Sport and play in a digital world

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Sport, Ethics and Philosophy

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Sport and play in a digital world

To cite this article: (2016): Sport and play in a digital world, Sport, Ethics and Philosophy, DOI:

10.1080/17511321.2016.1171252

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Published online: 10 May 2016.

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GUEST EDITORIAL

Sport and play in a digital world

In the early 1970s, a new electronic game was introduced, called Pong. It was as simple as a game can be: just two paddles and a virtual ball that can be hit across a two-dimensional screen. With some imagination, one could see in this game the simulation of table tennis. I remember play-ing this game for hours after school, layplay-ing on a bench. Although Pong could be played rather fanatically, to the point of exhaustion, this paddling of a moving dot was not really considered athletic. Nor did it really compete with doing ‘real sports.’ The pre-structured character of the game prevented the players from even thinking about cheating. Walking away in a losing position could be considered the only possible case of non-compliance.

The first generation of electronic games, such as Pong, was more or less categorized as ‘screen time,’ and did not even aspire to fall into the category of sport. Current generations of gamers are more likely to associate Pong with a search for inner peace and mindfulness (given its static and sometimes hypnotizing character) than with sport. The popularity and commercial success of Pong can partly be explained by the combination of innovation (it was considered something new at the time) and simplicity, but also to its ‘innocent character.’ The game did not involve actions or images that could have been considered inappropriate. New generations of games that followed were considered less innocent and started to compete not only with time spent watching television but with other leisure activities, such as sport, as well.

‘Video Games Are Blitzing the World,’ was the headline that could be read on a cover of Time

Magazine in 1982. More recently, in 2015, Pong was elected in a World Video Game Hall of Fame,

together with other games such as Pac-Man, Super Mario Bros., Tetris, and World of Warcraft. The content of more recent games has evolved into three-dimensional worlds in which gamers deeply identify with the roles of adventurers, soldiers, or omnipotent heroes. With the increasing popularity of these games, social disapproval arose, partly because of ignorance on the potential influence of all the virtual shooting, beating, and killing. ‘Video games are a bigger problem than guns!’, according to the headlines of the Huffington Post in 2013.

With the Dutch historian Huizinga (1938), it has often been argued that play is a free and non-serious activity, standing outside ‘ordinary’ life. This non-serious character of play implies that kids playing war or pretend to play with real weapons are usually not considered dangerous or immoral. Nevertheless, an enormous amount of research money and energy is spent on the potential dangers of playing video games (cf. Griffiths 1999). A new research agenda and new research fields (such as game studies) emerged that focused on the question how repeated and extensive experiences with electronic games relate to all kinds of behavior and character traits (cf. Aboujaoude and Starcevic 2015). When searching for research on the impact of gaming on the lives and leisure time of children, one is still overwhelmed by topics like game addiction, violence, aggression, gaming disorder, desensitization to violence, obesity, and all kinds of pathologies that might correlate with playing video games (cf. Spitzer 2012). When looking closer at the more recent trends of research on gaming and virtual sports, one can also recognize a growing popularity of a more neutral and analytical paradigm, where the main question does not focus on the potential dangers, but is more descriptive and phenomenological: What is happening in a virtual (game) world (cf. Boellstorff 2010)? How playful is a virtual environment? How do moral standards change in a digital game and how does the game-person and role-playing relate to the real person (cf. Copier 2007)?

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2 GUEST EDITORIAL

The skills needed and the ethically salient decisions that have to be made in modern computer games are incomparable with the first generation of games. With modern shooting games and

Massively Multiplayer Online Games, players have much more degrees of freedom. The increasing

possibilities within virtual worlds, of social interaction and identification with virtual characters raise fundamental questions on identity and personhood. What kind of person am I (if I am) in a virtual environment? Can I be as cruel, as merciless as the game appears to allow me to be? Do game designers also have moral responsibilities? According to Sicart (2009), there is indeed some-thing like unethical game design. Computer games can be ethically questionable, not because of its immoral content, but preventing players from creating their own ethical game values. From this perspective, Pong is less innocent than might be thought at first sight, because of its mechanical constraints. With little opportunities to modify the game and with a limited amount of choices, the gamer could easily turn into an uncritical, zombie-like creature. When players have greater autonomy and responsibilities within the game, Sicart claims that players can develop specific game virtues and ‘a specific, game-related character, within which, for instance, sportsmanship and other virtues have their meaning.’ (2009, 13)

Digital games do not only challenge us in our thinking how responsible, ‘(im)moral’ or ‘(un) sportsmanlike’ we may become in a virtual world without real consequences. They also challenge authorities of traditional sports to think about the potential of digital technologies to deal with some of the disadvantages of doing sports in a real-life environment. What to think of Formula 1 racing in a virtual environment, without the risks of real crashes and without the air and sound pollution? Questions like these not only deal with the potential of virtual sports, but also with our conception of current sports, and how relevant we consider elements such as health risks, real body interaction, and face-to-face contact.

Games of the twenty-first century are so much more complex, so much richer than first gen-eration predecessors that we cannot hope to discuss properly its impact, meaning, or effects in a generic manner. Modern games can hardly be compared with the first generation of electronic games, given the opportunities to control the game or modify elements of the game context, and given the possibilities to be another person and to be expressive. The diversity of games has also increased dramatically in terms of the existing elements sports that are being incorporated and transferred into the virtual game environments. This not only relates to the simulation of well-known sport actions (such as throwing or swinging a golf club), but also includes aspects of social interaction and being part of a game community. Given the increasing applications of digital technology in traditional sports, one can argue that the worlds of virtual and non-virtual sports are approaching and merging.

