ABSTRACT
Music, theater, dance, poetry, and rituals contain aspects of play, but so do war, science, and law. Historical reenactment facilitates forms of play in the sense that play may be a part of staging the past; children can play with historical toys, or shoot craps. Setting play apart from real life involves a theoretical inconsistency, as it contradicts the claim that play is self-referential and cannot be reduced to anything exterior. Play loses even the suggestion that understanding might have anything to do with the subjectivity of the author or the interpreter. In games that have clear narrative structures, outcomes, and goals and that deal with particular events, the representational element is dominant. In such a game, the play element is restricted to playfully taking part in historical narration. Play theory can offer new vantage points. Mads Daugbjerg, for example, describes the difference between scripted battles performed in front of an audience and tacticals, in which Civil War reenactors improvise.
