Playing: It’s Serious Business
Today we are going to talk about playing. But we will go deep. In fact, we will travel to the 20th century, when an entire new academic field, the field of Game Studies, was being developed. What? You didn’t know games can be studied academically? Well, you are in for a surprise! You see, playing games has always been part of human nature. As the famous Dutch historian Johan Huizinga would put it, we are “Homo Ludens,” which is also the title of a book he published in 1938. Then, Roger Caillois, a French sociologist, elaborated further on that in 1961 in the book Man, Play and Games. Caillois separated play into two types: ludus and paideia. Ludus, a Latin word, concerns the type of play that is..
