GAMES are analytically distinguished from other forms of contest by being framed as "play" and from other forms of play by their competitive format and the institutional—public, systematic, and jural—character of their rules. The American anthropologist Gregory Bateson (1972, pp. 177–193) has described the universal semantic process by which behaviors are framed as play. Conventionalized signals create a "metamessage" that instructs players not to take the behaviors they engage in as denoting what those behaviors would denote in other, nonplay, contexts. In this sense, game actions are "untrue." A nip is not a bite, a bullfight is not a hunt, a checkmate is not a regicide, a soccer match is not a war, a wrestling bout or footrace is not a cosmogony or theogony, regardless of overt similarities in the words, objects, gestures, emotional states, or social categories of persons involved. The framing of contests as play makes...