Response to “Playing for Keeps: An Evolutionary Perspective on Human Games”

Although I had arrived at some of the same conclusions myself before reading the article, I was particularly pleased by one thought in particular, inspired by the article’s analysis.  It has always seemed strange to me that we often find lying and exposing another’s gullibility to be funny.  This article proposes that all play is preparation for adult skills demanding similar processes.  When one teasingly lies, one is playing in order to learn how to tell others lies and how to detect lies when others exploit them.  That is also why saying “I got you” is such an integral part of the sequence.  Without the final confession and re-confederation, one is actually lying to profit from the other person without their knowledge.  Given that we are so socially dependent, it makes a good deal of sense that we practice betrayal and betrayal recognition in a playful way.

This idea fits in line with the theory that we play sports games to learn how to organize for warfare, we make witticisms to contend in displays of intelligence, we play hide-and-go seek to learn how to cache ourselves from predators and enemies and to track those we seek to eliminate.

However, it is notable that humans have also remade play into a non-instructive pursuit.  People play games as ends not means.  If games were merely vehicles to encourage practice and training, we would not see adults playing games at all.  Typically, as an adult–save for a few exceptions–games do not improve one’s talent as a breadwinner.  This paper lacks an adequate explanation for why adults continue to play games for their entire lives, whereas other mature animals lose interest.  

Here’s a possible explanation.  As remarked on in class, a number of post-Marxist political philosophers including Noam Chomsky and Guy de Bord have argued that organized entertainment is tool of the state used to distract the masses from their disenfranchisement.  Marx himself is, of course, well known for stating in the same vein that religion is the opiate of the masses.  However, organized sport and forms of communal entertainment are more deeply rooted historically than the state.  Adult play is rightly a distraction–but not a distraction imposed by the state.  This is speculation, but I think that most forms of adult play serve to distract from the paralyzing force of nihilism.

At some epoch in human evolutionary history, proto-humans began to conceive of death.  This was perhaps a gradual awakening.  The first conceptions of death need not have been as verbalized as ours are today.  However, once proto-humans had begun to understand death through some form of representation, they were likely to have encountered feelings of uncomprehending fear, finally unfolding in depression–more or less the feelings that all atheists have encountered at some point in their lives.  There must have been a vast selective pressure against this kind of analysis.  Those who dwelled on the inevitability and ruthlessness of death were, as now, impaired in their fitness.  As behavioral defenses against ontological purposelesness, proto-humans evolved, invented, and embraced rituals, philosophies, games, music, dance, and other hobbies.  

In fact, there must have been a selective pressure on these behaviors (whether caused by conceptions of death or by some other means).  Otherwise, they would not be attested so universally.