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On the Political Function of Triflers and Spoilsports in Game Studies

Chapter of: Historiographies of Game Studies: What It Has Been, What It Could Be(pp. 331–354)

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Metadata
TitleOn the Political Function of Triflers and Spoilsports in Game Studies
ContributorLiam Mitchell(author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.53288/0441.1.15
Landing pagehttps://punctumbooks.com/titles/historiographies-of-game-studies-what-it-has-been-what-it-could-be/
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
CopyrightLiam Mitchell
Publisherpunctum books
Published on2025-07-25
Long abstractConventional gameplay requires that players follow rules and aim for goals. Unconventional gameplay does not: cheats ignore rules, triflers ignore goals, and spoilsports ignore both. These unconventional modes of gameplay seem to be perennial preoccupations for those scholars concerned with the relationship between games and life, or with a political reading of games. Since the field’s inception, game studies scholars have conceived of these unconventional modes of play in metonymical or indexical terms, turning cheats, triflers, and spoilsports into different kinds of social actors who trouble the laws and conventions of society in different ways. Setting aside the comparatively straightforward rule breaking of the cheat, in this chapter I review four books – John Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, Bernard Suits’ The Grasshopper, James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games, and McKenzie Wark’s Gamer Theory – that cast the trifler and spoilsport as complicated agents of social change. By demonstrating the affinity between these texts, I resituate the figures of the trifler and the spoilsport in the field of game studies and identify a normative and philosophical framework for thinking about games that is grounded in a radical critique of the present.
Page rangepp. 331–354
Print length24 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Contributors

Liam Mitchell

(author)
Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at Trent University
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6999-5179

Liam Mitchell (he/him) is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at Trent University in Peterborough, Canada. His work theorizes the relationship between media, culture, and the political by paying close attention to particular technological artifacts, practices, and phenomena, particularly those objects associated with digital and social media. He is the author of Ludopolitics: Videogames against Control (Zer0 Books, 2018).