Is “serious game” an oxymoron?

 

Serious games were defined to “have an explicit and carefully thought-out educational purpose and are not intended to be played primarily for amusement” (Abt, 9) by Clark Abt in his book Serious Games. This definition, however, was mostly likely in reference to modern video games, which greatly serves educationally. When considering games throughout human history, particularly those traced back to ancient times, games appeared to be functioning more than just as pure entertainment or as an educational tool. The ancient Greek Olympic Games and the Roman Gladiator Games are examples of empires incorporating religious rituals and social stratification and utilizing publicized games as a political apparatus to reify Androcentrism and Chauvinism and to stabilize its imperial control. With closes examination of these games, we define serious games with modification to Abt’s definition — serious games are free activities that have an explicit educational, religious, or political purpose in either or both the game space and social space in addition to the primary entertaining function — and conclude that serious games are, therefore, plausible and not an oxymoron.

 

The Greek Olympic Games originated in 776 BCE were the most important of the four in the Panhellenic games: “But, my heart, would you chant the glory of games ... nor shall we sing games greater than the Olympian.” — Pindar, Odes of Pindar, 476 BCE (Lecture 4). In an era of expansionary campaign of sending colonies and spreading Greek culture across the Mediterranean world, the Olympic Games were developed by elite Greek men to construct a Panhellenic identity and unity across the race, including rival city states.

 

In a Greek patriarchal society where democratic elections and juries in law courts were comprised of only free men, excluding boys, slaves, and women, the Olympic Games was a game of men. It was purposed to demonstrate free male’s power to rule. Females were not permitted to participate or spectate the games because bleeding and gaining glory on the battlefield were the privileges of free men. The Olympic Games was a contest of the male body. Individual men athletes, who were among the elites of the Greek society, competed nakedly in battle-inspired sports such as stade, javelin, diskos, jump, and wrestling. The Games served not only as a celebration of the male body against rivals; it legitimized the elite place of men in Greek society through putting the male body on display in the scared site of Olympia.

 

The Greek empire was also a society of religion, making the Olympic Games at their core a religious festival. Not only temples were built near public plazas and markets, but altars dedicated to Zeus were also forged beside the tracks. Despite the celebration of the male body, the Olympic Games were both sacred and serious to the Greeks. The athletes had to “swear an oath on slices of the flesh of wild boars that they will do nothing evil against the Olympic Games in front of the statue of Zeus Horkios (Zeus of the Oath)” (Miller, 120). The Hellanodikai, the judges, “will undergo a ritual purification: they will be sprinkled with the blood of a pig and then washed in the spring water” (Miller, 118) before entering “the Sanctualry of Zeus” (Miller, 118). The holy process will also involve “the great sacrifice at the Altar of Zeus”, which marked “the religious high point of the games” (Miller, 124). Rather than a mere sport event, incorporating religious practices into the Olympic Games allowed the Greeks to solidify the grounds, truth, and prominence of their religion.

 

Just as how the Greeks had casted a religious light over the Olympic Games, the Romans absorbed a strong political intention into their Gladiator Games in the amphitheater. Before turning into a brutal and bloody event, munera was originated before 400 BCE as a funerary ritual, where “the male descendent of the deceased would fight and battle in the forum until blood was drawn to ease the passage of the dead” (Lecture 7). It wasn’t until the Romans that the game was appropriated after conquest to include many fights to death. The Flavian Amphitheater in Rome built in 80CE was a social and political institution central to the Roman Empire. Bloody events in this arena became an important expression of the Roman state’s power over rival peoples and over nature.

 

The morning would start with the venatio, in which specialists fought against lions, bears, antelope, or elephants shipped far from the vast stretch of the empire. It’s a struggle for men against the beasts; Rome against the wilderness. With the specialist representing Rome, his victory was seems as Rome’s victory. The afternoon game munera put gladiators against each other. Many wore the armors of the enemies of Rome in history, recreating Roman victory. “Pyrrhic dances, a sort of parade-like display of flashy military maneuvers with performers often acting out episodes from the legendary past, took place alongside the bloodier events” (Futrell, 17). It was obvious that both the venatio and the munera satisfied the same intent — Chauvinism — emphasizing the superiority of the Roman Empire over the world.

 

In between the two games was the Damnatio ad bestias or the Damnatio ad gladius, in which the prisoners were forced into the arena to indorse their sentence — fight against wild beasts or gladiators. The Roman Empire regarded this event as a major mechanism to aggrandize its political identity and legitimize its religion and the status of the royalties. The convicts were oftentimes not murderers or thieves but political rivals — people who refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of Roman gods and goddesses or the Roman state’s control over the colonies. In most cases, these enemies of the state were cultists — the Jews and the Christians — who denied the truth of the Roman religion and in turn, question the emperor’s legitimacy as a ruler. The prisoners might be exonerated if they survived, but their corpses will be “dragged to the steps of the temple nearby and left to rot” (Lecture 7) if otherwise.

 

Despite the fact that these games attracted thousands of people for their entertainment value, it’s vital for Roman political stability for the events to take place in front of public audience: they served as “a harsh object lesson for those challenging Roman authority” (Futrell, 28). The Roman rulers also made alternative use of the social space of cavea; it was a social stratification. The higher one’s social status, the closer one sat to the arena: senators and priestesses of Vesta, the only women allowed in the cavea, sat near the podium with women and slaves only allowed to watch from far above the cavea. Although the emperor occasionally joined the commoners in watching the games, the vivid class system employed in the cavea allowed the hierarchy, and hence the stability, of the empire to be secured.

 

Both games illustrated that it was through combining the rites with the sports, through excluding women and slaves from the events, through unifying the city states under a vigorous sport event, through displaying public executions, and through implementing artificial hierarchy in the social space that secured the legitimacy of the religions, the capability of ruling of the empire, and the high social status of men. In consequence, we may conclude from our definition of a serious game that the inconspicuous religion and political intentions of the two games can stray the games from pure entertainment and arm the game with “seriousness”; therefore, with such serious games being historically present or even played in the present, serious game is not an oxymoron.

 

 

 

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Bibliography

 

Abt, C. C. (1970). Serious Games. Viking Press.

 

Futrell, A. (2000). I. Beginnings. In Blood in the Arena: The Spectacle of Roman Power (New edition, pp. 9–29). University of Texas Press.

 

Miller, S. G. (2004). The Olympic Games, 300 B.C.: A Reconstruction of A Festival. In Ancient Greek Athletics (pp. 113–128). Yale University Press.

 

Professor Jeremy White.  (2021, April 15). Lecture 4, 7. [Video file]. Retrieved from ARTHI 6L Gauchospace