Some thoughts on the material rhetoric of basketball

Phill’s chunk of…

Some of the thoughts here might seem a little disconnected; I’m going to try to simulate how an idea comes to me in discussion

I’m also not going to have the space to fully flesh out the ideas here, so it’s sort of a “teaser”

There will be more of at least some of these ideas in my larger project.

It (as a game) originated in the US It’s madly popular in the mid-west (trust

me, I grew up in Indiana) The National Basketball Association (NBA)

has made marked attempts to go global (see Yao Ming/Asian NBA TV distribution, for example)

The NCAA Tournament (AKA March Madness) has become a part of gambling culture(in both the professional and casual sense)

If we define basketball as a thing because it is a practice (or a series of practices) we come up with an interesting way to view things

There’s also the funny “ironic” twist: basketball “practice” is a practice, but it’s a different practice from the game of basketball. We could, however, call the whole thing (practices, playing, travel, etc.) “basketball” as a single dominant practice

But for now, I want to confine my consideration to the actual game of basketball as a “thing.”

In Half Real, Jesper Juul outlines the criteria of something being a game; it’s a little more complex than this, but the essentials are that there are defined rules, a clear staging area (or board) and a clear end goal.

Basketball, then, IS a game by this definition. There are rules, a court, and a goal (score more points than the other team).

Does the game have to happen in a physical space to be the “thing” that it is? If we know that the ball is material and the uniforms and shoes are material, do we need to be able to touch these things for them to be “material?”

Examples coming…

But we aren’t there. It’s someone’s action photograph

(which is material, too)

But it’s not tangible for us It’s on NBA TVActually, it’s from YouTube, but I

wanted the scoreboard on the screen to show off an NBA TV broadcast.

It’s NBA Live 08, for XBOX 360 It allows for the creation of custom

players like this handsome devil here:

This is Live 08 for a mobile phone It looks very “old school video

game”ish

It’s a photo of a pick-up game, and… it’s a cool picture.

Pick-up games happen all the time. In fact on a warm day like this, I bet we could go find one by walking around campus.

One argument is that they aren’t. But if we utilize de Certeau’s idea of

practice, and combine it with Juul’s definition of what a game is, each of these instances is an example of someone PLAYING basketball.

This feeds the argument over authenticity; is virtual Phill playing NBA Live 08 as authentic as less-athletic Phill playing a pick-up game? Is virtual Chauncy Billups (controlled by someone who might or might not be Chauncy Billups) less of a player engaged in less than the real game?

… that these are, in key ways, different, but they are logical uses of technology to translate and expand practices

… is sort of my “simplification” of Baudrillard’s “simulacra” idea.

The painting says, at the bottom, in French, “this is not a pipe.”

It’s not a pipe. It’s a painting of a pipe. None of the images I have shown of

“basketball” are the most essential form of the game, because the game is a practice within a ruleset involving players (users, actors) a ball, and a hoop on a court.

There’s no “action” in this PowerPoint, so these are all representations of times when actions would take place.

It even come with a sport bottle so we know for sure!

Hang it up on the wall and you can play ANYWHERE

Is a “thing” that people make There are rules (established rules) that

people must follow in order to play. The goal is to score more points than

the other team (or player) Most people think of it happening on a

court, five-on-five, but it could happen in any of a number of places

We cannot “see” basketball (the game); we can only see the evidence that people are involved in the practice of playing basketball.