Some Notes on Games

Part Five — Oldweb as Play & Anti-Environment

I guess I lied about this being the brainstorm’s last chapter. This is a bit of a tangent or footnote, but it’s not irrelevant to where this all is going to end up. I’m still working all of this out for myself & thanks for watching me think about fun & games.

20.

On the topic of novel forms of fun, I think we’ve been missing an elephant in the room. It might be useful to back up several steps and actually let Huizinga tells us what he means by play—what we say one does when one does a game.

“First and foremost,” he writes, “all play is a voluntary activity. Play to order is no longer play: it could at best be a forcible imitation of it.” In Kantian fashion, he sets aside the questions of free will and determinism and unwittingly waxes Skinnerian in touching on the circularity of any explanatory narrative involving a play “instinct.” He stops short of calling fun and games “reinforcing,” but it is enough for Huizinga to say that animals and children play because it is pleasurable and because they are at liberty to do so—in the sense that it is extraneous to the basic needs of survival and comfort.

[F]or the adult and responsible human being, play is a function which he could equally well leave alone. Play is superfluous. The need for it is only urgent to the extent that the enjoyment of it makes it a need. Play can be deferred or suspended at any time. It is never imposed by physical necessity or moral duty. It is never a task: it is done at leisure, during “free time.” Only when play is a recognized cultural function—a rite, a ceremony—is it bound up with notions of obligation and duty.

Criterion number two: the world of play is not the world of “real life.”

It is rather a stepping out of “real” life into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all of its own. Every child knows perfectly well that he is “only pretending,” or that it was “only for fun.”...This “only pretending” quality of play betrays a consciousness of the inferiority of play compared with “seriousness,” a feeling that seems to be something as primary as play itself. Nevertheless...the consciousness of play being “only a pretend” does not by any means prevent it from proceeding with the utmost seriousness, with an absorption, a devotion that passes into rapture and, temporarily at least, completely abolishes that troublesome “only” feeling.

If Gen Xers or Millennials with oldweb nostalgia (like me) want to argue that the early internet was better and more fun than its modern version, there is a case to be made that the culture of Web 1.0 fostered and emphasized play, as per Huizinga’s qualifications, and ceased to do so sometime during the 2010s (or maybe even earlier).

gamefaqs.com in December 1996

For several years after the World Wide Web was launched in 1991, nobody needed to use it. Through most of the internet’s first decade as a consumer utility, many Americans could have been justified in thinking it was a nerdy white dude fad they needn’t buy into. There was a whole world of other things to do, and ways to meet and be with people that didn’t require buying a desktop computer and an ISP subscription—so why bother? And why use the web for things like banking, finding recipes, looking up driving directions, getting news updates, buying books, pet supplies, and furniture, etc., when the old, established ways of going about it were already fairly inexpensive and convenient?¹

This isn’t to say that life before the year 2001 was some prelapsarian idyll, or that that internet didn’t provide its early users opportunities for amusement, intellectual engagement, and forging interpersonal connections in ways solid life lacked—but it was precisely the play-character of the early internet that made it feel like such a refuge to habitual users. Those who made fan sites dedicated to their favorite band, TV show, or video game series, posted their drawings or comic strips on a subsection of their homepage, composed and shared comical pop culture essays or erotic fan fiction, typed out long theories about the enigmas of X-Files or EarthBound or Tool lyrics on a message board, etc., had no strategic reasons for doing so. In the absence of tools for turning views into revenue, manipulative “scorekeeping” systems billboarding individuals’ social currency and relevance, and trodden pathways to fame and glory, it could only be for fun.

As per Huizinga’s second characteristic of play, it was once taken as given that online life and “real” life constituted separate categories. Dial-up era netizens gave themselves new names and performed pioneering experiments with identity curation and creation, whether they were presenting themselves to others on message boards, in chat rooms, or through a personal website. There was a shared understanding that most of the people you “met” on the web were In The Know, standing apart from the general run of “normies” who lived entirely outside the magic circle and had no little to no knowledge of what went on within. To be sure, there exist internet communities that most of the population is unaware of today—but by now basically everyone understands the concept of an internet community without needing it explained to them in terms of an analogy from offline life, whereas a high schooler who launched a popular fansite circa 1996 might find his grandparents furrowing their brows and asking silly questions when he explained his hobby to them.²

The covertness and the esoteric culture of the early internet spiced its play element, as Huizinga would have us expect it to:

The exceptional and special position of play is most tellingly illustrated by the fact that it loves to surround itself with an air of secrecy. Even in early childhood the charm of play is enhanced by making a “secret” out of it. This is for us, not for the “others.” What the “others” do “outside” is no concern of ours at the moment. Inside the circle of the game the laws and customs of ordinary life no longer count. We are different and do things differently.

Internet culture had special lingos, shibboleths, in-jokes, and social mores, and for a while it was considered kind of cringe to carry them over into solid life. One winced to hear “pwned” pronounced in the classroom or workplace. In a way, it was like being involved in the BDSM scene and inwardly sighing to hear someone who ran in same circles oversharing at a colleague’s dinner party. “Like, dude, there’s a time and a place, and it’s ain’t it.”

