The concept of "winning" is closely related to the game. What does "win" mean? What is earned? Winning means: showing oneself, at the end of a game, superior to another. But the validity of this patented superiority tends to become a general superiority. And, with this, we see that something more than the game itself has been won. Prestige, honor has been gained, and this prestige and honor benefit the entire group to which the winner belongs. Herein lies another important property of the game: the success achieved in it can be transmitted, to a great degree, from the individual to the group. But there is still another more important feature: in the agonal instinct it is not, in the first place, the will to power or domination. The primary thing is the demand to exceed others, to be the first and to be honored as such. The question of whether, as a consequence, it is the individual or the group that increases its power, is secondary. The main thing is to have won.
You fight and play "for something." In the first and last instance, one fights and plays for victory itself.
Daring uncertain overtones of gain, insecurity of the result and tension, constitute playful action.
The development of sport, from the last quarter of the 19th century, indicates that the game is conceived with increasing seriousness. The rules become more rigorous and are elaborated in more detail. The performances are getting higher and higher. Everyone knows the prints from the first half of the 19th century in which cricketers wear top hats. This already says enough.
With this increasing systematization and discipline of the game, some of its pure playful content is lost, in the long run. This is manifested in the distinction of the players in professionals and amateurs. The group interested in the game sets aside those for whom the game is no longer a game and those others who, despite their great capacity, are below the true players. The attitude of the professional player is no longer the authentic playful attitude because the spontaneous and the carefree are absent in it. Sport is moving further and further away in modern society from the pure sphere of the game, and is becoming a sui generis element. It is no longer a game, and yet it is not something serious either. In today's social life, sport asserts its place alongside the cultural process itself, and the latter takes place outside of it.
The perfection with which modern social technology increases the external effect of mass demonstrations does not mean that the Olympics, the sports organizations of North American universities, or the international championships, which enjoy such good publicity, become an attitude culture creator. No matter how important they are for the participants and spectators, they continue to be a sterile function in which the old playful factor has largely been extinguished.
This conception is directly opposed to the current opinion, according to which sport would represent the ludic element in our culture in its maximum degree. But in no way can this be said of sport, which has consumed, on the contrary, the best of its playful sense. The game has become too serious and the mood of the game has more or less disappeared from it. It is worth noting that this shift to the serious side has also affected non-athletic games, especially those in which rational calculation is everything, such as chess and cards.
The attempt to examine the ludic content of our confused present time always leads us to contradictory conclusions. In sport we find ourselves with an activity that is admittedly a game and that, however, has been taken to such a high degree of technical organization, material equipment and scientific improvement, that in its collective public practice it threatens to lose its authentic tone. playful. Faced with this propensity of the game to drift into the serious, we have statements that seem to prove the opposite.» (There is an international show that produces a lot of laughter! The show of seriousness!)
Source images: Unsplash.
Comments