ABSTRACT
The classical work Homo ludens (1938) by Dutch historian Johan Huizinga is constantly revisited and generally understood as an indisputable point of departure in the academic debate about modern play (see the introductory chapter of this volume). Huizinga’s work is currently used as a standard reference for game designers (e.g. Crawford 2003; Salen and Zimmerman 2004) and in game studies (e.g. Consalvo 2009; Copier 2005; Taylor 2006; Dibbell 2006). It has even been argued that Huizinga is a “pop icon in game studies”, while his seventy-five year old theory about play anachronistically functions as a “prehistory” and legitimation of this emergent discipline (Pargman and Jakobsson 2008, 227). At the heart of Huizinga’s conceptualization of play lies a rigid distinction between real life and the game – play is an act set apart by hermetically sealed boundaries. Huizinga famously claimed play is a “free activity” standing quite consciously outside “ordinary” life as being “not serious”, whereas “it proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space” (1955, 13). To emphasize the self-referential and the sublime or even sacred nature of play, Huizinga used the concept of a “magic circle”. This “magic circle”, he argued, protects the freedom of play so as to enable it to bring “a temporary, a limited perfection […] into an imperfect world and into the confusion of life” (ibid., 10). For Huizinga, the concept of a “magic circle” was not just a loose metaphor. In the opening chapter of Homo ludens, he repeatedly emphasizes the affinity between the activity of play and the sacred. For instance, he writes: “[t]he concept of play merges quite naturally with that of holiness”, and “[t]he ritual act, or an important part of it, will always remain within the play category, but in this seeming subordination the recognition of its holiness is not lost” (ibid., 25, 27).
