From game to procedure: traditional archery and the loss of lusory attitude

At what point does a sporting practice cease to be a game and become a mere procedure? This paper examines traditional archery as a case study in the gradual erosion of the lusory attitude – the voluntary acceptance of inefficiency that constitutes a game as something more than a technique for producing outcomes. This erosion unfolds along three dimensions: standardizing competition formats; traditional equipment incorporating modern designs; and regulatory loophole exploitation. The result is a lusory chasm – a middle ground that imitates Olympic archery’s quantitative logic while relinquishing the qualitative complexity that gave the practice its value. The paper concludes by proposing an operational criterion for evaluating whether a given change is congruent with a practice’s constitutive values – with implications for any discipline where the quantitative logic risks absorbing the qualitative.