Performativities in Play

Is calling someone a ‘good liar’ a compliment or an insult? Or does it depend on the circumstances? Play, for example, complicates simplistic distinctions between real and virtual, tangible and intangible, truth and falsity. As a consequence, play transforms the significance of the language it appropriates. If statements in plays and in play are “lies” in so far as they subvert ordinary notions of truthfulness, then they must be lies of a particularly interesting sort. Statements made on stage and in games are meaningful in ways that play with the so-called “ordinary” uses of such statements. In play, language acts both by performing actions and by enacting a performance itself. This article questions the special meaningfulness of playful forms of deception, asking how language in theater and games can use their fundamental unreality to real effect. Such deceptiveness, I suggest, is no simple untruth, but rather establishes the fictionality of theater and the virtuality of games as ways of playing with and within reality.