The Forms and Fluidity of Game-Play

There are multiple forms of play. There is make-believe play—the play of imagination and pretend; there is also striving play, the play of competition, challenge, and overcoming obstacles. This chapter draws on Kendall Walton’s analysis of make-believe and Bernard Suits’s analysis of games to develop these two forms of play. It argues that the two are conceptually distinct and irreducible to one another. It rejects several forms of reductionism, including Suits’s argument that make-believe play is a kind of competitive acting challenge and a Waltonian argument that game-playing is a special kind of make-believe. The two forms of play break down in different ways: striving play is broken by cheating and make-believe play by spoiling the illusion. Reductionist accounts can’t explain this, nor can they explain certain frictions between the forms of play.