Competitive Cheese Rolling Is the Perfect Spectator Sport

Postscript is Cameron Kunzelman's weekly column about endings, apocalypses, deaths, bosses, and all sorts of other finalities.

Every year, people gather at Cooper's Hill to chase a cheese. Situated near Gloucester, the hill is a steep grassy climb that looks like it could, if you gazed down it in the wrong way, induce vertigo. That doesn't stop the intrepid people who look at that hill and decide to chase the cheese, though. They want that cheese. Nothing will stop them.

Watch a video of the 2017 cheese rolling at Cooper's Hill. Let me break it down for you: People line up at the top of this incredibly steep hill. Someone holds a foam circle shaped like a cheese, and they wheel it down the hill. The people at the top of the hill race to the bottom, each eager to catch the cheese and prove that they, themselves, are the cheese master. It's simple, elegant, and incredibly violent.

You might have noticed that I said that it's a piece of foam now. While "winning" the race still nets the victor an actual cheese, the thing that flies down the hill was replaced for safety reasons in 2013. Why? Because apparently the terminal velocity of a cheese (or at least its "terminal hill-rolling speed") is enough to seriously injure any bystander unlucky enough to get clocked by it.

At Cooper's Hill, you can get injured by a rogue cheese. You can break a leg while trying to run straight down a hillside. You can tumble forward, smashing your collarbone and grinding your face into the dirt. You can slip and fall, crushing your tailbone. You can trip and break your arm. If these things happen, they will happen at the fastest speed that you can run down the hill. While the event is goofy in some ways (a cheese!) and there are certainly people who have fun making their way down the hill slowly and in festive costumes, the reality is that many people turn up at the hill to hurt themselves. From an outsider watching the videos, reading the sites, and listening to the interviews, it's pure pain couched in a joyous acceptance of that pain.

"Cheese rolling is a dangerous activity for both participants and spectators," reads a sign put up by the Gloucestershire County Council. It continues: "The cheese roll is not managed. You are strongly encouraged not to attend." In some ways, this sign is the best endorsement that the competition can get. This is beyond the law and beyond reason. No one who has their best interest in mind would do this. It is the domain of the foolish and the damned. Cheese rolling is for those who are beyond the reach of God and government.

The name Roger Caillois comes up quite often in academic discussions of games. In that world, he's mostly known for a chapter in his 1958 book Man, Play, and Games called "The Classification of Games." In that chapter, he lays out a series of categories or types of games. While all of them are interesting and worth thinking about (and, indeed, dozens of people have at this point), every time I watch the cheese roll I think about how he positions the classification he calls ilinx in that chapter.

Ilinx isn't a thing. We don't point at a game and say there, there it is. Rather, it is a quality, a thing that a game can have. Caillois explains that games of ilinx are "those which are based on the pursuit of vertigo and which consist of an attempt to momentarily destroy the stability of perception and inflict a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind." These are games that are "a kind of spasm, seizure, or shock which destroys reality."

Games with a quality of ilinx sort of shatter their players, and because of that they're hard to track down. Painstation comes to mind easily, and for me, personally, Resident Evil 7 was so monumentally anxiety-inducing that I felt like I was being held over some precipice. For the most part, I think, video games have a harder time achieving the effects of the classic games of self-destruction. Dizzy bat, the game where you chug beer, spin around, and hit a can with said bat, is a game of ilinx to the highest degree. Quarters, beer pong, and more arcane drinking and substance-abuse games that proliferate in the 30-and-under set. These are what Caillois is after.

Ilinx helps us understand why these people chase the cheese down the hill. Cheese rolling is a game that can only be won with extreme sacrifice. You can watch the victors flying down the hill, sometimes tumbling forward, and the air hisses through your teeth at the prospect that they might land wrong. I can't imagine that it's anything other than the blur to these competitors, though. There's just the end, the cheese, and the entire hillside is just something to be self-violence'd through. Yes, that's right, I used "self-violence" as a verb, but I don't have better language for it.

There aren't many other games that look the same way as the cheese rolling at Cooper's Hill. Not many games require you to embrace the same self-destruction and ilinx qualities. At the same time, though, collapsed lungs are shockingly common in esports players. Players write longform writeups on how to stay awake for 24 hours so that they can play games faster. Gaming supplements are marketed at players who want to push their bodies beyond what they can normally do. And, of course, people die while playing games from a variety of different causes.

Put into perspective with all of these other ways that humans put themselves into odd relations with their games. They put themselves in precarious position. They push themselves over the edge to get an edge on other players or the games themselves. The people falling down Cooper's Hill in a bid to win a cheese appear to be special cases of ilinx play that unsettles us in their violence. From another perspective, all told, they might not be that far off from most of us who play games regularly.

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