Games And Culture In Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens
Human experiences are organized in a particular way when it comes to games and play. This is a starting point that underlines the particularity of play experiences and is closely related to a concept first introduced in Johan Huizinga´s work Homo Ludens; a study of the play-element in culture (1938/1955) known as the “magic circle”, which was later stablished as the key concept to address the boundaries that separate games from the “ordinary life.”
As Huizinga states, “All play moves and has its being within a play-ground marked off beforehand either materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter of course. Just as there is no formal difference between play and ritual, so the “consecrated spot” cannot be formally distinguished from the …show more content…
The display of skill, the pleasure in surpassing oneself or overcoming others, the pursuit of honour or glory or victory for their own sake and other ludic attitudes are pervasive. Homo Ludens was not written merely to mark a superficial analogy or similarity between play and culture. Religion, philosophy, politics and art all present an ineradicably playful aspect. To limit the importance of Huizinga´s study to the narrow sphere of games and toys is clearly to misunderstand his core philosophical aim, which is to regard culture sub specie ludis, under the aspect of play. When we begin to view all culture under the aspect of play, however, the distinction between playful and the serious often becomes irrelevant.” (The Playful and the Serious: An approximation to Huizinga's Homo Ludens by Hector Rodriguez - 2006) * como fazer corretamente a citacao de um …show more content…
All sort of quantitative or function-centred approaches seem to fall short here as well, even the ethnographic ones. On Huizinga´s way of thinking, play stands out as a free and meaningful activity, carried out for its own sake, and being so utterly absorbing that allows us to evade the immediacy of life and, by doing so, play sets its own territory on the soil of “reality”.
In the book Reality is Broken (2011) the north-American game designer and author Jane McGonical, who advocates the use of game thinking and game mechanics in non-game contexts as a means to improve the quality of human life, portrays perfectly the idea of the magic circle as a domain set aside of the everyday experience and through a myth about the Lydians written by
As Huizinga states, “All play moves and has its being within a play-ground marked off beforehand either materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter of course. Just as there is no formal difference between play and ritual, so the “consecrated spot” cannot be formally distinguished from the …show more content…
The display of skill, the pleasure in surpassing oneself or overcoming others, the pursuit of honour or glory or victory for their own sake and other ludic attitudes are pervasive. Homo Ludens was not written merely to mark a superficial analogy or similarity between play and culture. Religion, philosophy, politics and art all present an ineradicably playful aspect. To limit the importance of Huizinga´s study to the narrow sphere of games and toys is clearly to misunderstand his core philosophical aim, which is to regard culture sub specie ludis, under the aspect of play. When we begin to view all culture under the aspect of play, however, the distinction between playful and the serious often becomes irrelevant.” (The Playful and the Serious: An approximation to Huizinga's Homo Ludens by Hector Rodriguez - 2006) * como fazer corretamente a citacao de um …show more content…
All sort of quantitative or function-centred approaches seem to fall short here as well, even the ethnographic ones. On Huizinga´s way of thinking, play stands out as a free and meaningful activity, carried out for its own sake, and being so utterly absorbing that allows us to evade the immediacy of life and, by doing so, play sets its own territory on the soil of “reality”.
In the book Reality is Broken (2011) the north-American game designer and author Jane McGonical, who advocates the use of game thinking and game mechanics in non-game contexts as a means to improve the quality of human life, portrays perfectly the idea of the magic circle as a domain set aside of the everyday experience and through a myth about the Lydians written by