#but I spent a lot of time trying to infer the status of the rest of Antiva from scattered comments and data

[thesummerstorms]

Antaam Invasion of Antiva:

Almost all of this is repurposed from something else I was trying to work out for myself, before finding one single line of a codex entry that answered my question but I had somehow skipped every time prior to now. I figured it might still be a useful reference post for someone, so I reformatted, cut some stuff, and added some stuff.

Blue text is proven fact, red text is inference/supposition by me.

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As of the quest, Coffee with the Crows, Antiva as a whole is still occupied by the Antaam.

Evidence: Codex: A Letter from House de Riva

"Now we have Qunari in control of all Antiva. Treviso is like their favorite toy. They flaunt the occupation here, showing off how they took charge of our poor, lawless people for their own good. I know you [Lucanis] just got out and too much has happened already, but we still have work to do."

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2. The King of Antiva is still free, not under house arrest or a hostage, etc. However, he is not currently assisting with the resistance towards Qunari occupation.

Evidence: Multiple pieces of in game dialogue (sourced from the script file, but I have heard most in game) + Codex: King's Draft: Action on the Behalf of Antiva

Teia (Codex): We aren't required to give His Majesty a point-by-point, but he's your blood, Viago. It is a courtesy to let him know we are going to war."

Rook de Riva: "We Crows are all the army Antiva has, but it's not like we can field a garrison. Outside support?" Teia: "The king would say to call on us. The price for being patriots."

Ivenci: "Without you, the king would be forced to deal with this mess. To give proper power to real officials."

Teia: People are desperate. We need to arrange shipments of water from further inland. Viago : (snorts) Maybe the king can be convinced to build an aqueduct—if we involve his favorite sculptors. Teia : It is not a bad time to ask him for aid. Viago : (sighs) I'll go.

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3. The Antaam started by invading Antiva and northern Rivain, then used that as a launch point to conquer half of the rest of northern Thedas.

Evidence: Codex Entry: The Antaam Invasion

When the Antaam invaded the South, the people there were completely unprepared. Antiva and northern Rivain were overrun quickly, with the invaders pushing down through the Green Dales to the Minanter River, leaving only the southernmost of the Free Marches spared. From there, the Antaam pushed west, overpowering Tevinter magic with gaatlok cannons and brute strength until the defenders finally held at Vyrantium. Nevarra was spared, likely due to the Antaam fears of necromancy and unwillingness to attack until Tevinter was conquered, but almost half of northern Thedas fell to Antaam rule in just a few years...

My messy PowerPoint annotated/color coded map:

(I had to guess where exactly counted as "southern Free Marches", but I feel like the Minanter River makes the most likely boundary given its explicit mention in the codex.)

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4. Initial occupation of some parts of Antiva was implied to be particularly brutal, though no specifics are given.

Evidence: In game dialogue, confirmed by the script file.

Ivenci: "You know what the Antaam did elsewhere in Antiva. And in every other city they occupied."

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4. Although the Antaam still hold all of Antiva, they have struggled with supply chains as none of their support teams defected with them. They have been reliant on seizing the resources of occupied territories, presenting a possible weakness.

Evidence: Codex Entry: The Antaam Invasion; in game dialogue

It is also important to note that the Antaam fought alone. With little in the way of supply lines or experts in food production—the craftspeople and strategic experts who would normally support them had not broken from the Qun when the Antaam did—the invaders needed to attack to keep eating. When they encountered resistance that would have forced a siege, the Antaam invasion stalled. The kithshoks who wished only to conquer now had to learn to rule the lands they would claim.

Lucanis: The Crows may have something. The Antaam are moving large quantities of supplies out of the city. Weapons, armor, gaatlok…And food. About half our remaining provisions. Enough to feed the Antaam navy.

Civilian 1: You went to the physician? Civilian 2 : She stitched it well enough. Gave me what she could to ward infection. Civilian 2 : What she could? Civilian 1 : The Antaam confiscated half her supplies. Said they need it for their army.

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5. Josephine Montilyet's family and their estate in Antiva City appear to be safe, and potentially operating somewhat normally . Antiva City is also the capital where the King reigns.

Source: Codex: Notes from the Inquisition (if Josephine was romanced); DA:I dialogue placing the family home in Antivan City, Eight Little Talons

"The family writes the weather back home is beautiful. I do miss our quiet times together." "When we return to Antiva, I will ask you, on the steps of the estate, if you will do me a great honor. And I dream you will say yes." "Yvette and Lord Otranto send their best wishes, and hope to see us back home in time to welcome their third child."

