Sport as embodied oath: towards a theory of ‘game acts’

This paper builds on R. Scott Kretchmar’s contention that game play – not simply complex language – served as a primary generator of culture over the course of human evolution. Kretchmar’s ‘games-first hypothesis’ challenges the dominant privileging of language as the sole prerequisite for conventions forming our social institutions. On this view, ‘game acts’ – not ‘speech acts’ – stand at the root of what social otologists such as John Searle call ‘social reality’. Oldham makes the case that we hold game acts – more specifically physical game acts (i.e. sport) – as mechanisms par excellence for the development and display of trust and trustworthiness, fundamental elements of social institutions including language. Anchored thus in ontologically objective evolutionary processes, ‘game acts theory’ not only presents a novel solution to social ontology’s persistent problem of irreducibility to brute facts, but opens up a significant new perspective in the debate concerning value and meaning in sport and games. It is here, in fact, with a question about value – Does the Olympic Oath carry a moral obligation? – where the paper begins. The search for an answer launches an exploration of the origins of social conventions on an evolutionary time scale, decentring language and laying the groundwork for a new ontological understanding of sport.