When Science is a Game

Abstract: What happens when scientists are, at certain points in a field's development, playing a game? I present a framework for such an analysis that draws on the theory of games provided by the historian Johan Huizinga. Huizinga gives five conditions for a social practice to become a game: free engagement, disconnection, boundedness in time and arena, the order-creation of rules, and the presence of tension. Application of this theory to scientific practice predicts patterns of behavior that can be tested by quantitative analysis: the emergence of hard boundaries between disciplines, the closure of loopholes in theory creation, resistance to certain innovations in journal publication, and the ways in which scientists fail to prosecute colleagues who engage in questionable research practices.