There is some truth to this interpretation, insofar as the book insistently foregrounds the player's experience. It is always possible to ask: How will the game come out? The intensity of our investment in many games essentially depends on our consciousness that their outcome is not fixed in advance.Ī superficial reading of Homo Ludens might suggest that Huizinga views play as a purely "subjective" phenomenon. To experience this sort of tension is to become invested in an outcome that has not yet been settled. The consciousness of risk, for instance, presupposes that the player cannot confidently anticipate the result of an action this unpredictability largely determines the intensity of many games, particularly those involving chance and competition. According to Huizinga, the cultural study of play consists in a careful description of the players' experiences. Words like "tension", "release", "challenge", "effort", "uncertainty", "risk", "balance", "oscillation", "contrast", "variation" and "rhythm" typically describe the activity of playing as a temporal modulation of rising, falling and evolving intensities. To speak of experience implies a vocabulary of qualitative description. We do not characteristically play to fulfil a practical task we play for the sake of the lived quality that attaches itself to the act of playing. Huizinga sometimes writes that play is "free", by which he means that the fundamental motive of play is the experience that it affords. Playing is thus closely akin to aesthetics, in that experience is irreducible: it constitutes an essential aspect of the phenomenon. To describe play is to describe its "meaningfulness" for the players. Two dogs pretending to fight obviously understand that their actions are only make-believe, and this reciprocal awareness is an essential aspect of their pleasure. Even the most primitive forms of play imply some form of intuitive understanding. Most games presuppose a player consciously aware of the game's objectives, equipment, and rules. The philosophical starting point of Huizinga's study is the observation that, where there is play, there is also "meaning". A careful study of Homo Ludens clarifies the fundamental aims and purposes of serious game design, and also highlights the close connection between Huizinga's ideas and key developments in contemporary experimental art. If this line of argument is pursued to its logical conclusion, Huizinga can be enlisted as an ally rather than an opponent of the serious games movement. Huizinga, in fact, claims that most serious pursuits exhibit playful aspects. My aim is not only to make sense of the core concerns of Homo Ludens, but also to show that none of its central postulates actually undermines the legitimacy of serious game design. This essay proposes an interpretation of Huizinga's core argument. Are these efforts incompatible with Huizinga's claims about the fundamental difference between play and seriousness? Does the serious game designer misunderstand the essential nature of play? In particular, serious gaming is often considered a medium of education and sometimes also social change. Many designers in the "serious games" movement have called for games that make a difference to people's lives (Frasca, 2006). There is an important context for this debate. What does the expression "not serious" mean here? The exact meaning and implications of this thesis continue to raise difficult problems of interpretation (Bogost, 2006). Huizinga famously argues that play is essentially not a serious activity, but his writing is notoriously elusive on this point. Its core ideas also influenced modern avant-garde artists like Guy Debord and other members of the group known as the Situationist International (Andreotti, 2002). Although its core topic is playing rather than gaming, Homo Ludens remains a standard reference in game design books (Crawford, 2003 Zimmerman and Salen, 2004 Fullerton, Swain, and Hoffman, 2004). Similar assumptions underpin the work of subsequent scholars, notably the French sociologist Roger Caillois (1962), who followed Huizinga in emphasizing the central role of play in human culture. Huizinga's book describes play as a free and meaningful activity, carried out for its own sake, spatially and temporally segregated from the requirements of practical life, and bound by a self-contained system of rules that holds absolutely. The modern study of play can be traced back to the publication of Dutch historian Johan Huizinga's groundbreaking study Homo Ludens (1938). The Playful and the Serious: An approximation to Huizinga's Homo Ludens by Hector Rodriguez
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