Cricket matches occasionally end in
a tie, and often in a draw; but
that does not make it a futile game;
if no side ever won, the game
would lose its point.
-- John Watkins, Science and
Skepticism (1984), p. 279
Assignment: Distinguish tie from draw.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6FdBZQw2zQ |
I am at last resigned to the fact that I shall never
understand String Theory; and a
grasp of cricket must likewise
remain forever beyond my means.
Given that, Kipling’s dig about “the flannelled fools at the wicket” was quite unfair; you practically have to be a barrister
to make sense of the game.
~
More re the point
of a given genre of game:
Within the vocabulary of chess, it
makes no sense to say ‘That was the one and only move which would achieve
checkmate, but was it the right move to make?’ … as someone might ask, whose purpose in playing chess was to
amuse a small child rather than to
win.
-- Alasdair MacIntyre, After
Virtue (1981; 21984), p.
125
(And what is the point, of this game of life? -- Perhaps, to amuse the gods.)
It would be interesting to imagine extragalactic
sociologists or philosophers, provided with a complete, objective and
uncommented, play-by-play record of every cricket game ever played, and every
chess game ever played; we wonder whether, from these, they could deduce what the
point was. Cf. & contrast the
card‘game’ that we children called ‘War’, in which again, the ‘point’ is to ‘win’,
only, each player’s moves being completely determined, the resemblance to any
normal game is but feeble; it’s
really just a long-drawn-out, inefficient way of staging a single coin-flip.
~
Back to cricket, with its arcane distinctions and welter of
rules -- surely exceding those of tennis (let along ping-pong), basketball,
soccer and much else. These come at a cost (we want to shout, Just play the game!), but indeed to such an extent,
that what would, from a practical point of view, be counter-productive, must surely serve some
sociopsychological purpose, delineating the cultural boundaries of the Tight
Little Island. Rather like
the Japanese language, with its complex system of grammatical honorifics, which
no-one can master who hasn’t grown up in the culture from birth. Or Anglo-Catholic worship ritual:
unlike in an evangelical church, where anyone can wander in off the street and
fit right in, for an outsider to attempt to participate is continually to find yourself sitting
when (suddenly, inexplicably) everyone else is standing up, or standing up when they are sitting
down, or kneeling, or crossing themselves.
For an American analogue, we would suggest, not so much our
National Pastime of baseball, which physically most resembles cricket, but
American football, with its ever-expanding rulebook, its minute schedules of differing
penalties for everything from twitching (on the offensive line -- “false motion”
-- or the defensive -- “offsides”) to spiking the ball; and its many
game-interrupting circumstances. -- What physically
most resembles football is rugby;
but here the playing of the game -- the continuous unscripted motion, as
in soccer or basketball -- quite trumps the courtly ceremony characteristic of
football.
~
There is generally a core
of rules that characterize the essence of a given kind of game. As for the rest, they contribute to its aura of spectacle, but are not constitutive of the game.
The essense of football is simply that one guy runs with the
ball toward a goal, and the other guys try to stop him. Early football (and kids’
football even today) was largely just that. Then they added the possibility of a forward
pass: that was a significant
addition to the core, constitutive of an extension
of the game (Football v. 2.0), but
one in which the earlier nucleus remained aufgehoben: after all, there are plenty of running
plays even in the NFL, and if you laid them all end-to-end, you’d have a
simulacrum of original football (though to be sure, they are subtly different,
since each play is instinct with the possibility
that someone might throw the ball).
The constitutive rules of chess are the powers of the
pieces. That much is sine qua non -- you couldn’t very well specify
the moves of all the pieces except the knight, letting that fellow to joust
around as the mood might move him.
But now you’ve got a game, which could just as well exist without
niggling side-rules like that of castling, or capture en passant (let alone
purely ceremonial, non-structural rules like “j’adoube”).
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