Josephine: Well. My parents are alive, and in good health. They live in our estate in Antiva City.

Teia snatched his walking stick and twirled it in the air. “Are you going straight home to Salle?” [Viago] sighed and shook his head. “Antiva City.” “To brief His Royal Fatherliness?” She balanced the stick on the tip of her boot.

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6. Teia and Viago have left behind their home territories of Rialto and Salle to join with Caterina in Treviso.

It's unknown if the presence of the Cantori Diamond predates the occupation, but this might mean they are choosing to show a united front in the city most threatened or most symbolic and move outward from there to then retake their own territories.

Possibly this is a deliberate alliance due to Teia, Viago, and Caterina being three of the four Talons to survive the initial attempt to sell Antiva out to the Antaam by a rival House.

Evidence: Eight Little Talons, Codex: A Letter from House de Riva

"Teia had a garden full of the bell shaped flowers in Rialto."

"Andoral [Teia's horse] rarely gets a chance to let loose in Rialto.

"Teia snatched [Viago's] walking stick and twirled it in the air. “Are you going straight home to Salle?”

Now we have Qunari in control of all Antiva. Treviso is like their favorite toy.

This might also be supported by the unimplemented Codex Entry: Many Houses, One Roost. However, many things in the game files were struck on purpose, or contradict the final canon.

7. The Antaam control the port in Treviso, limiting the availability of supplies. However, they don't entirely restrict entering ships, instead taking a "cut" of the foodstuffs they do permit.

Rivain at least is working to send supplies through anyway.

Evidence: Codex Entry: On the Invasion, in game dialogue, Note: Flour Covered Grocery List

Treviso has always been a free port. Even the Merchant Princes respect this. Their fortunes exist because we trade and work where we will. So of course, the first act of the Antaam invasion was to blockade our trading ships with their dreadnoughts

Crow Prisoner: The Antaam kept me alive so they could use me to trick Rivain into sending more supplies....Thank you for your timely arrival. I'll get the supplies to Treviso… and pay back the Antaam there.

A list in Lucanis's handwriting: -Spring onions -Green cabbage -Short-grain rice -Vinegar (white, for pickling) -Vinegar (dark, for dipping with bread) -Coffee beans (for Neve, when she is back) Cinnamon, please! —Bellara If it can be found. The Antaam's navy takes its share from whatever trading ships pass through Treviso. —Lucanis

8. The Antaam across nations aren't working together, but have broken into smaller bands. Any coordination seems to be from the Evanuris.

The Butcher seems primarily occupied with Treviso, so we have no information about who is occupying the rest of Antiva or any alliances they might have.

Evidence: Warlords of the Antaam

It is easy to think that the Antaam broke from the Qunari as one, but the reality is that of a vase shattering into countless shards, each broken in its own way, reflecting the warlord who now leads each kith. Some, like the Butcher in Treviso, use their new freedom to indulge in cultures long forbidden to them. Others, like Ataashok (Dragon King) or Isskatari (Master Killer) in Rivain, reject foreign cultures and either lean on the trappings of the Antaam or invent a heritage to inspire the loyalty of their soldiers. What seems consistent among the Antaam warlords is cruelty, from Baqounasaar (Flaming Wind), whose ships terrorize the northern coast, to Kashtaar (Jewel-Taker), whose kith have become a bandit army in the mountains outside Marothius.

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Further cut information about the Antaam Invasion that can be found in the game files, but aren't technically canon due to remaining unimplemented: Codex Entry: Observations on the Antaam, Codex Entry: Many Houses, One Roost, Codex Entry: No Need for Armies

[ghoultyrant]

I've tried a few times to write Samus' pov before and I've had a lot of trouble. I feel like she is fairly inscrutable as characters go, being largely voiceless, and taciturn even when she does speak (not counting Other M). A lot of her dialogue is also removed from social interactions, being internal memos in scan logs. Idk. Maybe this is just me.

Samus as a character isn’t so much a cipher as an archaeological mystery.

The point of that comparison being that the Metroid series actually tends to tell a large fraction of its story through its environments, and does so quite well. Metroid II makes it clear that the endgame area is some manner of laboratory where the Metroids were apparently created, probably by the Chozo, but at some point control was lost. The laboratory is their nest because that’s where their existence as a species started, rather than the Metroid Queen selecting it as a good brooding ground for some other reason. Notably, the laboratory is unusually isolated and difficult to reach, even by Metroid II’s standards of travel distance, suggesting that the lab was deliberately cut off from the rest of the planet, and also probably explaining why the Metroid Queen didn’t wander off elsewhere to nest; she very possibly couldn’t.

