This weekend’s Wall Street Journal featured an article entitled, “America’s Most Profound Comic Strip,” referring to the loveable eighties cartoon Calvin and Hobbes. The article made brief mention of Calvin’s pseudo-sport, “Calvinball.”
For those not familiar, a primary facet of Calvinball allows players to change the rules as the game progresses. Even the system of scoring—i.e. scores of Q to 12, or, Oogy to Boogy—and the criterion for winning changes and differ each time the game is played. Calvin decries, “No sport is less organized than Calvinball!” Though I question whether we can even call such an activity a sport. A diversion, yes, and a great catalyst for instigating creativity, but not a sport.
A 1965 MAD Magazine article featured a game similar to Calvinball called 43-Man Squamish. A description of the game can be read HERE and it’s worth a visit, if for no other reason than to get a taste of comics in the mid-sixties. The fictional game is intended as a parody, with truly impossible-to-follow rules and no one to really enforce them. While the rules mandate four officials, “None has any authority after play has begun. In the event of a disagreement between officials, a final decision is left up to the spectator who left his car in the parking lot with the lights on and the motor running.”
And in the background while I’m reading and writing, my young sons watch the animated movie Free Birds. I overhear Owen Wilson’s character comment, “I love rules. I actually have a rule about following rules.” The juxtaposition amazes me as I’m simultaneously experiencing the cartoons—enough to drive one batty—each with antithetical approaches to rule following.
Philosophers have had quite a bit to say about the practice of rule following. One of the philosophical issues with following a particular rule is that the practice itself requires the ability to follow a rule. A rule about rule following. As Austria’s renown philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, once wrote, “If you want to understand what it means ‘to follow a rule,’ you have already to be able to follow a rule.” And so on, ad infinitum. This theoretical problem may highlight, in part, what’s so difficult about both establishing and then following rules in all facets of life, sport included.
This all got me to thinking about a game I invented in graduate school when our philosophy department embarked on a department-wide beach party one afternoon. (I’ll allow a moment to entertain any philosophers-at-beach-party jokes bubbling to the surface.) The popular beach “game” of Smash Ball, in which two people hit a ball back and forth with paddles, never seemed very game-like to me. It’s two people giving a ball back and forth to each other: truly enjoyable for what it’s worth, but not a game, per se. Being somewhat competitive, the whole “competing against ourselves” didn’t satisfy me, and also isn’t really competition. So I built a nuance—a new rule—into the activity, thus making it a game, and a competition, and adding quite a bit of philosophical speculation all the while.
Players play the usual Smash Ball but with one caveat: a third-party judge determines which player is at fault once the ball goes out of play. And so, built into the game, is the deception of the referee—a literal skill being tested. This, in part, was a revolt against the rampant referee deception and flopping-culture which had become so commonplace.
The aim, then, is to hit the ball to your competitor such that it appears as a good shot, yet is slightly challenging to return. Maybe your initial shot is deceptively hard-hit, or only slightly out of reach to the player’s weaker backhand side. Thus, the return would more likely be a poor one. This would lead to your making somewhat of an effort to get to this poorly returned shot so as to not quite get to it, demonstrating to the referee the poor quality of the shot and, thus, a point against your competitor. At times, a player will make a miraculous dive into the sand to retrieve a seemingly out-of-reach ball, hitting it directly back to his competitor, letting him off the hook for his poor shot. Going 100 percent, in this particular sport, seems to be a poor strategy. Though we soon realized the referees began to appreciate the honesty of such earnest players, awarding them points they might not otherwise have awarded to players they believed were hoodwinking.
Calvinball, 43-Man Squamish, and Hoodwinking Smash Ball all highlight the mayhem that ensues when rules become so fluid they turn to mush, or referees become adjudicators of acting versus authentic play. As sport philosophy pioneer Warren Fraleigh once commented, “In agreeing to play badminton, the players don’t ask, ‘Should we follow the rules?” Of course you should. The rules define the game. If the rules change mid-game then so does the game—and you can’t win a game if it’s not the same game by the end of the particular activity.
