The Playful and the Serious: An approximation to Huizinga's Homo Ludens

Player Experience

The philosophical starting point of Huizinga's study is the observation that, where there is play, there is also "meaning". Playing makes sense to the player. Most games presuppose a player consciously aware of the game's objectives, equipment, and rules. Even the most primitive forms of play imply some form of intuitive understanding. 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. To describe play is to describe its "meaningfulness" for the players. Playing is thus closely akin to aesthetics, in that experience is irreducible: it constitutes an essential aspect of the phenomenon.

Huizinga sometimes writes that play is "free", by which he means that the fundamental motive of play is the experience that it affords. 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. To speak of experience implies a vocabulary of qualitative description. 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. According to Huizinga, the cultural study of play consists in a careful description of the players' experiences. 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. To experience this sort of tension is to become invested in an outcome that has not yet been settled. 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.

A superficial reading of Homo Ludens might suggest that Huizinga views play as a purely "subjective" phenomenon. There is some truth to this interpretation, insofar as the book insistently foregrounds the player's experience. But the word "experience" does not refer to the inner states of an isolated ego. The player's experience essentially unfolds within a structured situation. A child regularly opening and closing a door is already engaged in the performance of a structured action, although its rules are relatively simple, loose and supple. The lived quality of play depends in part on the organization of the player's actions around a cluster of rules and equipment.

Every ludic experience is characterized and individuated with reference to the various rules and resources available to the person. Different types of play can be distinguished from one another via the structures that underpin them. For instance, playing games differs from playing with toys because the former typically specifies winning conditions; game rules normally determine what counts as victory or defeat. The winner may, for instance, score more points than her opponents, arrive first at a certain location, or achieve checkmate. Thus the quality of the player's experience depends, at least to some extent, on the structure of norms and resources that guide or organize her actions.

Experience is inseparable from structured action, which is seldom carried out by an isolated ego. In most situations, the player confronts either another player or some impersonal obstacle. There is always a dynamic interplay of move and counter-move. A squash player must wait to see how the ball bounces back from the wall. This "waiting to see" indicates an essential feature about the activity of playing: that there is always something other, and so play is seldom radically subjective. The experience of the player is partly constituted by this moment of otherness. The player must respond to some event, in the context of a structured situation. Playing consists in a trans-individual process of action and reaction, which often takes on a to-and-fro quality reminiscent of dance. It is the pattern of this movement, rather than the psychological make-up of the individual participant,which fundamentally characterizes the experience of play. Instead of saying that "someone is playing", it might better to say that "there is playing going on". The philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, who strongly opposes any subjective interpretation of Huizinga's conclusions, has persuasively argued that "the purpose of the game is not really the solution of the task, but the ordering and shaping of the movement of the game itself" (Gadamer, 1989, p. 97). In Gadamer's view, the fascination of play lies in the way this structured movement "draws" players into its arena and "fills" them with its distinctive spirit. The encounter with otherness is thus an essential aspect of the play experience.

Conclusions

Huizina's starting point asserts that play differs from blind physiological processes like respiration and digestion, because it presupposes a conscious player who understands the aims, rules, strategies, conventions and resources involved. Wherever there is play there is also meaning. Play also differs from logic in a fundamental way. The core aim of logic is to provide canons of thinking that guarantee the correctness of inferences. The aim of play is the modulation of human experience. The experience of the player is essential to the very nature of play. The study of play as play is directed towards the experience of the player, rather than the social, psychological or biological functions that playing performs. The methods of ludological research do not primarily depend on functional explanations.

