  What happens when scientists are, at certain points in a field's development,
playing a game? I present a framework for such an analysis that draws on the
theory of games provided by the historian Johan Huizinga. Huizinga gives five
conditions for a social practice to become a game: free engagement,
disconnection, boundedness in time and arena, the order-creation of rules, and
the presence of tension. Application of this theory to scientific practice
predicts patterns of behavior that can be tested by quantitative analysis: the
emergence of hard boundaries between disciplines, the closure of loopholes in
theory creation, resistance to certain innovations in journal publication, and
the ways in which scientists fail to prosecute colleagues who engage in
questionable research practices.
