Traveling to Microworlds Part 5 “Homo Ludens”

Homo Ludens

Comparing this with Dutch historian Johan Huizinga’s view on play and games in his 1938 essay Homo Ludens, which has been so influential in contemporary game studies, we see something interesting. According to Huizinga, games in human society are always superfluous. We play because we have the need. “…all play is a voluntary activity. Play to order is no longer play: it could at best be but a forcible imitation of it. By this quality of freedom alone, play marks itself off from the course of the natural process. It is something added thereto and spread out over it like a flowering, an ornament, a garment.”[1]

Looking back at the arguments made earlier in this paper, one might say that playing video games can be completely voluntary, but is not a superfluous activity because of its function to let you step outside your own frame of mind and into another. Huizinga offsets human play against play in the animal kingdom. “[Animals] must play because their instincts drive them to it and because it serves to develop bodily faculties and their powers of selection.”[2] Is this not the same for human beings, then? Do we not play to develop our bodies and mind when we look at it as stepping into an alternative frame of mind? Gee and Shaffer have already proven that at least some games -depending on their epistemologies and the way in which they allow for active and critical learning, are more than superfluous. They offer players a different frame of mind, a journey to another microworld from which they bring experience and knowledge back to their ‘own’ world.

I have challenged the notion that games need to be specifically designed to teach an epistemic frame or semiotic domain in order to be useful or educational because every game offers a new frame of mind to step out into. To illustrate this, let us look at a type of genre of video game that counts both epistemic or educational titles in its library and commercial games made purely to entertain: the army game.

• Part 1 Introduction
• Part 2 Broadening your horizons
• Part 3 Epistemic games
• Part 4 Semiotic domains and their similarity to travel
• Part 5 Homo Ludens
• Part 6 Case in point: waging war as frame of mind
• Part 7 Conclusion & References.

[1] . Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (New York: Roy Publishers, 1950) pp. 7.

[2] . Ibid., pp. 7-8.