Play as Mock War, Sociology of

Comparisons between Play and War

War is an activity that is fundamentally linked with the discourse of play and games. For many play activities, comparisons can be drawn to those of warfare. This can be seen most clearly in the ways that war and games share similar linguistic descriptions and conditions. This system of using the rhetoric of play to describe warfare has been described by Paul Fussell as “high diction.” Henry Newbolt's poem “Vitae Lampada” exemplifies this, where a cricket match becomes a metaphor and a guideline for actions on the battlefield. Amid cries of “Play up and Play the game!” the participants are encouraged to see war as a noble sport, and to treat the two with the same competitive spirit. Although this idealism was, of course, almost totally destroyed by the [Page 532]advent of modern warfare; the comparison with historical wars, events such as jousting, and even the link with modern re-enactment events, all act to preserve the concept that when war is idealized, it should contain moral and social principles such as good sportsmanship, fairness, clear rules that should not be broken, and a positive attitude toward healthy competition.

These latter examples demonstrate how often, social actions are specifically linked with ideas and actions of warfare. The moral linkage of war with a “well played” sport is also tied into concepts that involve ethical behavior rather than actual actions, blurring the two lines. World War I is often seen as the point where this changed; largely because it is seen as the moment where social values were corrupted by the barbarism of mechanized, rather than sporting, warfare. This is often linked specifically with the move from single combat with a recognized enemy to Mass Destruction, where identification with individuals is lost within the war machine. Again, the emphasis on the person (or player) is crucial to the formation of this understanding. When the individual is subsumed, the social understanding of the event changes as the “play” aspect of warfare is lost. Of course, historians know that no war can really be conceptualized as a game, since the reality simply defied this, however, the reconstruction of the past through various mythologies (including the discourse of war = game) means that it is often presented as such.

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