In turn, this grounds a detail many players probably never questioned, but which is slightly odd on its own: that Metroids can apparently only grow into their Alpha and so on forms on SR388. As a consequence of natural evolution, this is certainly possible, but seems odd. But given that they’re clearly artificial, it’s easy to guess that the Chozo put that in as an artificial constraint; most likely the Chozo had plans for shipping them out to other worlds, and for some reason or another didn’t want them to change form once they were off the planet. (There’s a lot of plausible reasons for why they’d want this, but that’s a bit of a tangent)

Furthermore, this also grounds the Metroid Queen itself. Most players probably never question the fact that there’s literally only one Metroid Queen on an entire planet, because after all she’s the final boss. There’s obvious video game design reasons involved. But actually, it makes perfect sense in-universe: while fandom frequently assumes that any Metroid could potentially molt all the way to being a Metroid Queen, and that’s not an unreasonable assumption, it’s also entirely possible the Metroid Queen was one-of-a-kind because the Chozo carefully designed things so she’d be unique; that the Metroid Queen was built to be a Queen from the ground up, and is not supposed to be capable of producing more Queen-capable Metroids. That would be a logical thing to do to limit the damage in the event of a containment failure, and neatly explains why the planet has only one Metroid Queen even though Metroids themselves are running rampant across the planet.

Speaking of the Chozo and environmental storytelling, the fact that we saw their statues on two different planets back in the original trilogy was already a strong indication that the Chozo were a spacefaring species. Metroid Prime using scan logs to spell it out was a confirmation of an already-likely-true thing, not a state of canon invented by that particular entry. Again, I imagine a lot of players never questioned it because there’s game design reasons that are obviously applicable (eg that Chozo statues are frequently used to mark Important Power-Ups), but it’s extremely good environmental storytelling.

Anyway, that’s just some bits from Metroid II. Aside Other M and let me be brutally honest Samus Returns (I enjoyed it, but it mostly doesn’t try to do environmental storytelling, and probably-accidentally heavily retcons things, with the Metroid Queen’s nest no longer being set deep inside a laboratory being the most blatant example), the Metroid series does this heavily and constantly. The player is expected, if they care about the story and the world it takes place in, to look at the details they can see and make inferences.

And if they don’t care about any of that, it’s not intruding on their experience: they can just play a fun little game with blasting aliens and whatever.

Looping this back to Samus, though: yeah, we mostly don’t get Samus’ voice, both in a literal sense and in the writing sense. What we get is a ton of secondary information hinting at the kind of person she is, supplemented with concrete facts (eg that she was substantially raised by the Chozo), and then are expected to draw inferences.

As one of the more obvious examples: the first two games implicitly establish that Samus has to have a high degree of confidence in her abilities, or if she doesn’t she’s got a literally suicidal streak. She twice accepts missions to travel alone, deep into hostile territory, with the interstellar bounty hunter equivalent of nothing but the clothes on her back. Metroid II’s manual tells us that some elite corps of soldiers was sent to SR388 and never heard from again, and this didn’t dissuade Samus from going in completely alone.

This strongly implies she earnestly believes she can do the job when a literal small army couldn’t even survive: it’s not just that the Egenoid Star Marines failed at the mission, it’s that they were so completely out of their depth that none of them were able to escape the planet to report their failure!

Important and related is that starting from Metroid Ii it’s very normal for Samus to unambiguously have the option of just turning around and leaving. Her ship is on-planet, she uses it to leave at the end of a given game, and nonetheless she sticks each given mission out. She doesn’t encounter Omega Metroids and go ‘no, this is too dangerous, I’m out’. She doesn’t rampage across half of Zebes in Super Metroid and give up in disgust when she fails to find the stolen Metroid reasonably quickly. She doesn’t report the Space Pirates on Tallon IV to the Federation and leave them to clean up that particular mess while she goes to get a drink. Echoes and Fusion are the only games that actually trap Samus on-site temporarily to justify her ongoing presence, and even then if you bother to visit and scan her ship regularly in Echoes you’ll discover it’s ready for liftoff well before it’s time for the endgame, while in Fusion it actually doesn’t take that long to get back access to the Main Deck and thus her ship.

A lot of games that place a player character alone and far from civilization are very careful to explain that the player character was stranded in this strange place, and implicitly or explicitly sets the player character’s goal as escape back to civilization. The implication is generally that these are people who would never willingly inflict such a situation on themselves, and if they ever accidentally found themselves in such a situation with the ability to back out, they’d take it in a heartbeat.

