Play and the quest for the moral subject in Physical Education: toward a framework for the analysis of the ethical affordances of modified games

Since its introduction into modern education systems, physical play has been consistently used as a means for the moral education of young people. In recent times, game-based approaches (GBAs) to Physical Education (PE) have pursued this quest by leveraging games as laboratories for the embodied practice of democratic values. This paradigm hinges on the ordered and order-generating dimension of games as contexts of interaction regulated by transparent rules that all players agree to, make all players equal, and encourage accountability within the game and beyond. These ideal characteristics, however, are not always reflected in the complexity of real-life PE. Drawing on ethnographic data gathered over 7 months of observing and participating in game activities with two classes (ages 13–15) at a high school in Aotearoa/New Zealand, this paper examines how the moral-education potential of games materialized in situations where teachers adopted original approaches to game-based PE that deviated from pedagogical orthodoxy. I present three modified games in which the rules remained implicit, unclear, and unstable. Despite not affording opportunities to practice democratic procedures, I argue that these games still carried specific ‘ethical affordances’ (Keane, Citation2014) by engaging students and teachers in complex ethical negotiations on the playing field. I explore these affordances from two viewpoints, building on the metaphors of games as artifacts and architectures to reveal two facets of students’ agency as internal and external to play forms. Bridging concepts from the anthropologies of ethics and play, this paper advances an original theoretical framework casting students’ and teachers’ ordinary encounters with the ethical dimension in PE games as an open-ended process of experimentation. This may provide a useful lens for PE curriculum and pedagogy by spotlighting the competencies students are already demonstrating through play, rather than focusing on developing skills relevant to their future selves.