A good way to see the difference between art and entertainment is to consider sports. Yes, there is the ballet of basketball, and a batter’s swing can be said to be beautiful. But these are stretches, metaphors parading as accurate descriptions, as when baseball is described as an American religion when it is just something that excites a feeling of loyalty about something not to be taken all that seriously. Bostonians and New Yorkers make believe they hate one another’s baseball teams, but in a crunch, as after the Patriot’s Day bombing, the police and fire departments work closely together. The conflict between Red Sox Nation and the Yankee Empire is an affectation. The same is the case with sports and art. Sports are not taken seriously as art. They do not make the same claim at the transcendental, or at originality. A batter is not rewarded for the creativity of his swing, just how dependable is his production of hits or home runs. Even very well paid players know their place. They say, at least, that what is important is providing for the economic security of their families; sports, after all, is just a game.
What allows sports so clearly to be taken as entertainment, in the sense of being non-serious, rather than art, whose perpetrators take themselves very seriously even if they live in a garret and starve? It is because sports are entertainment in the formal sense: the focus is on the performance rather than on what the performance represents. Sports are largely for entertainment because they tell very simple stories which stress attention to the facts of the story rather than their meaning, and so prompt a savoring of events as a retelling of the events rather than of their meaning. The story of a game is the story of the events in the game that made the team win, not the background story that shows the motivation that went into the winning. Basketball is not “Hoosiers”; it is about the pick and roll.
Some sports are competitions. Runners race against a common metric, distance or time, and the one who wins is the one who does best on that metric. Tactics are employed in such competitions. Some runners may set the pace for others, or shield them from the wind, and some runners may decide to run to the front while others hang back and depend on their finishing kicks. Tactics, however, are no substitute for stamina, or being able to race “within yourself”, except in such competitions as bicycle speed races, where when to make a breakaway turns competition into a zero-sum game. One biker outsmarts the other.
Team sports are usually not just competitive but zero-sum games, or what Georg Simmel called conflict. One side wins when it outscores the other side, whatever the other side may score. So a baseball team can win by a narrow margin, 7-6, or by a large margin, 5-0. The difference in the score doesn’t count and there is no score that has to be achieved to win, nor any ideal score that opponents can measure themselves against, as is the case with bowling.
What is interesting about sports, whether competitive or antagonistic, is that all that counts is the winning or the losing. Everything else is a means to the end of keeping the score of your own team ahead of the score of the other team or your own time better than the time of other competitors. Athletes may be complimented for their ballet-like grace, but this is done condescendingly, to explain athletic competition as a kind of art to those who have little appreciation of athletics. The point of an athlete’s exertion is to score the basket or the run, not to look good doing it. Moreover, this central part of the experience of sports, the score, is visible. The ball goes into the stands; the runner gets into the end zone; the basketball goes into the hoop; the puck gets into the net. There is none of the contemplativeness that goes into the creation of art that people trying to portray the creative process find so hard to visualize except as a set of clichés: Rodin’s thinker, Chopin flushed with inspiration. There is also none of the ambiguity that surrounds other kinds of success: whether a Presidential candidate has been lucky in his advisors, whether a general has guessed right in positioning his troops. In short, in sports, scoring is both visible and definitive.
Participants score or do not score; teams win or lose. That is all you need to know about a past performance or need to contemplate about a present performance to find sports engaging, and that is why it is so easy and satisfying to become a sports spectator or even a sports fan, and why sports are so popular. There is suspense over whether a team will score or not; the suspense is resolved when that happens or fails to happen. That does not mean that there cannot be a great many different stories in a sport, every game a little different from another one; it means only that the story does not provide an explanation for the scoring, only a description of the sequence of the scoring. One team goes ahead of the other; the other team catches up and goes ahead or does not quite make it. There are many other tones and flavors that go into making one game different from another, just as there are a number of other factors that can make a sequence of notes in music or a sequence of scenes in a dramatic play different from one another. One of the two teams or both or neither of them may make significant errors. The pitching on one team or another or both may be good enough so that one team is far ahead or the game is close at a low score or a high score. One player may make a pivotal error or a pivotal run. But it is all about the score.