Samus, meanwhile, keeps ending up in these situations and sticking them out. She doesn’t mind being alone with her thoughts for long periods of time.

It’s worth mentioning that the Japanese version of the original Metroid tracked how long you’d played, only your hours of play were presented as how many days Samus had been on Zebes. If you treat this ratio as canonical to all future games, which are generally designed so a first-time player will beat them in 4-20 hours... yeah. Samus has repeatedly spent several days or weeks in a row far away from civilization, and is just fine with sticking those situations out, and even inflicting them fairly spontaneously on herself if she has a specific reason for doing so. (eg she goes to Tallon IV in pursuit of Ridley)

Now, since this is inference there’s a fundamental ambiguity here. I personally tend to interpret Samus as being someone who finds socializing with her fellow sentients to be a stressful experience, such that going out into the wild for a week is a form of decompression and relaxation, but this isn’t the only plausible interpretation, and honestly I probably go to that interpretation because I don’t cope well with that kind of social interaction, rather than it actually being a better interpretation. One could plausibly interpret Samus as someone who, say, is actually fairly intensely social and just rates (Insert mission objective here) as more important than her own personal comfort. (In this interpretation, it would be assumed she instead decompresses from her missions by partying with her must-exist-in-this-interpretation large circle of friends) That’s certainly an excellent justification for her chasing Ridley in Metroid Prime, for example, and if we ignore Other M entirely I can’t think of a Metroid game that could be said to contradict that particular interpretation. (And Other M doesn’t count because it contradicts literally every other game on so many levels; if one game doesn’t fit while the rest are consistent with each other, you toss that one game as an inconsistency)

(Well, actually, another reason I take my interpretation of Samus is that she was raised by Ascetic Space Bird Monks, but then again plenty of people rebel against their upbringing. It’s perfectly possible to say Intensely Social Samus was driven crazy by the Chozo expecting her to be an Ascetic Space Bird Monk But As A Tiny Human, and even suggest that she takes being Intensely Social even farther than she would’ve otherwise as pushback against that whole thing)

BUT

While there’s room for interpretation and murkiness on details, Samus across the games has a fairly clear sketch of a certain range of plausible personalities. This range is also further reduced if we actually, for example, acknowledge Samus’ monologues from Fusion, which make it clear Samus concerns herself with the big picture (Suggesting that she sticks out her missions at least in part because often The Fate Of The Galaxy hinges on them kind of thing), and also seems to indicate (Consistent with her observed behavior), that Samus isn’t someone inclined toward negotiation as a problem-solving mechanism -that is, she doesn’t even countenance the possibility of trying to talk the incoming Federation goons into not trying to weaponize the X, going straight to ‘I need to make sure it’s not possible for them to try’- and that she’s got a bit of a philosophical streak to her, of exactly the sort one might expect of someone raised by Ascetic Space Bird Monks.

But even without the Fusion monologues, it’s not actually that hard to dig up a coherent personality for Samus, consistent with what we see across most of the games and compelling in its own right. It just takes a mentality that, while unusual for most writing/reading, is completely consistent with how the Metroid series prefers to convey its stories.

[nayanba-blog]

Play as a foundation for hunter gatherer social existence

Pg 1: They maintained playful attitudes in their hunting, gathering, and other sustenance activities, partly by allowing each person to choose when, how, and how much they would engage in such activities. Children were free to play and explore, and through these activities, they acquired the skills, knowledge, and values of their culture. Play, in other mammals as well as in humans, counteracts tendencies toward dominance, and hunter-gatherers appear to have promoted play quite deliberately for that purpose.

Pg 2: Immediate return egalitarian hunter gatherer society: "These societies have low population densities; live in small, mobile bands, that move regularly from place to place within large but relatively circumscribed areas; do not condone violence; are egalitarian in social organization; make decisions by consensus; own little property and readily share what they do own; and have little occupational specialization except those based on gender."

