Ring a Ring o’ Roses as a Game

If you recall the history of game definitions, you remember how Wittgenstein discounted the possibility that the things that we call “games” (or rather Spiele in German) have anything in common, and argued that they rather have family resemblances. Wittgenstein’s argument is basically to say that naive people/philosophers assume that words have definite meanings, but that if we consider his range of examples, from board, to card, to ball games, to Ring a Ring o’ Roses, it will be clear that the things we call games have nothing in common. My response to this has usually been to say that Ring a Ring o’ Roses is not a game since it does not have quantifiable, variable outcomes to which the game assigns values (also discussed in Half-Real), so that’s that – Ring a Ring o’ Roses is not a problem for the definition of games, since a game definition doesn’t need to include Ring a Ring o’ Roses in the first place.

But lately I have been thinking that Ring a Ring o’ Roses is (or can be) more of a game than I thought. For those of you who haven’t played in a while, here is a video of some children playing it:

And this is what Wittgenstein has to say – I have to quote it all, §66-67 of Philosophical Investigations:

Consider for example the proceedings that we call “games”. I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all? — Don’t say: “There must be something common, or they would not be called ‘games’ “-but look and see whether there is anything common to all. — For if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don’t think, but look! — Look for example at board-games, with their multifarious relationships.

Now pass to card-games; here you find many correspondences with the first group, but many common features drop out, and others appear.

When we pass next to ball-games, much that is common is retained, but much is lost.– Are they all ‘amusing’? Compare chess with noughts and crosses. Or is there always winning and losing, or competition between players? Think of patience. In ball games there is winning and losing; but when a child throws his ball at the wall and catches it again, this feature has disappeared. Look at the parts played by skill and luck; and at the difference between skill in chess and skill in tennis.

Think now of games like ring-a-ring-a-roses; here is the element of amusement, but how many other characteristic features have disappeared!

I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than “family resemblances”; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and cries-cross in the same way.-And I shall say: ‘games’ form a family.

The strange thing always was how easy it is to come up with any number of things that all of Wittgenstein’s examples have in common – they all involve humans participating in a socially defined activity at the very least. That’s the thing with family resemblances – they are within a family, and families usually have shared traits, such as being carbon-based lifeforms and so on. In The Grasshopper Bernard Suits makes the snide remark that Wittgenstein didn’t follow his own advice of looking and seeing – “He looked, to be sure, but because he had decided beforehand that games are indefinable, his look was fleeting, and he saw very little.”

Perhaps that is a little hard on Wittgenstein, but the truth obviously is that he was a theorist of language, not games, and he doesn’t look very hard. This doesn’t detract from his value as a philosopher, I think.

Lately I have played a lot of Ring a Ring o’ Roses (or rather “Ring round the Rosie”) with my toddler son, and I suddenly remembered that Brian Sutton-Smith had once told me that Ring a Ring o’ Roses could be considered a game because it has variable outcome if you are 2-3 years old. At that age, it is really challenging to coordinate all the dancing and falling down as a group. It is a goal that all participants should fall at the same time (the valorization of the outcome), and the group sometimes succeeds and sometimes fails (variable outcome). This is very visible in the video above.

Seen that way, Ring a Ring o’ Roses is akin to tic-tac-toe which is also challenging and interesting up to a certain age, but ceases to work as a game once we understand the strategy. The reason we don’t remember the challenge of Ring a Ring o’ Roses is that we played it mostly before our earliest memories. At the other end of the spectrum, I guess old age will make Ring a Ring o’ Roses into a game for us again.

12 thoughts on “Ring a Ring o’ Roses as a Game”

  1. In fact, Ring o’ Roses will become a very, very challenging game for old people. Falling down simultaneously is akin to mass Russian roulette once you reach a certain age, I’m sure. Last one with an unbroken hip wins!

  2. What we\’re looking at here is play, not games. There are indeed plenty of similarities between different types of play, but games are a particular kind of play at which you can lose. I wouldn\’t have any problems with what Wittgenstein was saying if he\’d used the word \”play\” instead of \”games\”.

