If Pindar, Ancient Greek lyric poet from Thebes, were alive today, he may, for a day job, work as chief sloganeer for an advertising agency. “Become what you are,” he wrote in a Victory Ode in the 5th century BC, long before Nike brainstormed over what would best accompany the swoosh. Victory Odes, or epinikion , was a poetic genre, usually in the form of a choral song, commissioned for and performed at the celebration of an athlete’s victory in the Panhellenic Games. I have little doubt that absolutely no one is giving Pindar a thought during this year’s football World Cup — the beautiful game is swift and absorbing — but in his poems may be found, as on the field, a Shakespearian range of human fragility and immortal aspirations. Beneath the triumphant gilding —“Theron, for his victory with chariot-four, is the man we must sing [of] now”— runs an abiding love of play. And something more. An insight into what was held in esteem, valued, emulated: their notions of masculinity (for Ancient Greek sportsmen were only men), physical prowess, gestures of piety and generosity — throwing up a very rich array of anthropological observations.

Play, far from mere entertainment, points us to an understanding of, and sometimes encapsulates, a worldview. Likewise, in literature, most commonly in science fiction and fantasy, ‘sport’ is very rarely an accoutrement.

You might imagine the most complete, and bone-chilling, employment of ‘play’ as novelistic structure is Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games (the first book in the trilogy; the next two were severely jaded), forever damning the line “Let the games begin.” In the totalitarian nation of Panem, 12 districts, mostly poor and exploited, must send two child ‘tributes’ to participate in the Hunger Games, organised annually as a reminder never to rebel again against the regime. The tributes are forced to battle to the death in a dangerous public arena, while spectators watch the ‘live televised event.’ Whether critique of winner-takes-all capitalism or panegyric work designed to remind us how grateful we should be to live in a ‘free’ society, The Hunger Games is inarguably discomforting. Yet, perhaps, not as much as the late Iain Banks’ The Player of Games , second of the Culture novels, set in a post-scarcity, semi-anarchist utopia of various humanoid races. Jernau Morat Gurgeh, master of any intellectually stimulating game of diversion, is invited to journey on a secret mission to Azad, to participate in what may be the most complex game invented by a humanoid life form. It shapes the empire — all social positions, from the lowliest clerk to the emperor, are ‘won’ by playing — and has outcomes of life or death. The disquietude springs not from frenetic action sequences but how the game forces Gurgeh to think as an Azadian, to value force of arms over diplomacy, conquest over cooperation, possession over sharing. “Escape,” Banks wrote in 1988, “is a consumer good like another.” Far more elusive is the mysterious Glass Bead Game in Herman Hesse’s novel of the same name. Set in Castalia, a fictional province of central Europe, a place reserved solely for the life of the mind, this monumental ‘biography’ follows Joseph Knecht, who, as a young boy, joins the Castilian Order and is nurtured to play the game.

The rules are merely alluded to, and the Glass Bead Game is defined mostly as a “synthesis of human learning,” of aesthetics and scientific arts, mathematics, music, logic, and philosophy.

Intricate and ambitiously realised as these novels may be, fictional games — rather than forming skeletal structures — may also act as subtle mirrors, placed in the text to magnify its themes. George RR Martin’s Cyvasse, in his A Song of Ice and Fire series, which he calls a mix of “Chess, Stratego, and Blitzkrieg,” mimics most alarmingly the real-life warring, scheming, bloodthirsty escapades of its players. In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead , an absurdist, tragicomedy play that expands upon the misadventures of two minor characters in Shakespeare’s Hamlet , Tom Stoppard inserts sporadic ‘question’ games of verbal tennis. (In the 1990 movie adaptation, Gary Oldman and Tim Roth ‘volley’ across a net.) The winner is one who replies in questions, with no repetition, hesitation or synonyms. My favourite exchange? After a heated ‘set’:

Rosencrantz: ‘What in god’s name

is going on?’

Guildenstern: ‘Foul. No rhetorical questions.’

At the heart of the play, of course, lies the crisis of existentialism, which in itself is a query with no answer. What, if any, is the meaning of life?

But in fantastically imagined fiction, as in life, whether in Ancient Greece or World Cup 2014, games must also be silly. Kurt Vonnegut’s German Batball (played with a “flabby ball the size of a honeydew melon”), Douglas Adams’ Brockian Ultra Cricket (where players must grow at least three extra legs to amuse the crowds), JK Rowling’s Gobstones (if you lose you’re sprayed with foul-smelling liquid), Aldous Huxley’s hilariously-named Centrifugal Bumble puppy, and most glorious of all: Bill Waterson’s Calvinball. In which one makes up the rules as one goes along. Hence, no Calvin ball game is like another. Perhaps, this, played by a six-year-old and his pet stuffed tiger, is closest to life.

( Janice Pariat is the author of Boats on Land )

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