This document explores the dual nature of games in education and society, highlighting their role in teaching cooperation and conformity while also posing risks of isolation and addiction.
Extract
[...] The role of the game in education thus appears as a phenomenon widely shared across cultures and eras. Thus, in ancient Greece, the education of young citizens (the paideia) involves learning a large number of playful activities. The young citizen learns to be a citizen by learning to be a player. The wrestling that punctuates the days of children at the gymnasium has nothing in common with violent outbursts, but it takes on its full value in the rules associated with it. [...]
[...] Games occupy an ambivalent place in Western societies. How can we understand that in the 17th century a social practice like gaming could be perceived both as a danger to social order and as a valued practice at the heart of education and social life? It seems that playing appears just as much as a necessary step in the construction of social order as a practice that threatens the existence of this same order. This historical ambivalence of representations of the game refers to the double meaning that playing can have. [...]
[...] Playing therefore appears as an ambivalent activity. If playful practice is at the heart of education in that it teaches citizens to live together and cooperate, the game also carries the risk of a disintegration of the social and the individual for the benefit of chance and pure entertainment. In conclusion, it would be possible to think that playing has no value in itself or, in other words, that "playing" is nothing, but that playing only makes sense through the missions associated with it. [...]
[...] Playing can thus quickly become a way to submit the player to the risk of a player isolation that defines this vertigo of addiction Thus, I would end up wondering if the game does not risk setting up a society of the 'all-game' in which the seriousness of the world is abolished II.A/ The danger of the game is indeed the danger of a vertigoilinx in Greek). This vertigo is that of addiction, an addiction that affects the player caught up in his own activity. [...]
[...] II.B/ From then on, I can conclude by questioning the danger that would constitute a society of all-games, a society of non-seriousness in which playfulness and entertainment would be elevated to cardinal values. Hannah Arendt in The Crisis of Culture was already worried about this phenomenon in which she perceived the seeds of a society marked by the stamp of individualism. At the heart of the game is built a practice of pleasure oriented towards pure self-satisfaction and one's desires. [...]