The spectator knows that a pitcher is getting roughed up because he gives up so many home runs, or has a win stolen from him because he gave up a single home run after having held the opposing team to very few hits during most of the game. The spectator is also informed by the broadcaster of things he does not or cannot himself observe: whether the pitcher is having mechanical problems with his delivery, or if his past performance against a particular hitter was not very good, or if the outfielder who might have caught a ball to the outfield was playing too far in, or whether that was because the outfielder was not properly directed where to place himself by a dugout coach or because he had a mental lapse or because he did not familiarize himself with the spots to which a particular hitter hits. All these are technical matters rather than matters of meaning in that they refer to how to go about accomplishing or preventing scoring rather than because there are any points awarded for style (which makes it questionable whether figure skating is a sport at all rather than a theatrical performance for which medals are awarded, as was the case in the competitions at which Sophocles and Euripides trotted out their wares.
The game communicates with its spectators precisely because the spectators do not have to know the technicalities of the game to get pleasure from the suspense and release of suspense that makes up a game composed of scoring. That is the entertainment: technique in the sense of what happened rather than technique in the sense of how it happened. Sport, for its part, is a unique entertainment in that it can compromise the complex and the simple, the esoteric and the evident, the technique and the outcome, because of the visibility and decisiveness of scoring. That is different from literature or drama or even religion, where knowing something about the art not only enhances appreciation but may make appreciation possible. You don’t get much out of “King Lear” if you cannot follow the language or figure out the meaning of the words much less if you have never considered why relatives can be so balky or asked yourself any existential questions. Baseball, to its credit, does not require that.
Games of cards are also simple stories of winning and losing, even if participants in card games do not do much huffing and puffing. “War”, the children’s card game, is as primitive a card game as there is. It is an antagonistic game which is completely dependent on the way the cards were stacked before the game began, and its satisfactions come from the events in the game rather than what the game means as, let us say, a representation of warfare. Each card in “War” is simply higher or lower than the card chosen next by the opponent, and the winner of the pair of cards is the player with the highest card, the winner of the game the player with the highest number of cards after all the cards have been played. There is some suspense when each card is turned up, a greater suspense when the next card is turned, and there is a sense of release when the player who has the higher of the two cards collects the pair for his own pile. This trio of suspense, suspense and release is repeated until the ultimate tally is arrived at when the piles are counted up at the end to see which player has the most cards. That single event creates the greatest suspense, and brings the game to a close. The game is over when the count is in, when the scores of the two players have been tallied and compared.
Solitaire games are slightly more complicated but do not even appear to be antagonistic. The players are matched, as in “War”, against the unknown ordering of the cards, and so the winner of the game is, as in “War”, the person the cards “choose”. Cards are turned over and laid off against the columns of cards on which they can be legally placed until no more cards can be placed or until all the cards are placed in (according to one game) alternate color columns that can then be laid off onto the four aces that make up the foundations and so establish all four suits from ace to king. Players can make mistakes only by forgetting to place cards where they can go, although there are more complicated games of solitaire which actually involve strategy in that a decision to lay off too many cards on the foundation cards can reduce the chances of lying off the lower cards still remaining in the hand.
Solitaire is interesting and engaging because it is possible to get involved in how the particular cards turn up in the pack-- whether, for example, one needs a red ten to allow moving a train of cards and so uncover a new tableau card. Each game has a drama of its own because of the unknown arrangement of the cards hidden in the tableau or in the hand. Sometimes the hand will be gone through over and over in the hope of revealing the card needed to allow a suit to be transported from one tableau to another. Sometimes the key to a game of solitaire may be an absence of black or red cards. In another game of solitaire, one can go through a bad patch in which the deck can be repeatedly turned over and only one card can be placed each time, and then a number of cards are placed, while in still other games that one “performs”, luck seems to run out when there are fewer and fewer cards to be placed through another round of the play of the deck until there is no play left in the deck. So there are different stories that are told in different instances of solitaire, if we understand “story” to be the minimal tale of the sequence of the particular suspensions and releases offered in one game or another. There is nothing more to the game than that: what actually happened in the game, what the play of the game revealed about how the original ordering of the cards in the hand and hidden in the tableaus allowed the game to be won or lost, completed or incomplete.
