Empty Forms: Vestiges of Sacred Play

"In blood harvest you call a horde with crows....And for some reason zombies can't startle the crows." [the Mayor, Left for Dead Steam Forum, Sep 2009]

Written in the hey-day of structuralism, Giorgio Agamben's early 1978 treatise  "Infancy and History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience" relates structuralist formulations such as diachrony and synchrony to a more philosophical concern with experience.  In an essay entitled "In Playland: Reflections on History and Play,"  drawing substantially from  Claude Levi-Strauss' the Savage Mind, Agamben presents a  diagram composed of axis's that  pull in the direction of either play or ritual.  Ritual societies are "cold", are given to cyclical movements and ahistoricity.  "Hot Society's" change rapidly and are disconnected from the regularity of the seasonal calendar, with the diachronic aligned closer to the axis of play. Anthropology has since abandoned such totalizing, cross-cultural comparative classifications, but this early ludic anthropological structuralism suggests some promising investigations for contemporary ludic researchers.

Despite Agamben's constitution of play as a separate pole from ritual, he cites examples, again borrowed from Levi-Strauss, of  "games" where both play and ritual converge in sacred play.  Some of these games are funerary ceremonies to appease or transform the ghosts of dead loved ones.  However, in a very hot society, players have forgotten the sacred connotations of games, the "circle game that was once an ancient matrimonial rite, games of chance derived from oracular practices; the spinning-top and the chequered board [that once] were tools of divination."  Contemporary players are suspended in the timeless meaningless flow of the escapist little boys only world of Lampwick's tale of Pinocchio's Playland quoted at the beginning of Agamben's essay: "Playland is a country whose inhabitants are busy celebrating rituals, and manipulating objects and sacred words, whose sense and purpose they have, however, forgotten". (Agamben p.70) In this essay we contend that contemporary computer games do contain vestigial traces of sacred play, if only in forms that have been emptied of significance. We propose to isolate some of these vestigial structures, adopting a speculative playful archeological approach to sacred ghostly forms persisting in games such as the memorial Half-life mod "Dear Esther" and the zombie game "Left for Dead."

Keywords
Ludology, Death, Games, Cultural Analysis