Risk-as-Pleasure
“Anything becomes a pleasure if you do it too often.”
—Oscar Wilde
Entertain: to provide amusement for (a person or audience), to
show hospitality to (guests), to give pleasure, diversion (C l5:
from Old French entre-tenir: to mutually hold)
—Collins English Dictionary
Let us examine the principle premise on which gaming activities are
based and to tend to the ediical and epistemological principles, at least in
ftmdament. Evidence of the pursuit of risk-taking goes back to the early Lower
Pleistocene man w4io understood that a trap for animals would yield different
outcomes depending on placement. The odds against his getting a meal would
be smaller if he left less to chance.^ Clearly such deliberation on maneuver-overoutcome is a process we almost always assume in even simple decisions. In
gaming, and in play, such deUberation is isolated fi‘om its usual working-world
associations. Risk, play, and leisure are interestingly connected in the game
environment.
Leisure serves as an important component of human productivity. “No
society can exist on production alone. It must devise principles to organize time
and space—it must develop and maintain a healthy environment for its citizens
to continue to foster economic and cultural growth, educate its young, make
provisions for the sick, elderly and the disadvantaged and for the workers to
relax and play. A surplus of energy and resources always remains. The problem
of leisure is how to use this surplus.”^
Rojek [p 1,2] mentions traditional societies such as the Azande, where
the occult and the religious are bound together to coordinate the tribe’s surplus
energy and is dominated by the individual’s observance of witchdoctors and
oracles. The mystical forces at work in the lives of the tribe determine the
individual’s “general life-course—the Azande’s notion of time is that there \ݙ\