Apart from a few exceptions (cf. Hemphill 2005), philosophers of sport have been relatively silent thus far about this new cybersport reality. This contrasts with the enormous and still increas-ing amount of literature that involves questions on digital play and human behavior in virtual worlds. This special issue has been conceived as a means to bridge the gap between ‘game studies’ and current topics within the philosophy of sport literature. It does so by dealing with a variety of topics in which the virtual or the electronic takes over, contradicts, or melts with current sports as we know it. The papers in this issue deal with a variety of conceptual and moral questions.

A few papers in this issue deal with the concepts of cybersport and eSport, and with the issue of physicality. In Virtual Domains for Sports and Games, Jason Holt uses a Suitsian theory of games to question the sportive character of cybersport. In his argument, Holt critically questions the aspect of physical skills, and does so by holding on to the distinction between fine and gross motor skills.

This contrasts with the argument presented in the next paper, Embodiment and Fundamental

Motor Skills in eSports (by Ivo van Hilvoorde and Niek Pot). Based upon a Merleau–Pontian

per-spective, the authors argue that it does not make sense to qualify digital sports as non-physical activities. It can even be argued that motor skills are a defining characteristic of eSports. The authors further question the educational implications of such an argument.

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In Broadband and Circuits: The Place of Public Gaming in the History of Sport Kalle Jonasson asks why eSport is being perceived as the black sheep in the family of sports and does so from a his-torical perspective on sports. The author argues that the perception of the relationship between eSport and sport resembles the common perception of the relationship between alleged vices of Roman and virtues of Greek athletics.

What Kind of an Activity is a Virtual Game? A Postmodern Approach in Relation to Concept of Phantasm by Deleuze and the Philosophy of Huizinga is the title of a paper written by Barış Şentuna

and Dinçer Kanbur. In this paper, the authors discuss the issue of whether video games can be considered as sports activities or not. Besides matters of classification, the paper also deals with issues of addiction and immersion. The aspect of addiction is considered in relation to Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens and the notion of phantasm by Gilles Deleuze.

In the next paper, Andrew Edgar tries to get a deeper understanding of the person that is playing digital games. In Personal Identity and the Massively Multiplayer Online World, the author explores the implications that the construction and use of avatars in games such as Second Life and World of Warcraft have for our understanding of personal identity. Can the personal identity be explored within the virtual world? If an avatar can meaningfully be experienced as a separate person, what implications does it have for our understanding of what counts as reasonable and ethical behavior?

Will Robots Ever Play Sports? is the title of a paper by Francisco Javier Lopez Frias and Jose Luis

Perez Triviño. The authors discuss the possibility of robots engaging in sports. In their paper, the authors assume that the creation of human-like robots and artificial intelligences in sport makes it possible to mirror human athletes’ behavior. They further propose to conceive sport as a particular ‘imitation game’ or Turing test, which permits us to distinguish between artificial intelligence and human beings. The authors introduce ‘the Frías-Triviño test’ as a test for artificial intelligence in sport.

In An Earthless World: The Contemporary Enframing of Sport in Digital Games Steven Conway provides a phenomenological understanding of contemporary sport and its digital game incar-nation. Building upon the Heideggerian notion of Enframing (Ge-Stell), the author compares and contrasts traditional sport with digital games.

The last paper deals in a more broader sense with the human athlete, interacting with modern technology. Francisco Javier Lopez Frias is the author of The Defining Components of the Cyborg:

Cyborg-Athletes, Fictional or Real? He questions several definitions of the cyborg and identifies

two sides in the debate: the continuist approach and the exceptionalist approach. This difference is based upon the question if the cyborg already exists in our world or should be regarded a fiction being who has never existed. The author further uses this debate to address the question whether athletes should be regarded as cyborgs.

With this special issue, we hope we may contribute to future developments of scholarship in the area of digital and virtual appearances of sport and play. Whatever the conceptual and moral positions are in the debate on the status of eSport and cybersport, the fact is that digital technology plays a crucial role in the everyday lives of more and more people. Digital games are gaining in significance all over the world and are challenging the hegemonic concept of sport. The papers in this issue illustrate the fact that philosophers (of sport) have much to say about these new forms of digital play. The diversity of the authors of this special issue (both in background as nationality) reflects a wide variety of topics. We hope that reading these papers on some of the main conceptual and moral questions that are being raised by these digital developments encourages other scholars to take up new questions that still remain unanswered.

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4 GUEST EDITORIAL

References

Aboujaoude, E. and V. Starcevic eds. 2015. Mental health in the digital age: Grave dangers, great promise. New york, Ny: Oxford University Press.

Boellstorff, T. 2010. Coming of age in second life: An anthropologist explores the virtually human. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Copier, M. 2007. Beyond the magic circle: A network perspective on role-play in online games. PhD thesis, Utrecht University, The Netherlands.

Griffiths, M. 1999. Violent video games and aggression: A review of the literature. Aggression and Violent Behavior 4: 203–212.

Hemphill, D. 2005. Cybersport. Journal of the Philosophy of Sport 32 (2): 195–207.

Huizinga, J. 1938. Homo Ludens. Proeve Eener Bepaling Van Het Spel-Element Der Cultuur [Homo Ludens. A Study of the Play-element in Culture]. Haarlem: H.D.Tjeenk Willink & Zoon.

Sicart, M. 2009. The ethics of computer games. Cambridge, MA: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press. Spitzer, M. 2012. Digital dementia: What we and our children are doing to our minds. Munich: Droemer Verlag.

Ivo van Hilvoorde

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands

i.m.van.hilvoorde@vu.nl