experience of play- ing, as well as the reflections of players regarding the meaning of these experiences. Playing was found to be essen­ tially an absorbing, flowing, and unreflective experience.

Questions concerning the meaning and significance (or insig­ nificance) of the playful act don't normally arise during 236 the process of playing. The more the individual gives him- or herself over to reflection, the less the individual is involved in the immediate experience of playing.

Unlike many other theories and explanations of play, this dissertation has dealt with the question of what play is in itself, and what the experience of playing means for the adult player. It has been argued that one fruitful ap­ proach to the problem of defining play is to specify the meaning of play from the vantage point of the one who plays.

Adult social play has been found to be a uniquely crea­ tive experience. Players transcend ordinary reality and create a meaningful world that is of their own making. Dur­ ing play the player lives in a world of spontaneous and total engagement, and, at the end of this experience, or during fleeting moments within the experience, the player as creator feels a sense of joy, a kind of ecstasy. 237

NOTES - CHAPTER X

The phrase "being-in-the-world" is existentialism's way of avoiding "reference to human reality in terms either of a thinking substance or a perceiving subiect closed in upon it­ self facing physical objects which may or may not be know- able. Being-in-the-world refers exclusively to human reali­ ty in contrast to nonhuman reality..." {Stewart and Mickunas, 19 74:64).

2 It is important to note that a distinction must be drawn between actual experiences of playing (the player's immedi­ ate contact with the world of play), and questions concern­ ing the significance and meaning of such experiences. De­ fining the meaning of play is a conscious and reflective pro­ cess, and as Schutz (1967:71) notes, "The reflective glance singles out an elapsed lived experience and constitutes it as meaningful."

It will be noted in the following discussion of various feelings associated with the lived-experience of playing, that reflections about play are not usually part of the ex­ perience of playing. In short, reflections about play are not to be taken as the same as the actual experience of play­ ing.

^Phenomenologists refer to this pre-reflective awareness of the world as a prepredicative experience: an activity of consciousness unaware of itself.

4 Murphy and White (1978) also note that an altered sense of time is one of the hidden dimensions of sports. Athletes report that they sometimes experience being totally immersed in the present, unaware of any distractions. 5 Schutz (1962) has described the ordinary world in which people carry out their "normal" activities in collaboration with others as the everyday "life-world." According to Schutz (1962:208) this is "the world of daily life which the wide-awake, grown-up man who acts in it and upon it amidst his fellow-men experiences within the natural attitude as a reali ty." 238

"By 'signals of transcendence' I mean phenomena that are to be found within the domain of our 'natural' reality but that appear to point beyond that reality" (Berger, 1969:53). APPENDIX

NEW GAMES: BECOMING THE PHENOMENON

You can't change a game by winning it or losing it or refereeing it or spec­ tating it. You change a game by leav­ ing it, going somewhere else, and starting a new game. If it works, it will in time alter or replace the old game (Brand, 1976:137).

Very soon after starting this research I learned about the concept of "New Games." New Games are not really "new" games— some of these games have actually been around for hundreds of years. What is "new" about these games is the ph ilosophy behind the playing of these games, and the atti­ tude that players bring to these games. The purposes of this Appendix are to outline the basic ingredients of the philosophy of the New Games Movement, and to examine the im­ plications of this movement for developing alternatives to traditional sporting and recreational activities. Further­ more, I want to describe some of my own personal experiences with New Games, as well as provide experiential descriptions of other players who have participated in such games.

The concept of New Games first emerged during the

1960s and can be viewed as one manifestation of the youthful counterculture that attempted to transform American society.

239 240 Stewart Brand (author of the Whole Earth Catalog) and George

Leonard (author of The Ultimate Athlete) successfully or­ ganized the first New Games Tournament in 1973, and over

4,000 people attended. Leonard (1974:132) describes his earlier visions of such a tournament in these terms:

I began to have my own dreams of sports glory. I envisaged a Super Bowl of the new culture. A mythic valley, sunstruck at noon, shrouded by mist in the setting sun. Tents and domes and multicolored banners. Thousands of people glowing with their own radiance— all players, no spectators. Men, women, and children playing together, flowing in and out of games which themselves flow and change. The air filled with Frisbees, balls, kites, and laughter. A scene both medieval and surreal. A picture by Brueghel, Salvador Dali, and Hieronymus Bosch. A tournament of new games!

