ABSTRACT
The human activity of playing games can be traced back to prehistoric times, and scholars from various disciplines have concluded that the gaming urge is part of the conditio humana, in the sense that it has its roots in the social aspect of human beings – ‘game’ probably derives from an old Germanic word that means ‘participation, communion’ (OED). In 1938, Johan Huizinga, one of the founding figures of modern games studies, famously claimed that the activity of playing even exceeds the human: ‘Play is older than culture, for culture, however inadequately defined, always presupposes human society, and animals have not waited for man to teach them their playing.’ 1 Still, human gaming practices can and must be historicised to see how the activity of playing specific games was shaped by and shaped a particular culture at a particular time. As an integral element of early modern popular culture, games were a highly productive and contested part of the cultural fabric. In some cases the rules and playing procedures of early modern games have been lost, so that we know that certain games existed but have no hermeneutic access to them any more – always presupposing that we can identify them as games in the first place.
