Transgressive Play: When Murder is Playful
Leland Masek stresses the importance of understanding an abhorrent side of play
What if someone’s desire to play matters more to them than your safety? This question will make some readers uncomfortable, and may make some reject the idea that this situation can be called play at all. For many theorists and optimists, play is something that must be mutual, shared, empathic, voluntary. Play is often all of these things. However, sometimes play is none of them.
Play has the capacity to dominate the mind of a player. Customary priorities, rationality and codes of conduct can be swept away because of the intense focus during play. Think about how a favourite film can transport you to another world, a bewitching engrossing experience where you forget the here and now. You know that you’re in your sitting room; you know it’s a film, that you’re watching actors playing characters; you know it’s make-believe, not real life. Yet none of that matters. If the story is engaging and the actors’ performances are compelling, the emotions you can feel are all too real. The intense pleasure of experiencing feelings of desire, loss, love, sorrow and joy matter to the degree that − for the duration of the film – you’re willing to ‘suspend disbelief’ and truth and integrity become irrelevant. You can lose your sense of self and reality. Such is the power of play.
In games, we experience the same phenomena. For example, I have watched people playing Half-life Alyx, a game in which players, wearing virtual reality goggles, navigate a computer-simulated 3D world populated by ferocious zombie-like creatures. I have seen players so immersed in this wholly artificial world that they twitch, flinch and react physically, even, in one case, going as far as dodging a ‘fake’ attack by diving headlong into a very real wall. The urge to survive in this virtual reality game can be so powerful that it elicits strong emotional and physical reactions that can bear little relation to how a player might think or behave in the real world. In play studies, this is often called the ‘protective frame’ psychologically or the ‘magic circle’. Taking part in any highly engaging activity can cause a disconnection − albeit only temporarily − between how we act within this self-contained world and our understanding of who we are, what is safe, rational and acceptable outside the confines of this ‘magic circle’. It is a fact that this is how some people can and do play.
All of the above is meant to contextualize a certain form of play that I call ‘transgressive play’. In this form of play, the mere act of taking part, of ‘joining in the fun’, appears to be so intensely rewarding in and of itself that players, seemingly indifferent to the real life and death consequences of their actions, can lose all sense of perspective and can violate moral and social boundaries.
This is the moral equivalent of jumping into the wall with a VR headset on.
Play is not necessarily limited to actions that are morally acceptable. Playfulness is not always virtuous, as Aristotle suggested.
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, thousands of photographs and postcards of Black Americans killed by white mobs in racist terror lynchings were collected and traded. These ‘lynching photographs’ often captured the bodies of Black Americans and the hundreds of white people − including children − who gathered to witness the public spectacle of a lynching. According to historians, in more than half of these photos and postcards, the perpetrators and spectators to these hideous crimes were shown smiling. Exuding pride and joy at their own success, they point at the dead and mutilated body of a victim as though it were a trophy, posing for the camera as if for a winning team’s photo.
If this was not disturbing enough, these lynch photographs became popular to collect, store in albums and trade within a like-minded community.
In other words, large groups of violent, smiling white supremacists documented their violence and then proceeded to collect and trade these documentations as philatelists collect and trade postage stamps as a hobby. Their smiles and their subsequent actions show clearly that they were enjoying themselves and revelling in the sense of power and triumph that comes from defeating an opponent. However abhorrent the idea, these people were playing.
Far from a singular historical event, similar phenomena have occurred more recently. For example, in 2003, American soldiers in Abu Ghraib tortured Iraqi prisoners and began to photograph their torture victims as an act of humiliation. In these photographs, much like the lynch photographs, the soldiers are, according to Dora Apel, ‘proud perpetrators whose smug gloating we do not expect to see and who flaunt an appalling shamelessness’. Indeed, rather than appear even vaguely guilty or ashamed of their behaviour, the soldiers seem to be enjoying themselves. Clearly perfectly happy to be photographed, they display a strong sense of preening and self-satisfaction that we commonly associate with game players holding up their trophies from sports competitions. It is as though these soldiers were playing.
There is a grisly tendency for serial killers to collect and preserve key pieces of evidence from their own crimes. Why would they do this, given the clear risks to themselves that are involved? Perhaps, like the lynch mobs’ photographs, these souvenirs enable killers to relive their crimes and reinvoke the elation and pleasure of winning. Calling a serial killer’s collection a ‘trophy’, as is common, already speaks to a gamified language. A trophy is usually awarded for an achievement, for a contest, for playing and winning a game. It is as though these serial killers are playing.
While the mob, the soldiers, the serial killer, may be playing − pursuing acts which bring them joy, and inviting their friends to participate – it must be made clear that their victims are emphatically not.
This kind of one-sided play is in no way morally justified by its playfulness. Playfulness is not inherently moral. Smiling and enjoyment does not justify violence. Ethically, the victim’s pain and humiliation are of significantly more importance than that of the perpetrator’s pleasure: which is probably why we balk at calling killers and torturers playful. This is a mistake though, for if we as a society are to understand why these violent acts occur, and more importantly how to stop them, we must try to understand what motivates the perpetrators. If it is indeed play, then we need to understand play.
It is important to stress that not all forms of murder or torture are play. These phenomena are far too diverse to paint with such a broad brush. But, ghastly as this may be, the truth is that throughout human history, to maim, torture and kill as an act of dominance can – sometimes − be considered a form of play, however deeply immoral, offensive and transgressive. What is absolutely critical to acknowledge, though, is that when perpetrators are being playful, they will exhibit many totally normal play symptoms. In other words, they, like players immersed in innocent but compelling games, can often be internally-driven and insensitive to external rational arguments to stop.
Perhaps we should consider play from another angle. Serial killers have often lost their freedom and their own lives as punishment for their murderous ways. Their overwhelming desire to kill others is extremely dangerous to themselves. Yet, when committing violence is akin to playing, even the threat of severe punishment is highly unlikely to dissuade assaulters from pursuing their play act further.
It is generally accepted by play scholars that rational arguments or explanations are a very weak counter to any type of play that is exciting and deeply engaging. Much like the suspension of disbelief in cinema, the suspension of rationality in many forms of play enables such self-harming behaviours to persist. We see this kind of persistent irrationality in many games; if you were to proffer ‘a safer way to gain exercise with less chance of injury’ to a team of football players, they would ignore you. In fact, fans of American football would hurry you off the pitch. Research has shown that supporters find the dangerous moments of the game more exciting,, because they are fully aware that players could be severely injured. In fact, the more dangerous it becomes for the players, the more thrilling it becomes for the spectators.
We often make the assumption that the law, or the threat of severe punishment, or a rational explanation can be effective counters to dangerous actions − murder, mob violence, serial killings. Yet, if these actions are a form of transgressive play as I suggest, then our assumptions are not just wrong but dangerously wrong, too. We as a society need to start taking play very seriously if we are to identify when it becomes murderous, and how we should stop it when it transgresses too far. However, offering an informed opinion and taking a particular stance on what approaches we should take will require considerably more research and time and attention. I can only hope that my work will open a door in a way that inspires others to begin the work to close it.