Pg 4: The word play has some negative connotations to people in our culture, especially when applied to adults. It suggests something trivial, a diversion from work and responsibility. It suggests childishness. So, in the past, when people referred to the playfulness of the indigenous inhabitants of one place or another, the term was often an insult or, at best, a left-handed compliment. In truth, hunter-gatherer life can be very hard. It is certainly not all fun and games. There are times of drought and famine; early deaths are common; there are predators that must be dealt with. People grieve when their loved ones die. People take losses seriously and take seriously the necessity to plan for emergencies and respond appropriately to them. As you will see, my point is that play is used not to escape from but to confront and cope with the dangers and difficulties of a life that is not always easy. Perhaps because of the negative connotations, anthropologists don’t often use the terms play or playful in their descriptions of hunter-gatherer activities. They do, however, often use terms like good-humored and cheerful. My inferences about play and playfulness come primarily from researchers’ actual descriptions of hunter-gatherers’ activities, not so much from their explicit use of the labels “play” or “playful.”

Pg 5: Rules of Play: Classic and modern works on play have employed quite a variety of terms and phrases to describe play’s characteristics, but I think they can be boiled down nicely to the following five: Play is activity that is (1) self-chosen and self-directed; (2) intrinsically motivated; (3) structured by mental rules; (4) imaginative; and (5) produced in an active, alert, but nonstressed frame of mind.

Pg 6: The most basic freedom in play is the freedom to quit. The freedom to quit ensures that all of the players are doing what they want to do. It prevents leaders from enforcing rules that are not agreed upon by all. People who are unhappy will quit, and if too many quit play will end.

Pg 6:  The process, not the product, motivates them. Similarly, children or adults playing a competitive game have the goal of scoring points and winning, but, if they are truly playing, it is the process of scoring and winning that motivates them, not the points themselves or the status of having won. If someone would just as soon win by cheating as by following the rules, or get the trophy and praise through some shortcut that bypasses the game process, then that person is not playing.

Pg 7:  The rules of play provide boundaries within which the actions must occur, but they do not precisely dictate each action; they always leave room for creativity. Human activities that are precisely structured by rules, with known ends and known paths to those ends, are properly called rituals, not play. Rituals provide no opportunities for self-direction, and play requires self-direction. In all sorts of social play, the players must have a shared understanding of the rules. In many instances of social play, more time is spent discussing the rules, to arrive at a shared understanding, than is spent actually playing. Again, play requires consensus. One person playing by a different set of rules can ruin the game.

Pg 9: So, the mind at play is active and alert, but not distressed. Attention is attuned to the activity itself, and there is reduced consciousness of self and time. The mind is wrapped up in the ideas, rules, and actions of the game. This state of mind has been shown in many psychological research studies to be ideal for creativity and the learning of new skills.

Pg 12: The five characteristics of a group playing a social game are precisely the elements that anthropologists refer to repeatedly, and often emphatically, in their discussions of social relationships and governance in hunter-gatherer societies.

Pg 13:  Hunter-gatherers likewise do not tell others what to do or use power-assertive methods to gain compliance. When they do try to influence the behavior of others, they usually do so indirectly, in ways that preserve each person’s sense of choice and prevent or minimize any sense of being dominated. A general assumption is that all adults will want to work for the good of the band, but care is taken to ensure that each person’s work for the band is voluntary, not coerced. Ingold points out that social relationships among hunter-gatherers are founded on trust—trust that the others will, on their own volition, want to please others in the band and support the band as a whole.

Pg 17: The effectiveness of humor as a leveler and reducer of aggression, I think, comes from its direct relationship to play. To make fun of something is to say, “This thing that you are so proud of, or this dispute that has you so angry, is not as important as you think it is. This is play, and the important thing in play is to be a good sport.” When hunter-gatherers use humor to resolve even the most serious social problems that they face, they seem to bring all of social life into the domain of play.

Pg 18: All social play involves shared rules. The rules give structure and predictability to the interactions among the players. The overarching purposes of the rules for any social game, if it is truly play, are to coordinate the activities of all of the participants into a coherent whole and to make the game fun for all. The rules of social play often require that people resist their natural urges or instincts and exert self-discipline. Much of the joy of social play comes from such exertion and from the aesthetics of taking part in a coordinated, rule-restrained social activity. All this, which can be said about the rules of every form of social play, can also be said about the rules within any hunter-gatherer society

Pg 22: One of the Ju/’hoan deities has characteristics that might, at first, lead us to view him as equivalent to the single god of modern monotheistic religions. This deity, called Gao Na, is the creator of the universe. First he created himself and the other deities; then the earth, water holes in the earth, and water to fill the holes; then the sky, sun, moon, stars, rain, wind, lightning, plants, animals, and human beings. Yet, despite such power of creation, Gao Na is seen as not particularly powerful in other respects and certainly not as wise. In fact, consistent with their general practice of leveling those who might think too highly of themselves, the Ju/’hoansi delight in portraying Gao Na as a fool.3

Pg 27: One anthropologist, Marshall Sahlins, has famously characterized huntergatherer societies collectively as “the original affluent society.”54 An affluent society, by Sahlins’s definition, is one in which “people’s material wants are easily satisfied.” Hunter-gatherers are affluent not because they have so much, but because they want so little. They can provide for those wants with relatively little work, and, as a result, they have lots of free time, which they spend, according to one observer of the Ju/’hoansi, at such activities as “singing and composing songs, playing musical instruments, sewing intricate bead designs, telling stories, playing games, visiting, or just lying around and resting.”55 These are just the kinds of activities that we would expect of happy, relaxed people anywhere.