This experience of multiple possible unfoldings, only very few of which can be accomplished in any given sitting, can be considered a profound experience, a reverie on the idea of chance: how unknown information becomes important or dramatic information when its consequences for a particular procedure are known. It is possible to go farther than that. Card games reveal the complexity of chance, how difficult it is to hold the possibilities of the game in the mind. A player can only watch as the impact of the original arrangement of the cards unfolds, while some keener mind would be able to know the outcome of these games without strategy if the original order of the cards was known. In that sense, solitaire provides the kind of awesome experience that intrigued Pascal in his own considerations of chance, which is a more complicated concept than that of simply not knowing the order of cards that has already been established by the deal. But, nonetheless, there is something even in solitaire of the sense that the nature of the universe has to do with numbers, and that numbers are awe-inspiring, because they are so difficult to master even if the principle of what is happening has been mastered.
That, however, is to treat card games as well as other games of chance (which can be distinguished as those games where the story line comes from what might be in the cards or the probabilities of success that result from what might be done with the cards rather than from what is already in the cards) as a form of art. The emotions and the reasoning drawn from cards are applied to how the universe is organized (or not organized) and how people organize their lives or are overwhelmed by their inability to organize their lives very well at all even though they have, as it were, enough information to plan better strategies and so outcomes for living their lives. You should have known what that girl or potential boss was like; you should have seen what was coming in the stock market or in a friendship. There are very few new stories under the sun; why didn’t you predict your own?
For the most part, however, card games and games of chance are forms of entertainment rather than forms of art. Like sports, they depend on scoring to tell what has happened. And, also, like sports, they depend on the conflict between issues of chance conflated with issues of skill. The pitcher may be on or off a given day, but the winning home run just made it inside the foul pole. It is possible to pull an inside straight, but the smart poker player weighs the odds of each hand and makes his money by knowing when to fold, and so not lose another round of bets, and when to stay, because his chances of winning the pot are not too bad. It is not necessary to get inside another poker player’s head to figure out whether he is going to bluff or not to enjoy the game. Risk of loss of money heightens the suspense that will be released when the cards are revealed. Professional card sharks can read the psyches of their opponents, but that is the equivalent of inside baseball.
Card games and other games of chance remain largely entertainments even if they depend more heavily on strategy than they do on the simple playing out of the original arrangement of the cards, and even if they are, for those who care to notice them as such, a reverie on number and chance. (People who only notice that “Hamlet” is a depiction of how to go about taking revenge are experiencing an entertainment.) Commentaries on card games are therefore simply recitations of what did happen and what might have happened in the play of the cards (or the chessmen). A columnist on contract bridge will not enunciate principals or carry on about the significance of one deal rather than another so much as discourse on techniques of the game: the finesse, the squeeze, counting cards, clues from the bidding, and so on, which are names for procedures that can be followed to get the most possible tricks from the cards that were dealt. The columnist will construct his own narrative by telling what would have happened if the cards were played one way rather than another way. The fun of playing game after game of contract bridge is that only slight shifts in the initial dealings of the cards can create very different problems for maximizing tricks and lead toery different solutions as well as from the fact that very different dealings—ones where a player has a great many points, or an unbalanced hand—create very different experiences because the game is to be played so differently. The very large number of possible ways a deck of fifty-two cards can be dealt provides the enduring interest for the game, rather than any “theoretical” advances in how cards are to be bid or played. So whatever art we make out of entertainments, our experience of them remains as entertainments, meanings forced out of them in the sense that the meanings are not our first or our most lasting presentiment of the phenomenon.