I’m trying to find connections between sports & games to rituals & religion. In doing so, I’ve come across a variety of different things. The latest is a couple articles I found off that newly-launched Google Scholar thing, which is supposed to have “scholarly papers” and pdf’s and shit.

1. Can Sports Exist Without Religion?
2. Gospel on the Mound: Our National Pastime and the Culture of Religion

Neither of these is especially awesome, although there are some okay things in each. Actually, none of the articles I’ve encountered so far through this Google Scholar thing were all that hot. Most of them had the stink of poorly thought out and researched student papers. I mean, some of the ones I saw were using the fucking Encyclopedia Brittanica as one of their main sources. What a crock of shit!

Anyway, I have a couple posts which are loosely based around this topic also, but I want to take these and some other things I’ve read and fuse them into a more coherent whole. I’ll probably get to this after Thanksgiving.

1. Play & Shared Context
2. Developmental Stages of Play
3. Using Games to Understand the Sacred

Just to get the ball rolling, let me try and put together a little summary of what I have so far. One of the most interesting things I’ve read involved developmental psychology and looking at how kids play, and how that changes as they grow up. Younger children will do a lot more “pretend play,” which consists of a lot of social role-playing, and the rules here are usually flexible and tend to change quickly. Actually, a great way of understanding this might be to reference the comic strip Calvin & Hobbes, and how they used to play “Calvinball“. If you don’t remember or you’re some kind of jerk who never read Calvin & Hobbes, Calvinball basically consists of running around and making rules up as you go along while you’re playing the game. And you can never use the same rules twice.

Then, when kids get a little older, their flexible role-playing usually morphs into full-on games with strict rules, and more or less fixed roles within the game. This is more like what we consider to be “sports.” Examples abound: baseball, basketball, football, etc. Everyone has a more or less fixed role to play, and rules are adhered to. Another example of younger children’s games include “tag” and hide & go seek. Both of those games have fixed rules, but they are very simple. And the roles in those games change with great frequency, especially in tag.

So how does this relate to religion? Well, I tend to see a correlation between the two styles of play here and the different types of religion I have delineated elsewhere. While I haven’t worked out the exact relationship, I would say that the sort of play which focuses around “roles” more than rules would be more “mystical” and focused on the individual experience. Whereas, the type of play older kids do with a stronger emphasis on “rules” is more akin to the orthodox religions with their emphasis on shared social experience.

Maybe something happens where kids basically imprint more heavily on one style of play than another. For people like me, I can definitely see this thread going back in my life. Being pretty shy and awkward, I was never real big on excessively social, team-based games with lots of rules and subtleties. I was much more into just freestyle types of playing, where you run around and throw your hands up and act out different types of scenarios. Following that to the present, that’s definitely carried over in my more creative free-form approach to spirituality, with an emphasis on direct and personal mystical experience, over elaborate systems of rules and social institutions. I’d be curious to hear what other people think about this, if they seem similar correlations between the sorts of games they have liked to play, or still do like to play, and the type of religion/spirituality they tend to align themselves with now.

Besides that, I’m also interested in looking at how religions function as a means of giving social cohesion to a group. Since both games and religion are interested in providing people with rules of behavior and goals, I feel like there is an important connection. Like, religion is the game we all play together socially, into which all the other games fit. Something like that. I have more pieces to work out about all this, but that’s the general gist of it.