Pg 30: This is true of hunter-gatherer cultures too. Hunter-gatherer adults, however, do not concern themselves much with their children’s education. They assume that children will learn what they need to know through their own, self-directed exploration and play. In play, hunter-gatherer children, on their own initiatives, practice the skills they will need for survival as adults. In their play, they also rehearse and build upon the knowledge, experience, and values that are central to their culture.

Pg 36: Our survey question about the forms of hunter-gatherer children’s play elicited many examples of valued adult activities that were mimicked regularly by children in play. Digging up tubers, fishing, smoking porcupines out of holes, cooking, caring for infants, climbing trees, building vine ladders, building huts, using knives and other tools, making tools, carrying heavy loads, building rafts, making fires, defending against attacks from predators, imitating animals (a means of identifying animals and learning their habits), making music, dancing, storytelling, and arguing were all mentioned by one or more respondents. The specific lists varied from culture to culture in accordance with differences in the skills that were exemplified by adults in each culture.

Pg 37: Because they are free to mingle with people of all ages, hunter-gatherer children learn from those of all ages. From the oldest people, they hear stories about the past. From returned hunting and gathering parties of adults, they hear accounts of the day’s adventures. From older children, they gain examples of skilled play toward which to strive. From younger children and infants, they gain playful practice in child care and nurturing. All this contributes to their growing fund of knowledge and to the games they play among themselves. The stories and examples draw and fascinate children because they are real aspects of the culture in which they are growing, not something designed artificially for their supposed benefit.

Pg 38: Research on age-mixed play in our culture suggests that such play differs qualitatively from same-age play. It is less competitive and more nurturing. In age-mixed play, each child tries to do his or her best but has little or no concern for beating others. When playmates differ greatly in age, size, and strength, there is little point in trying to prove oneself better than another. In such play, older children typically help younger children along, which allows the younger ones to play in more sophisticated ways than they would alone and gives the older ones valuable experience in helping and nurturing

Pg 38: In the 1950s and 1960s, using data from the Human Relations Area Files, John Roberts and his colleagues compared the types of competitive games commonly played in different types of cultures. They concluded that the only cultures that seemed to have no competitive games of any kind were huntergatherer cultures.82 In response to a question about competitive play in our survey, only two of the ten respondents said that they had seen any competitive play in the cultures they had studied, and both of them said that they had seldom seen it. Several of the respondents noted that play among huntergatherer children is noncompetitive not just because it is age mixed, but also because competition runs counter to the spirit of cooperation that pervades hunter-gatherer bands. For instance, regarding Agta children’s play, P. Bion Griffin commented that the only consistent rule of the play he observed was that “no one should win and beat another in a visible fashion.”

Pg 39: The point of hunter-gatherer play is not to establish winners and losers but to have fun. In the process of having fun, the players develop skills requiring strength, coordination, endurance, cooperation, and wit, and they solidify their bonds of friendship. If the focus were on competition, the pressure to win could reduce the playfulness and fun of the activity. Instead of cementing friendships, competitive games could produce arrogance in winners and envy or anger in losers, which would weaken rather than strengthen the community.

Pg 40: In this article I have presented examples from the research literature on hunter-gatherers to show (1) how the fluid structure and consensual decisionmaking processes of hunter-gatherer bands resemble those of social-play groups, which people are free to join or leave at a moment’s notice; (2) how humor and laughter are used as leveling and peace-keeping devices; (3) how the rules of hunter-gatherer societies, particularly the rules for sharing, are like the rules of social play; (4) how hunter-gatherer religious stories and ceremonies emphasize the playful, comic nature of the deities and reinforce the notion of equality within the cosmos; (5) how hunter-gatherers arrange their subsistence-essential work in a manner that retains the spirit of play; and (6) how hunter-gatherer child care and educational practices are structured to maximize children’s opportunities for play and to minimize any sense of their being dominated by adults.