Time and place are what Huizinga’s third aspect of play touches upon:

Play is distinct from “ordinary” life both as to locality and duration. This is the third main characteristic of play: its secludedness, its limitedness. It is “played out” within certain limits of time and place. It contains its own course and meaning.

The limitations on access prior to the proliferation of laptops and wi-fi hotspots—to say nothing of smartphones—played a not insignificant role in determining Web 1.0’s ad hoc culture. For the individual user, online behavior was closely linked to a particular setting. After all, many of our actions are tied to specific environments: one prays inside the church, for instance, just as one drinks at the bar, works out at the gym, screams in the bleachers, etc., and may perform none of these actions outside of the places that elicit them. Similarly, the dial-up web user performed their online identity in the room with the desktop computer, and nowhere else (unless they had access to a school computer lab, a neighborhood internet café, etc.). To some extent, difficult to examine, the technical restrictions to getting online helped to maintain the apparent partition between solid life and digital life, the real-world self and the internet persona.³

During the late aughts, I’d hear people saying—offline, in public settings, with their actual mouths—“the cake is a lie” and “I can has cheeseburger,” and I have to admit it made me apprehensive. I wish I could claim I had the perception and prescience to recognize it for what it was: the proverbial levee springing a leak an hour before it burst apart.

no comment.

It is a gross oversimplification to say that the smartphone in and of itself changed the game—it belonged to a concatenation of factors that included the rise of the blogosphere, content mills, and social platforms, filesharing and MMOs, the swelling population of internet users, and any number of other reasons for why anyone who hadn’t gone online yet could no longer assure themselves their FOMO was unjustified—but the smartphone unmoored the individual user’s experience of the internet with regard to place. Everyone could be on the internet everywhere and at all times. Increasingly, everyone was on the internet everywhere and at all times. Moreover, everyone knew everyone was on the internet everywhere and at all times. The netizen’s idea of being somehow distinct from the normie by dint of having special knowledge and experiences was more and more clearly an empty pretense.

As a cultural space, the internet was dispossessed of the exclusivity, apartness, and the earnest frivolity that made it magic—or that made it a McLuhanian anti-environment.

The term “environment” is used somewhat loosely here. An anti-environment needn’t necessary be a physical place; it’s rather more like a learned second language that exposes the peculiarities of one’s native tongue as one converses in it. Traditional festivals, religious rituals, and art galleries often function as anti-environments, as do most of the forms of play Huizinga lauds as such. Every time a group of young men gather on the blacktop and divide themselves into teams of shirts and skins, we see traces of the premodern festival in the sense that the players are consciously breaking off from the routine patterns of society, discarding the customs which preside over the public street, the home, and the workplace, and mutually agreeing to abide by a different set of rules and priorities instead—for a fixed interval.

“Games,” McLuhan writes in Understanding Media, “shift familiar experience into new forms, giving the bleak and the blear side of things sudden luminosity.” In this, old games can resemble new technologies—and vice versa.

McLuhan concurs with Huizinga that the seriousness and systematization of professionalism changes the game, as it were, but suggests a different reason:

The structural features of environment and anti-environment appear in the age-old clash between professionalism and amateurism, whether in sport or in studies. Professional sport is environmental and amateur sport is anti-environmental. Professional sport fosters the merging of the individual in the mass and in the patterns of the total environment. Amateur sport seeks rather the development of critical awareness of the individual and most of all, critical awareness of the ground rules of society as such. The same contrast exists for studies. The professional tends to specialize and to merge his being uncritically in the mass. The ground rules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serve as a pervasive environment of which he is uncritical and unaware.

Athletics began as a nonspecialist affair. Academics, the same. In their early unprofessional and nonspecialized forms, sport and scholarship were anti-environments: adjacent and parallel to the institutions making up the vital tissues of society, but not integrated with them in any thoroughgoing way. By the time ancient Greek athletes were forming guilds, the Panhellenic Games had deviated far from its original character as a religious festival. Over time they transformed into a component of the Greek world’s political and economic apparatuses. The philosophical traditions of both East and West, Huizinga argues, can be traced back to games of riddles. After some thousands of years, the game elaborated into academia, the training grounds and gateway to white-collar professionalism. Not exactly a playground—and from what I’ve seen lately, it’s even less of one today than when I was an undergraduate.

The culture of the web followed a somewhat similar track, and more readily resembles the academic tradition in that its growth in the West was contingent on the adoption of a new technology. In the works of Plato and Aristotle, we see the greatest minds of two generations beginning to and then fully interiorizing chirography. They didn’t think like their predecessors, or even like the mass of their contemporaries. Half a century after Socrates was executed for impiety, Aristotle proposed the utterly impersonal supremacy of an Unmoved Mover. The anti-environment of an emergent literate culture gave the post-Socratic Greek philosophers new eyes to examine the world and new modes of thought with which to reappraise old assumptions.

(It is worth our while to point out that Plato and Aristotle were born roughly forty years apart—four decades during which chirography worked at displacing the old primary oral culture. Plato composed dialogues, and Aristotle wrote treatises. If you’ve read even a little of both, you already know which philosopher is more fun and which is more serious and systematic.)