Homo Ludens does not, however, express the thesis that playing is in every respect isolated from serious concerns. The boundary between the playful and the serious is certainly real and widely applied, but not sharply defined everywhere, and always subject to revision. In some cases, the borderline cannot be marked at all. Moreover, ethical questions about civility and fairness are often intimately connected with the act of playing. Huizinga asserts, for instance, that many forms of serious culture originated from ludic actions. Playfulness lies at the origin of art, religion, politics, philosophy, and the law. It is misleading to view these institutions in purely functional terms, as vehicles for the transmission of social values or the reproduction of societal cohesion. Social action is partly motivated by a desire for intense experiences of risk, uncertainty, surpassing oneself, overcoming a challenge, etc. These regions of social life cut across the distinction between the playful and the serious.

Serious game design has the potential to reveal essential features about philosophy, science and other serious academic subjects. The reason is that those subjects already exhibit ludic aspects. Playing can help us to recognize the playful aspects of human culture. For instance, playing a philosophical game can highlight the elements of competition and exhibitionism at the heart of philosophy. Playing with the magic circle can bring to light fundamental features of all social formations, and so highlight fundamental issues about philosophy and sociology. Game designers can render the boundary between play and life systematically ambiguous, thus encouraging players to engage in a collective discussion about the nature of their community. The formation of the collective would then become a core theme of experimental game design. Alternatively, the game designers may selectively withhold from the players information about where the magic circle begins and ends, so that random everyday events can potentially be part of the game; serious game designers can exploit this condition to generate paranoia and other experiences that depend on doubt.

Different concepts of play are closely interconnected with different philosophical assumptions about human nature. Many contemporary artists have advanced a paradigm of experimental action that values improvisation, exploration and risk. Game designers can benefit from the experiments already conducted by members of radical art groups, particularly those designed to subvert the boundaries of the magic circle. They challenge the tyranny of gallery walls and other institutional settings that isolate art from the everyday. The performances of Allan Kaprow and other members of the Fluxus group, for instance, burst open the confines of artistic institutions, and destabilized any effort to mark out a clean boundary between art and serious life. Radical artists have discovered an essential feature of children's play: fluid and porous boundaries. The borderline of the playing field becomes fragile, contingent and negotiable. As games open themselves up to the experience of risk, trust, dependency, vulnerability, fatalism, uncertainty, addictiveness and violence, playing may thus enable novel forms of subjectivity and interaction to emerge through experimental modifications of everyday life.

Game designers might argue that some of these techniques undermine the very nature of play. How can a game remain a game when its boundaries are no longer clearly defined? Once again, I would recommend a careful study of the development of modern art. Performance artists like Kaprow rejected the presumption that there is a distinct sphere called "art" bound by necessary and sufficient conditions; he organized his performances without any certainty as to whether what he was doing really was really art or not (Kaprow, 1993). This gesture embraces conceptual uncertainty as a generative source. Perhaps the next step for experimental designers working with digital technologies is to suspend their absolute commitment to some distinct sphere called "play", or to some self-evidently distinct art form called "game design", and begin designing frameworks for actions that may or may not be considered playful. This project demands a struggle against deep-rooted assumptions about what constitutes a proper game genre and game design method, and to cultivate an attitude of open-minded receptivity to the ambiguities, contingencies and potential risks of human play.

Huizinga himself underscores that the concept of play sometimes cannot be circumscribed within precise conceptual boundaries. Homo Ludens seldom advances rigid definitions. Huizinga's attempt to "define" play in terms of the magic circle, for instance, should not be understood as a set of necessary and sufficient conditions, but as a tentative approximation to regions of life that resist exact categorization. Like a good historian, Huizinga does not shirk away from ambiguity. His entire study can be seen as an effort to speak as precisely as possible about categories and distinctions that cannot be neatly demarcated. Definitions are useful, insofar as they suggest common threads running through heterogeneous manifestations, but they are not meant to function as absolute categories. Thus play both is and is not serious. The difficulty lies in paying attention to important conceptual differences while keeping our descriptive categories sufficiently supple to accommodate ambiguity and vagueness.

Source: Games Studies - the international journal of
computer game research - volume 6 issue, 1 December 2006http://gamestudies.org/0601/articles/rodriges

Mauro Basignani 

Alejandra Peralta