    As an analogy, it\’s as if he\’s been talking about motorbike and then told us to look at cars and buses and ships and planes, to reveal that they\’re all motorbikes in some sense. They\’re not motorbikes, though, they\’re vehicles. A motorbike is a kind of vehicle, but that doesn\’t mean vehicles are all motorbikes.

    Games are a kind of play, but not all play involves games. Ring-a-ring-a-roses is is play, but whether it\’s a game or not depends on whether you think you can lose at it. I guess 3-year-olds could, but even so I don\’t think they would routinely ask \”can we play a game of ring-a-ring-a-roses?\” instead of \”can we play ring-a-ring-a-roses?\”.

    Richard

  3. I love Wittgenstein :)

    But as Jesper said, I think he has more to say about language than about games, although it can enlight our thoughts about them. I don’t think he argued that games were indefinable, I think he basically argued that most of the concepts we use in everyday life are not defined when we use them. When we read a (non-academic) text where the word “game” (or “play” or “videogame”, etc.) is used and not (implicitly or explicitly) defined, it can mean different things which do not necessarily have something in common, because that’s how language works. For a lot of concepts, there will always be borderline cases, but the concept is still mostly effective in common usage.

    That said, it’s worth to define even broadly our concept of games when we ought to study them. I’m pretty sure we could fine a definition of language somewhere in Wittgenstein’s works!

  4. Hi Jesper!

    I’m incorporating both your view and Richard’s (Hi Richard – it’s been a while since Magdeburg!) and liking Lee’s comment.

    Follow the white rabbit and answer my question =)

    From this point I see the use of the tool i.e. “game” (very broad approach to tool -> artefact, service and process model) for play which gives (in multi-player games) some kind of social ritual and interpretations of the tool (rules of the ritual).

    If we add a formal evaluation of the execution of Ring-a-ring-a-roses (like Lee did – but I feel it’s more like a gamble then) the outcome is quantifiable one (perhaps from qualitative aspects on a non discrete scale). But is it a game then? There is nothing stopping you from compare ring-a-ring-a-roses to competition dancing (or what it is called in English?), playing, rituals (change of the guards at the Tower/Buckingham Palace, formal dinners, any University ceremony, etc), public performances…

    Game (and play) is equally troubled as the word animal is. It is not easy to come to the (wanted/valued as an academic) generalised definition when removing the context where the word is used. If you describe ring-a-ring-a-roses in a fixed form with evaluation criteria – we can interpretate it as game.

    Implement a simulator (or why not “4:32”) and add a score counter and you have a game?
    [“I was thinking about adding a high score table. Would that be an added incentive?”, http://www.jesperjuul.net/ludologist/432-my-conceptual-game-from-the-global-game-jam ]

    Best to All in the New Year! I hope to see you soon!

  5. @Richard We don’t disagree – I was just pointing out that Ring a Ring *can* be used as a game depending on the players. If you are sufficiently skilled at coordination, the emphasis has to shift to the activity as pure play (the enjoyment of falling down, for example).

    @Simon Interesting – I think the common interpretation of Wittgenstein is that we should never try to define anything, but perhaps that is a misinterpretation.

    @Steve Informally, I think that rituals are meant to have non-variable outcome. So if the users are sufficiently skilled, the certainty and repeatability of a ritual are demonstrations that our beliefs and social structure remain standing. I do think that adding a score counter can make something into a game.

  6. I’ve written about this in a few place — To my mind ring-a-round-a-rosy (as we called it in the Bronx) is a good example of what the essence of game pleasure is — synchronization of behavior: watching someone doing something like what you are doing, and being aware that you are doing it in sync.

  7. @Janet Yes, I was also thinking about your DiGRA 2005 keynote – you were talking about joint attentional scenes, right? That would certainly be one thing that all of Wittgenstein’s examples have in common. (Apart from kicking the ball around on your own.)

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