Homo Ludens

Johan Huizinga, I had a friend who had the last name mispronounced that way, so I'm sorry if it's wrong, but H-U-I-Z-I-N-G-A.

He wrote a book called Homo Ludens from 1938 that is one of the foundational texts for the modern way we talk about games.

And he points out that play isn't something that comes from culture.

It actually creates culture.

So, um, but the, yeah, uh, Greg, why don't you tell us about the other major new feature, the letter narrative book club?

so the idea of the book club is that we will basically run a book club through discord where you can sign up with one of the three of us and we are going to read books that are not specifically game books but which are connected to them so uh oh was it james were you the one claiming homo ludens uh

i did not in the end oh

that's that was ross's yeah ross beat you out for that uh i'm probably gonna do robin laws uh robin's loss of good game mastering and hamlet's hit points because they're they're not that long so we can get two in there and it'll just be your basic book club uh set up where it's like okay yeah at this time we're all gonna get on discord and talk about we'll have read chapters one through eight and we'll drink some red wine and uh talk about what we thought about hamlet's hit points

Yeah.

Those are the two I'm doing.

Ross, you said Homo Ludens.

And Homo Book of Game

Well, let's begin with our wonderful audience by asking those who feel like doing some hard reading.

Not everyone needs to do this, but a very interesting Dutchman named Huizinga, I won't try to spell it, wrote a book, Jane, called Homo Ludens, H-O-M-O-L-U-D-E-N-S, which means man at play.

Okay.

Okay.

It's still a classic about Europe between about 1450 and 1550.

And then 20 years later, he writes this book, Homo Ludens, about basically like offering a definition of a game as a kind of serious games.

Like when I was talking about earlier, a lot of that goes back to Huizinga's work that he makes the case that, you know, like a courtroom is a game.

You know, that this form of the game is actually like a sort of key aspect of human culture all the way back.

I've been researching this for months now, and this is a pretty heady philosophical territory that people have a lot of different theories ranging from sociology and psychology and beyond.

But I'm just going to talk about one definition of play, and that is one that comes to us from Johan Huizinga, the Dutch author who wrote the book Homo Ludens, that really advanced this field of study.

And so I'm going to read the definition and then I'm going to break it down piece by piece.

So Huizinga says, "...play is a free activity standing quite consciously outside ordinary life as being not serious, but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly." It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it.

But.

Huizinga also wrote that play is, quote, one of the main bases of civilization, end quote, in his 1938 book, Homo Ludens, which is Latin for man the player.

Huizinga is the kind of academic we would all like academics to be.

Deeply nerdy, erudite, and willing to speak up for truth and decency, even if it means paying a cost.