Cheats might break the rules, but spoilsports throw them away completely
In last month’s column we turned to the work of the philosopher Bernard Suits in our discussion of cheating in tabletop gaming. This month we consider another unwelcome guest at the games table – the spoilsport, and once again we begin with Suits. When discussing the different types of gamers with his disciples, the titular Grasshopper of Suits’ book argues that the attachment of a player to the outcome of a game depends on their lusory attitude (from the Latin word ludo, meaning game). There are a number of such attitudes players might take, including unsporting behaviour (breaking a game’s unspoken rules and etiquette), cheating (breaking a game’s constitutive rules for an unfair advantage) and spoilsports (who undermine the rules entirely). As Suits puts it, while a “regular” player recognises both the rules and the goals of the game, cheats recognise goals but not rules, and spoilsports recognise neither. To take Catan as an example, a regular player is someone who aims to get to 10 victory points whilst strictly adhering to the rules, a cheat might lie about the amount of wood they have in order to win, while a spoilsport might take all of the development cards and build a small house with them before declaring themselves Emperor of the Planet Zogg.
In general players are, as Johan Huizinga notes, much more lenient to the cheat than the spoilsport. The reason for this curious distinction lies in the fact that, while cheaters might be considered as being overly zealous in their pursuit of victory (thereby ratifying the importance of the game), spoilsports risk undermining the game entirely. In Huizinga’s words, “the spoil-sport shatters the playworld itself. By withdrawing from the game he reveals the relativity and fragility of the play-world in which he had temporarily shut himself with others.” In other words, by displaying such a distinct lack of zeal, the spoilsport calls into question what video game theorist Jesper Juul calls the “game contract”: an act that forcibly requires the other players to examine not only the game’s validity but also its very nature. In other words, the spoilsport questions the value that the other players place in choosing to play a particular game, and to some extent the value of playing games in general.