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In game studies, instrumental play (also known as power gaming) is a form of play that seeks to achieve particular goals within the rules of a structured, organized game. The behaviors that compose instrumental play are different from what one would typically consider to be ‘play’ – it is highly focused, goal-oriented, and dedicated.

Power gamers form communities of practice which agree on the ‘correct’ way to play a particular game – both the broad objectives which determine whether a player has achieved success, and the details as to the best way to achieve these objectives. Their strategies are formed through thorough analysis of the game’s mechanics, and refined through collective sharing and criticism of their body of knowledge.

While play is often characterized by a lack of seriousness, it is not defined by it. It is easy to come up with a counterexample to this: a chess player is unambiguously engaging in play, but is completely serious while doing it.^[2]

The act of play creates invisible social boundaries. If the player were to cross these boundaries, failing to acknowledge the validity of the rules, the play loses all meaning.^[3] Doing so is an act distinct from mere cheating; a cheater attempts to subvert the rules, but does so in a way that still acknowledges their existence.^[3][4] In his 1938 book Homo Ludens, cultural historian Johan Huizinga called this boundary the magic circle.^[3]

Players of a game take roles, which define what they must do and how they interact with each other. Each player must be aware of how they expect others to act in their roles, and their own actions are based on those assumptions. It follows that each player’s actions are controlled by what the other players assume their actions will be.^[6]

Instrumental play is dissimilar to the forms of play typically associated with fun or leisure. Its main focus is on efficiency, skill, and understanding the game to find the best way possible of playing it. Power gamers enjoy developing strategies to play the game as ‘correctly’ as possible, both by considering how they could be playing differently, and how they are currently playing incorrectly.^[7] They are willing to put in large amounts of time and effort doing things they may not particularly enjoy in the moment, and break down the game to analyze it and the strategies that can be used to ‘attack’ it,^[8] seeing the game as a problem to be solved.^[9][10]

Games, even ones that originated as “solitary pastimes”, naturally evolve into competition. Any game would eventually lose its appeal if there was no one to compete against and no one to watch, as players have an innate desire to defeat opponents – either directly, or indirectly by setting records or otherwise achieving impressive feats. To facilitate this, they form communities where they can compare their skill, establish rules for organized competition, and create spectacle.^[11]

It is not always clear what exactly it means to be the best at a game. These communities define the goals they want to achieve.^[12][13]

When players develop new strategies for a game, other players adopt them, until the strategy becomes a norm.^[14] Power gamers mathematically and statistically analyze of the mechanics of a game to understand it and develop new strategies for it, an act called theorycraft.^[15] The strategies formed by theorycraft fundamentally change how the game is played,^[16] distilling a large variety of options into the few that are objectively correct. The use of numbers to describe games makes the conclusions feel ‘objectively true’, polarizing the perceived qualities of the strategies the numbers do or do not support into being ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’.^[17]

Players expect these correct strategies of each other^[17] They form communities of practice, which are a group of people that collectively engage in a shared behavior.^[18] In order to achieve success at a game themselves, a new player must adopt the culture of this community, which involves adopting their practices, forming social connections to join the ‘in-group’.^[19] The players that are the best at the game garner respect and reputation from others.^[20]

Instrumental play can be characterized as a form of instrumental rationality, which is in turn a form of social action that exclusively aims to achieve a goal through any means.^[21] Sociologist Max Weber, the creator of these concepts, also wrote extensively about the rationalization – the “increasing importance of a style of reasoning” – of society.^[22] This movement can cause the original purpose of societal structures to become distorted, as “meaningfulness devolves into practical advance”.^[23]

When players engage in instrumental play within the view of others, it legitimizes it as the correct way to play a game,^[24] which spreads the use of instrumental play across games within society.^[25]

• Folding Ideas (November 25, 2022). Why It’s Rude to Suck at Warcraft (video).