If the netizens of the nineties and early aughts displayed an iconoclastic streak with regard to old media, intellectual property law, and certain social customs or values, it was because they had been conditioned by an anti-environment to become critically aware of these things. The early-aughts blogger found fault with papers of record and television news; the webcomic scenester tended to be critical of the comic book industry and newspaper strips. (It must be remembered that for several years, both fields were illuminated by amateurs who either had day jobs, were still in school, or enjoyed financial security and a surfeit of free time.)⁴ Similarly, few people seriously took issue with how the music industry went about its business—or even thought much about how the music industry went about its business—until they looked at it from the vantage point of filesharers acting as distributors and marketers in a parallel economy. “When an environment is new,” says McLuhan, “we perceive the old one for the first time.”⁵

The last lines of Allen Ginsberg’s [found?] poem “Graffiti 12th Cubicle Men’s Room Syracuse Airport” comes to the heart of what we’re getting at:

Man, I’m really stoned out of my skull really O-Zoned—good old LSD the colors in here are so nice really fine colors and the floor tile is really outasight if you haven’t tried it you ought to since it is the only way to really get your head together by first getting it apart LSD Forever.

The anti-environment of the psychedelic experience and the anti-environment of a new medium both invite exploratory free play and a reappraisal of the “normal” environment. And if you happen to have taken acid a number of times over a number of years, you’ll be hard-pressed to say your fortieth or fiftieth trip was as much of a blast or a revelation as your first, second, or third.

The internet is no longer a new environment. Everyone lives in the augmented reality of cyberspace now; to opt out into a deviceless life would not only mean severing oneself from the social mainstream, but living with a self-inflicted disability. Looking again at Huizinga’s three defining characteristics of play, it should be obvious that the post-Web 2.0 digital environment no longer ticks any of the boxes.

1. The internet can’t easily be ignored or left alone when society has been reshaped under the assumption that everyone is an everyday user. Reminder: there are employers and potential romantic partners who will turn you down if you don’t have a profile on a social platform, or if they look it over and don’t like what they see.

2. The Venn diagram between modern culture as a whole and online culture is very nearly a circle, and everyday experience powerfully militates against the notion that “real” life and digital life occupy separate spheres of activity.

3. There is no longer a set time or place for online life; we browse our feeds and submit our feedback (without necessarily being aware of it) all day and night and everywhere.

Is it any wonder that the web should have stopped feeling like a refuge?

(To be clear, the content of a website or social platform is more or less irrelevant here. What has changed is the architecture of cyberspace, the incentives and economics of participation, and the technology on which it all runs—the material base of the cloud capital paradigm. When we use the web in 2025, we stand in an entirely different river than we did in 2005 or 1995.)

Once in a blue moon, I’ll click on a Reddit or Twitter link and find myself taken to YouTube and listening to the familiar opening notes of “Never Gonna Give You Up.” Even in 2025, rickrolling isn’t completely dead—and whenever someone falls for it, they confront an anti-environment that snaps them out of their trance. For a sudden fleeting moment, the internet becomes visible.

1. Dire take: for a lot of people the question was “so why not just keep watching TV?”

2. I was specifically thinking of the Castlevania Dungeon when I typed this out. (I have no idea if Kurt Kalata’s grandparents ever looked askance at him when he told them he spent his free time working on a website about a video game series, but can easily imagine my own grandfather trying not to let on how puzzled and skeptical he was about the whole idea of it.) A bit later I passed over the line again, punched some stuff into the search bar, and found this 2015 interview with Kalata. It’s worth a read, and this line in particular…

I created something I thought was cool, and if other people thought it was cool too, then I was pretty happy.

…perfectly glosses the ur-ethos of what we now call “content creation.” It was very easy to think of the early web as a digital zine library (similar to how the automobile was once likened to a horseless carriage), and a necessary stage of its evolution was the recognition that it actually “wanted” to be something completely different.

These remarks also stood out to me, and they are germane to our overall theme here:

There was certainly more variety in [early website] design. Nowadays, most sites are developed using a CMS, which are rigidly defined, so you lose some of that uniqueness. Everything begins to feel the same. The Web 1.0 “standards” were indeed pretty ugly! But no one knew any better.

Actually, the same could be said about video game magazines then versus now. They used to be more colorful and enthusiastic. Nowadays, the writing quality is more mature, professional, and definitely better, but there was a charm in that old amateurishness.

3. An adult who arranged their bedroom furniture such that they could roll over on their mattress and reach their desktop computer’s mouse and keyboard was once apt to be regarded as a dysfunctional and addicted misfit. Laptops and then smartphones made compulsive internet use so convenient as to not only normalize it, but render it invisible.

4. A friend who occupied the same social orbits as the creator of a fairly popular aughts-era webcomic satirizing punk culture told me the artist/author lived off a trust fund—a reminder of why “amateur” in certain contexts is synonymous with “gentleman.”

5. And the content of any new medium is an old medium. There is more to say about this with regard to the early web. Another time.