Are Sports Games?

In studying the relationship between playing and modern sports, one can not avoid discussing Johan Huzinga’s famous work, Homo ludens.  According to his often quoted statement, modern sports are not games, since they lack the main characteristics of playful activity.  Approaching the problem from a historical-sociological perspective, Norbert Elias argues that modern sports have emerged as a the result of the civilizing process.  Their characteristics are historically shaped by the state monopolization of violence, and the individual’s internalization of the accepted norms of behavior.     
Allen Guttmann locates sports activities in the context of the different concepts of play, game, contest, and sport.  He criticizes Huizinga for overemphasizing the notion of contest in his analysis.  Frank C. Kew distinguishes the formal elements of sports activities from the informal ones, and claims that an activity formally considered as sport may be viewed differently from an informal point of view.  Tibor Tamás, the editor of this thematic section also cites Eldon Snyder, who shows that sports do not always lack playfulness, because elements of it always crop up in the pauses of “serious” sports activities.