And if we want to even pretend we are in control, it’s not to be found individually but through vulnerable cooperation. These other sports give you pretty reliable ways to control the ball (normally your hands - catching and throwing), but soccer by forcing you to use the same weirdly shaped body part that you must use to run and to stand(!), seems to accept or even embrace that we simply are not in control of everything. And while I’d admit soccer doesn’t have the bounciest ball of all the ball sports - it’s not covered with some sublime rubber surface nor does its ball bounce the most erratically because of some irregular shape- the fact that you have to manipulate the ball using your foot makes it super chancy. In her essay, Wing lays out this argument that a defining layer of uncertainty in a game comes from the bounce of the ball. It’s one of the things that makes it the best. They are played because they’re fun.įurther, the degree to which chance is acceptable in soccer is one of the things that makes it soccer and not some other ball game. In a way, games are not played because people want to know who is best.
When you’re playing any game, the less predictable the outcome, the more enjoyable it is to undertake with others, and the more enjoyable it is to watch and engage with. On the whole, sports are fun and playful instead of violent and fascist, and I find it persuasive that ultimately one reason for this is simply that balls do funny things and this brings joy where fully deterministic competition otherwise might bring pain. And first, I just want to affirm that as being really good. I’m going to take a small piece and run up this opening segment by starting with this idea that the fundamental element that separates “ball games” from “serious sport” is the consensus acceptance of chance that is built into them by design. In her piece, Wing reflects on and explores sport and play, what is “fair play” and who gets to decide it and more, and in this way it is grander and beyond the scope of this post. You should read the whole thing - there is SO much there. It is a property distributed among these things: a name for those kinds of collisions from which all of the entities involved emerge with their respective shapes and speeds relatively intact. And only an athlete who contends with balls (or pucks, or shuttlecocks, or other third objects) earns the title “player.” We become players in and through bounce.īounce does not belong to any one object, surface, or body. While other kinds of contests are raced, run, rowed, and swum wrestled, fenced, fought, and boxed timed, weighed, measured, and judged ball games are played. At least in the Anglophone world, this second kind of chance-the chance of the ball-seems to be especially important to our contemporary understanding of play. Its bounce dances along the edge of our predictive capacity, always almost but never fully under control. A ball introduces a second, more uncertain, kind of uncertainty into the fray. We don’t know who will win and who will lose, but we know that at the end of the day, there will be a winner and a loser. Aleatoric structures-structures of planned chance-produce a reliable kind of uncertainty. All ball sports are aleatoric structures organized, to greater or lesser degrees, around bounce. Ball games are a basic way for us to hone what computational neuroscientist Beau Cronin calls “the quotidian spatiotemporal genius of the human brain,” and over the past two hundred years, they have come to dominate the popular imagination…. In 2014, Carlin Wing an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Scripps College, wrote one of my favorite paragraphs about sports:Īll cultures engage in some form of ball play.