This quote contains many essential ingredients of the philo­ sophy of New Games, a topic that will now be examined.

Philosophy of New Games

The basic underlying goal of the New Games Movement is to provide an alternative to traditional sporting activities in American society. Specifically, New Games offer an alter­ native to traditional sports and games by stressing parti­ cipation, cooperation, spontaneity, and playing for fun, as opposed to spectating, competition, predetermined rules, and playing to win. Most importantly, all New Games are subject to evolution--players are free to improvise and change the rules of the games as they play. 241

By way of an example, the rules of "Infinity Volley­ ball" are described in The New Games Book in the following manner:

...this game is pure cooperation, and any number can play. The rules of standard volleyball still apply, in­ cluding three hits per side before sending the ball over the net. The score, kept track of by both teams chanting in unison, is the number of times the ball is hit over the net to the other side without hitting the ground. Any score over 50 is good. Over 100 is phenomenal. And both teams always win (Fluegelman, 1976:113).

Infinity Volleyball, like other New Games, attempts to restructure play in such a way that players are competing against their own limits, rather than against each other.

As player/philosopher DeKoven (1976:42) notes:

The games we start with aren't competi­ tive. To establish the play community, we can't separate people into winners and losers. We can't begin with some­ thing that's going to divide us or measure us against each other. We be­ gin the play community by embracing each other, by giving each person the opportunity to experience him-or herself as a full and equal member.

The non-competitive nature of New Games is reflected in the very common tendency of some players to defect to the other side when their team begins to win, so as to allow the play to continue. In this sense, the experience of playing is regarded as more important than the experience of winning.

Team games like Infinity Volleyball adapt themselves easily to groups of varying size. Furthermore, these types 242 of games require little or no special equipment. For exam­ ple, in the context of a New Games Tournament I participated in a game of Infinity Volleyball, yet we had no volleyball equipment. This did not stop us, however, from playing; we simply used a kick ball and proceeded to hit the ball back and forth over a football goal post.

In summary, New Games offer a viable alternative to traditional sports, games, and physical educational programs in contemporary American society. In contrast to highly or­ ganized sports and games. New Games have these essential characteristics.

(1) New Games are designed for everybody. These games are based on participation, not spectator- ship.

(2) There are no structured time limits. New Games are not played against time; these games are played only as long as the players themselves enjoy it. If the game isn't fun, forget it, and go to another game.

(3) No specific playing field is required. These games can be adapted to nearly any environment.

(4) No specialized equipment is needed.

(5) All new games are subject to evolution- Players are free to change the rules of the game as they play.

(6) No referees are needed. Players must work out any disputes themselves, and all players assume responsibility for the game and the safety of the other players.

(7) There are no fixed roles. Players are free to switch sides or change roles, and they are free to wander in and out of games whenever possible. 24 3 Exoeriences with Hew Games

After learning about the New Games concept, I became intrigued with the possibility that play festivals could be put on for the public at large, and that thousands of people had actually participated in New Games Tournaments. I imme­ diately contacted the New Games Foundation in San Francisco,

California. I was provided with pamphlets and a newsletter, and also with information on New Games Training Programs.

I then attended a weekend Training Program where I had the opportunity to personally experience New Games, as well as learn how to organize and apply New Games to a variety of recreational settings.

During the summer of 1977 I had the opportunity to attend a New Games Training Camp in Pottstown, Pennsylvania.

The Training Camp was limited to anyone who had attended pre­ vious training sessions, and was designed for people who wanted to become more involved in the work of the New Games

Foundation, or for those who simply wanted to learn more about New Games.

At Pottstown I was one of a group of thirty individuals who lived and played together for five days, and in the process experienced the creation of a "play community." What was so remarkable about this experience was the type of social transformation that took place. A complete group of strangers was transformed into a trusting, loving group of players in a relatively short period of time. I had never 244 before experienced anything quite like this. Here I was re­ vealing things about myself that I would normally share with only my closest friends and intimates.

