Softball and rules

A few days ago I was at the park with my parents and we started watching a group people playing softball.

Even though I did not grow up in the US, I thought I knew the general rules of softball and baseball. But talking to my dad, I learned about the infield fly rule for the first time. (It's a rule that says that in certain circumstances the ball is automatically considered caught even though it is still in the air. The rule is meant to prevent the defense team from dropping the ball on purpose to make it easier to get other players out. It is called based on the umpire's judgement.)

So I started thinking about how rules in sports are decided. Most sports can be easily traced back to some natural gesture or task: running, throwing, kicking, aiming, and so on. In the case of baseball, it is hitting a ball with a stick. These basic gestures were almost certainly first played as "games," with only simple and informal rules. Gradually, the rules of some of these games became precise and more widely accepted, and finally these games started being called "sports."

It may be obvious, but I think it's interesting that there is an evolutionary process here: there have certainly been countless been games that involved hitting a ball with a stick, but only a few sports of this kind are still popular today (I guess mainly cricket, baseball, and softball). We can see this as a sort of "natural selection" for rules. Games undergo gradual mutations, simply because their rules are not fixed and can change over time; the most succeful mutations become more popular and turn into sports.

Can we say something about the "evolutionary fitness" of a game? That is, what are some characteristics that can make it successful? Two important factors are probably: 1) how easy it is to play 2) how fun it is to play. Obviously, games that require a lot of equipment and have complicated rules might not spread easily. But the second factor is equally if not more important, and some amount of equipment and rules are necessary to make a game entertaining. And actually, understanding what makes a game fun is a fascinating question. This might be the topic for another note but, at high level, I think that in a "fun" game there needs to be a competitive component, and the right balance of randomness and skill. It's also interesting that there are essentially no sports today (or at least, none that I'm aware of) that involve three players or teams to play against each other at the same time. I wonder whether there is a good explanation for this.

But getting back to the evolution of games, once a game is a sport, it naturally slows down in the way it changes and evolves, simply because of its "officiality." This of course depends a lot on the sport. In the case of baseball, rules have remained mostly unchanged since the orgins of the game, and the tradition of the sport is highly valued. In other sports like american football, the rules are still evolving rather quickly. One might say that there is spectrum of cultures ranging from "conservative" to "progressive" even in sports.

How about the creation of new sports? I have the impression that the majority of modern sports reached its current form in the beginning of the 20th century, and that now it is harder for games to become popular sports. Are examples of recently invented games that are sports? One example that comes to my mind is ultimate frisbee, but perhaps there are others. I think that this trajectory is similar to what happens to musical instruments, since most people today play instruments that were invented a few centuries ago.

One more question: why do adults typically play sports and not games? It is common for kids to invent new games when playing, but not for adults. I think the reason for this is that adults are just too used to following pre-existing rules in life in general, and because of this they become less interested in playing with the rules themselves. I think think this is unfortunate, inventing new rules for new sports sounds like fun!