Appendix A
Risk as Pleasure Corrected Text
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.
I feel I should examine the principle premise on which gaming
activities are based and to tend to the ethical and epistemological, at least in
fundament. Evidence of the pursuit of risk-taking goes back to the early Lower
Pleistocene man who understood that a trap for animals would yield a different
outcome depending on placement. The odds of against his getting a meal would
be smaller if he left less to chance1. Clearly such deliberation on maneuver-overoutcome is a process we almost always assume in even simple decisions. In
gaming and as play such deliberation is isolated from 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 the traditional societies such as the Azande, where the
occult and the religious are bound to coordinate the tribe’s surplus energy
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 is overlap
between the present and the future. Unlike the characteristic Western concept,
time is not linear—space is not defined according to a rational-legal criteria.
Shamanism seeks to reconnect the powers of the medicine man to reconnect
earth with the highest heavens. The ‘epic journey’ away from the mundane
world, allows the shaman to bring back knowledge of the future after travel to
the superhuman world of the gods.