There was an atmosphere of almost complete freedom at the camp to experiment as much as possible with the limits of playfulness. My most important discovery while attending the camp was the realization that nearly anything can be done playfully. By way of an example, let me provide a description from my notes of one activity that I was person­ ally involved with--the "Lunch Game" (see Plate IX).

I was part of a group of six people ex­ ploring New Games as a part of everyday life; we called ourselves the "Lifers." Our first experiment with the idea that space facilitates play occurred at lunch­ time today. Our group was in charge of preparing the meal and we decided to do it playfully. We called it the "Lunch Game."

The rules of this game depend very much on the playing field, which may range from formal dining rooms to backyard barbeques. We selected a shaded site between two rows of trees. We first decorated the area with colorful fabric and hung a para­ chute canopy over the tables. We created a maze out of string and fabric so that our guests would be challenged to get into the eating area. Utensils were hung by string from tree branches. Picnic tables were propped up at different angles, em­ phasizing how space affects us continuous­ ly-

The "Lunch Game" delighted the whole camp. Hungry participants juggled soup, drinks, plates, etc., as they bent, twisted, and hopped around the obstacle course, collect­ ing napkins and tableware. When our group finished this work/play, our excitement was expressed by a spontaneous circle dance to The Lunch Game 245 fiddle music we had chosen for the meal.

My experience at the Training Camp convinced me even

more of the significance of play to everyday life situations.

The most important thing I learned from this experience was

not only how to talk about play, but how to be more playful

myself. New Games provided me with a way of "becoming the

phenomenon" I was attempting to study. According to Mehan

and Wood (1975:227), "To become the phenomenon means to do

a reality as its members do." In becoming the phenomenon,

I attempted to enter the play world not only for the purpose

of describing it, but also for the experience of learning how to actually accomplish it. In this way, New Games could

be used as a way of further investigating adult playful inter­

actions, while at the same time allowing me as a play or­

ganizer and play participant to test my own abilities to cre­

ate and display playful social events.

During the past five years I have had the opportunity

to organize a number of what I have come to call "Community

Play Festivals." Modeled after New Games Tournaments, these

festivals are generally open to the public and all age

groups. Some of these festivals have taken place on college

campuses, others have been held in parks, fields, and even

indoors. On a smaller scale I usually manage to take my

college classes outdoors to play New Games.

Generally when I announce to classes that we will be

going outside to play, and to wear comfortable clothing, the 247 students don't take my comments very seriously. After all, academics are quite serious, and a sociology class is one of the last places where you would expect to find playful social interactions. After convincing the students that this is what we will indeed be doing the next class, most of the students become very curious about what is about to happen.

By way of introduction, I usually give them a little background information about the games, and inform the class about the motto of New Games— "Play Hard, Play Fair, Nobody

Hurt." Weather permitting, we then go outside. What follows are accounts of my students' first reactions to New Games.

(5g-220) My sociology class along with the instructor went out to play today- At first I was not sure if I wanted to participate, because I thought it was silly. However, everyone else joined in and it looked fun so I followed. I really had fun, but I still felt silly, although this feeling became less as the play continued.

(5b-49) Today during sociology class we played New Games. At first I felt kind of inhibited or afraid being around most of these people because I didn't know them, but then I felt more at ease, and it felt really good getting to know them.

(5a-221) When we first started to play I felt embarrassed and I hoped that no one I knew would see me. After we began to play with the parachute, though, 1 felt happy and carefree and the play took my mind off a lot of problems I have had lately. Despite some of the looks we got from others who were observing our play, I still had a great time and felt really 248

happy while I was doing it. It had been a long time since I had played these types of games and it made me feel like a little kid again.

In discussing this play session with the classes afterwards, almost all the students agreed that it had brought the class

closer together having interacted in a playful atmosphere

instead of the classroom.

These experiences with New Games have provided me with many insights about how individuals accomplish a sense of playfulness in their interactions with others. New Games also provided me with a context to observe the play of others, as well as the opportunity to participate directly in that play. Most significantly. New Games provide a context where play can take place. This is what is truly "new" about New Games--it not only expands potential playgrounds,

it also legitimizes play for adults. 249

251

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