Spoilsports can ruin the fun of playing a game – but they can also become
an essential part of making games better, as our experts nd out
I
n last month’s column we turned to the
work of the philosopher Bernard Suits
in our discussion of cheating in tabletop
gaming. is month we consider another
unwelcome guest at the games table – the
spoilsport, and once again we begin with Suits.
When discussing the di erent types of gamers
with his disciples, the titular Grasshopper
of Suits’ book argues that the attachment of
a player to the outcome of a game depends
on their lusory attitude (from the Latin word
ludo, meaning game). ere are a number of
such attitudes players might take, including
unsporting behaviour (breaking a game’s
unspoken rules and etiquette), cheating
(breaking a game’s constitutive rules for
an unfair advantage) and spoilsports (who
undermine the rules entirely). As Suits puts it,
while a “regular” player recognises both the
rules and the goals of the game, cheats recognise
goals but not rules, and spoilsports recognise
neither. To take Catan as an example, a regular
player is someone who aims to get to 10 victory
points whilst strictly adhering to the rules, a
cheat might lie about the amount of wood
they have in order to win, while a spoilsport
might take all of the development cards and
build a small house with them before declaring
themselves Emperor of the Planet Zogg.In general players are, as Johan Huizinga
notes, much more lenient to the cheat than
the spoilsport. e reason for this curious
distinction lies in the fact that, while cheaters
might be considered as being overly zealous
in their pursuit of victory (thereby ratifying
the importance of the game), spoilsports risk
undermining the game entirely. In Huizinga’s
words, “the spoil-sport shatters the play-
world itself. By withdrawing from the game
he reveals the relativity and fragility of the
play-world in which he had temporarily
shut himself with others.” In other words, by
displaying such a distinct lack of zeal, the
spoilsport calls into question what video game
theorist Jesper Juul calls the “game contract”:
an act that forcibly requires the other players
to examine not only the game’s validity
but also its very nature. In other words, the
spoilsport questions the value that the other
players place in choosing to play a particular
game, and to some extent the value of playing
games in general.
While we expect the readers of a magazine
called Tabletop Gaming likely place a high
value on playing games, we’d perhaps all
bene t from asking ourselves whether or not
we might (just occasionally) be guilty of being
spoilsports. While our Catan example is anextreme case, can you hand-on-heart say
that you have never knowingly disregarded
both the rules and goals of a game in a
slightly subtler fashion? Have you perhaps
“accidentally” lost or even sabotaged a game
that you weren’t enjoying so that you could
play something else? Playing well is, after all,
one of the challenges (and pleasures) of games
that rely so heavily on social contracts and we
are all fallible.
Having said all of this, perhaps there is a
way to redeem the much-maligned spoilsport.
Huizinga hints at a way out when he argues that
“sometimes” (and that sometimes marks this as
an exception rather than a rule) “spoilsports in
their turn make a new community with rules of
its own”. It’s an idea that game designer Charles
J. Pratt puts forward, suggesting, “the games
that have been passed down to us through the
ages, games like chess and Go and Soccer and
Golf, owe a great deal to the mostly anonymous
players who decided that there was something
wrong with the ludic contract they had signed.
ese players rejected the conventionally
recognised rules and presented ideas of their
own, promising that their ludic contract was
a much better deal.” Pratt goes on to suggest
another name for the pioneering spoilsport:
“game designer”.+y
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Play it smart
Doctors Paul Wake and Sam Illingworth are
Manchester Metropolitan University academics
and co-directors of the Games Research NetworkSpoilsports can ruin the fun of playing a game – but they can also become
an essential part of making games better, as our experts nd out
Play it smart
February 2019 tabletopgaming.co.uk 51Cheats might break the rules, but spoilsports throw them away completely