Roger Caillois, “The Definition of Play”

Huizinga “deliberately omits, as obvious, the description and classification of games themselves” (4)

“His work is not a study of games, but an inquiry into the creative quality of the play principle in the domain of culture” (4)

“Play is an occasion of pure waste: waste of time, energy, ingenuity, skill, and often of money” (6)

“The confused and intricate laws of ordinary life are replaced, in this fixed space and for this given time, by precise, arbitrary, unexceptionable rules that must be accepted as such and that govern the correct playing of the game” (7)

“The game is ruined by the nihilist who denounces the rules as absurd and conventional, who refuses to play because the game is meaningless” (7)

Commentator’s Note Interesting that Caillois calls this person the nihilist where Huizinga calls them the spoil-sport. Intimations of ontology here.

“His arguments are irrefutable. The game has no other but an intrinsic meaning. That is why its rules are imperative and absolute, beyond discussion. There is no reason for their being as they are, rather than otherwise. Whoever does not accept them as such must deem them manifest folly” (7)

“The game consists of the need to find or continue at once a response which is free within the limits set by the rules” (8)

“Rules themselves create fictions” (8)

“the preceding analysis permits play to be defined as an activity which is essentially:” (9)

  • Free
  • Separate
  • Uncertain
  • Unproductive
  • Governed by rules
  • Make-believe

“These diverse qualities are purely formal. They do not prejudge the content of games” (10)


Roger Caillois, “The Classification of Games”

“The multitude and infinite variety of games at first causes one to despair of discovering a principle of classification capable of subsuming them under a small number of well-defined categories” (11)

“A particular game may require several skills simultaneously, or none” (11)

“Very different games can be played in the same place” (11)

“I am proposing a division into four main rubrics, depending upon whether, in the games under consideration, the role of competition, chance, simulation, or vertigo is dominant” (12)

“I call these agon, alea, mimicry, and ilinx, respectively” (12)

“Even these designations do not cover the entire universe of play” (12-13)

“They can also be placed on a continuum between two opposite poles” (13)

“At one extreme an almost indivisible principle, common to diversion, turbulence, free improvisation, and carefree gaiety is dominant. It manifests a kind of uncontrolled fantasy that can be designated by the term paidia” (13)

“At the opposite extreme, this frolicsome and impulsive exuberance is almost entirely absorbed or disciplined by a complementary, and in some respects inverse, tendency to its anarchic and capricious nature: there is a growing tendency to bind it with arbitrary, imperative, and purposely tedious conventions … I call this second component ludus” (13)

“Agon. A whole group of games would seem to be competitive, that is to say, like a combat in which equality of chances is artificially created, in order that the adversaries should confront each other under ideal conditions, susceptible of giving precise and incontestable value to the winner’s triumph” (14)

“Alea. This is the Latin name for the game of dice. I have borrowed it to designate, in contrast to agon, all games that are based on a decision independent of the player, an outcome over which he has no control, and in which winning is the result of fate rather than triumphing over an adversary” (17)

“Play, whether agon or alea, is thus an attempt to substitute perfect situations for the normal confusion of contem porary life” (19)

“Mimicry. All play presupposes the temporary acceptance, if not of an illusion (indeed this last wofd means nothing less than beginning a game: in-lusio), then at least of a closed, conventional, and, in certain respects, imaginary universe” (19)

“Mimicry is incessant invention” (23)

“llinx. The last kind of game includes 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. In all cases, it is a question of surrendering to a kind of spasm, seizure, or shock which destroys reality with sovereign brusqueness” (23)

“Rules are inseparable from play as soon as the latter becomes institutionalized” (27)

“But a basic freedom is central to play in order to stimulate distraction and fantasy” (27)

“Such a primary power of improvisation and joy, which I call paidia, is allied to the taste for gratuituous difficulty that I propose to call ludus” (27)

Paidia is “a word covering the spontaneous manifestations of the play instinct” (27-28)

It is an “elementary need for disturbance and tumult” (28)

“the pleasure experienced in solving a problem arbitrarily designed for this purpose also intervenes, so that reaching a solution has no other goal than personal satisfaction for its own sake. This condition, which is ludus proper, is also reflected in different kinds of games” (29)

“It is complementary to and a refinement of paidia, which it disciplines and enriches” (29)

“just as there could be no relationship between paidia, which is tumultuous and exuberant, and alea, which is passive anticipation of and mute immobility pending the outcome of the game, there also can be no connection between ludus, which is calculation and contrivance, and ilinx, which is a pure state of transport” (31)

Ludus is “training in self-control, an arduous effort to preserve calm and equilibrium. Far from being compatible with ilinx, it provides the discipline needed to neutralize the dangerous effects of ilinx, as in mountain climbing or tightrope walking” (31)

“Industrial civilization has given birth to a special form of ludus, the hobby, a secondary and gratuitous activity, undertaken and pursued for pleasure” (32)

“ludus relates to the primitive desire to find diversion and amusement in arbitrary, perpetually recurrent obstacles” (33)

“Thousands of occasions and devices are invented to satisfy simultaneously the desire for relaxation and the need, of which man cannot be rid, to utilize purposefully the knowledge, experience, and intelligence at his disposal, while disregarding self-control and his capacity for resistance to suffering, fatigue, panic, or intoxication” (33)

“The example of the word wan shows that the destinies of cultures can be read in their games. The preference for agon, alea, mimicry, or ilinx helps decide the future of a civilization” (35)

Commentator’s Note: As the GSSB guys note, Caillois goes even further down this essentializing path. At the same time, might a thinker like Watsuji Tetsuro, his Climate and Culture, the concept of fu-do, also lead us to think in material, non-essentializing ways about such differences?

2024 Addition: ‘Fūdo means “wind and earth…the natural environment of a given land” (Watsuji 1988 [1961], 1). We are all inescapably environed by our land, its geography and topography, its climate and weather patterns, temperature and humidity, soils and oceans, its flora and fauna, and so on, in addition to the resultant human styles of living, related artifacts, architecture, food choices, and clothing. This is but a partial list, but even this sketchy list makes clear that Watsuji is calling attention to the many ways in which our environment, taken in the broad sense, shapes who we are from birth to death’ (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/watsuji-tetsuro/).

“the chaneling of the free energy in paidia toward invention or contemplation manifests an implicit but fundamental and most significant choice” (35)


Game

  • Baba Is You