COLI 289F SUNY at Binghamton Huizingas Theory Computer Games and Narrative Essay Write a 10-page paper summarizing Huizinga’s theory (from both texts) of p

COLI 289F SUNY at Binghamton Huizingas Theory Computer Games and Narrative Essay Write a 10-page paper summarizing Huizinga’s theory (from both texts) of play and analyzing the characteristics of computer games 12pt fonts, double space Copyright 1998. Routledge.
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II
THE PLAY-CONCEPT AS EXPRESSED IN
LANGUAGE
WHEN speaking of playas something known to aU, and when
trying to analyse or define the idea expressed in that word, we
must always bear in mind that the idea as we know it is defined
and perhaps limited by the word we use for it. W ord and idea
are not born of scientific or logical thinking but of creative
language, which means of innumerable languages-for this act
of “conception” has taken place over and over again. Nobody
will expect that every language, in forming its idea of and expression for play, could have hit on the same idea or found a single
word for it, in the way that every language has one definite word
for “hand” or “foot”. The matter is not as simple as that.
We can only start from the play-concept that is common to us,
i.e. the one covered, with slight variations, by the words corresponding to the English word “play” in most modern European
languages. Such a concept, we felt, seemed to be tolerably weU
defined in the foUowing terms: play is a voluntary activity or
occupation executed within certain fixed limits of time and place,
according to rules freely accepted but absolutely binding, having
its aim in itself and accompanied by a feeling of tension, joy and
the consciousness that it is “different” from “ordinary life”. Thus
defined, the concept seemed capable of embracing everything we
c~U “play” in animals, children and grown-ups: games ofstrength
and skill, inventing games, guessing games, games of chance,
exhibitions and performances of all kinds. We ventured to caU the
category “play” one of the most fundamental in life.
Now it appears at once that a general play-category has not
been distinguished with equal definiteness by allianguages everywhere, nor expressed in one word. All peoples play, and play
rcmarkably alike; but their languages differ widely in their conception of play, conceiving it neither as distinctly nor as broadly
as modern European languages do. From a nominalist point of
.iew we might deny the validity of a general concept and say that
for every human group the concept “play” contains just what is
28
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THE PLAY-CONCEPT AS EXPRESSED IN LANGUAGE
29
expressed in the word-or rather words. For it is arguable that
one language has succeeded better than others in getting the
various aspects of play into one word. And such indeed appears
to be the case. One culture has abstracted a general notion of
play much earlier and more completely than another, with the
curious result that there are highly developed languages which
have retained totally different words for the various play-forms
and that this multiplicity of terms has itself impeded the aggregation of all the forms under one head. One is reminded here of the
well-known fact that some of the so-called primitive languages
have words for the different species of a common genus, as for eeJ
and pike, but none for fish.
Various indications convince us that the abstraction of a general
play-concept has been as tardy and secondary in so me cultures
as the play-function itself is fundamental and primary. In this
respect it seems to me highly significant that in none of the
mythologies known to me has play been embodied in a divine or
daemonic figure,l while on the other hand the gods are often
represented as playing. The absence of a common Indo-European
word for playaiso points to the late conception of a general playconcept. Even the Germanic group oflanguages differs widely in
the naming of play and divides it into three compartments.
It is probably no accident that the very peoples who have a
pronounced and multifarious play-“instinct” have several distinct
expressions for the play-activity. I think this is more or less true
of Greek, Sanskrit, Chinese and English. Greek possesses a
curious and specific expression for children’s games in the ending
-inda. In themselves the syllables do not signifY anything; they
merely give to any word the connotation of “playing at something” . -inda is an indeclinable and, linguistically speaking,
underivable suffix. 2 Greek children played sphairinda-at ball;
helkustinda-tug 0′ war; streptinda-a throwing game; basilindaking of the casde. The complete grammatical independence of the
suffix is a symbol, as it were, ofthe underivable nature ofthe playconcept. In contrast to this unique and specific designation of
child-play Greek has no less than three different words for play in
‘Needless to say, Lusus, son or cornpanion of Bacchus and progenitor of the
Lusitanians, is a bookish invention of very late date.
“At best we rnay conjecture sorne affinity with-w6os and hence infer a preindogerrnanic or Aegrean origin. The ending occurs as a verbal suffix in d»’!”öw,
KV».!VÖW, both in tbe sense of “revolving”, variants of d)l.!w and KV».!W. The idea of
“playing” has only a faint echo here.
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30
HOMO LUDENS
general. First of all: 1tOC~o~a.,
the most familiar of the three. Its
etymology is obvious; it means “of or pertaining to the child”, but
is immediately distinguished by its accent from 1tOC~oLoc-childish­
ness. The use of 1tOC~o~a.,
however, is not by any means restricted
to children’s games. With its derivates 1toc(~eLV,
to play, 1toct),lloc,
1toc(yv~ov,
a toy, it serves to denote all kinds of play, even the
highest and most sacred, as we have seen trom the passage in
Plato’s Laws. A note of light-heartedness and carefree joyfulness
seems to be struck in the whole word-group. Compared with
1tOC~o~a.
the other word for play-&oupCJl, &O)Plloc-stays very much
in the background. It is tinged with the idea of the trifling, the
nugatory.
There remains, however, an extensive and very important
domain which in our terminology would co me under the head of
playing but which is not covered in Greek either by 1tOCLOLa. or
&O)PllOC: to wit, matches and contests. The whole of this sphere,
so extremely important in Greek life, is expressed by the word
ci)’wv. We can weH say that an essential part of the play-concept
is concealed in the field of operation of the ci)’wv. At the same
time we must ask whether the Greeks were not right to make a
verbal distinction between contest and play. It is true that the
element of “non-seriousness”, the ludic factor proper, is not as a
rule explicitly expressed in the word ci)’wv. Moreover, contests
of every description played such an enormous part in Greek
culture and in the daily life of every Greek that it might seem
overbold to dass so great a section of Greek civilization with
“play”. This indeed is the point of view taken by Professor
Bolkestein in his criticism of my opinions to the contrary.l He
reproaches me with having “illegitimately induded the Greek
contests, which range from those rooted in ritual to the most
trifling, in the play-category”. He goes on: “When speaking of
the Olympic games we inadvertently make use of a Latin term
which expresses a Roman valuation of the contests so designated,
totally different from the valuation of the Greeks themselves”.
After enumerating a long series of agonistic activities showing how
the competitive impulse dominated the whole of Greek life, my
critic condudes: “All this has nothing to do with play-unless one
would assert that the whole oflife was play for the Greeks!”
In a certain sense such indeed will be the contention of this
IProceedings Q[ the 17th Congress Q[ Dutch Philologists, Leyden, 1937, where he refers
to my rectoral address on “The Borderline between Play and Seriousness in Culture”.
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THE PLAY-CONCEPT AS EXPRESSED IN LANGUAGE
31
book. Despite my admiration for Professor Bolkestein’s lasting
and lucid interpretation ofGreek culture, and despite the fact that
Greek is not alone in linguistically distinguishing between contest
and play, I am fervently convinced of their underlying identity.
Since we shall have to return again and again to this conceptual
distinction I shall confine myselfhere to one argument only. The
agon in Greek life, or the contest anywhere else in the world, bears
all the formal characteristics ofplay, and as to its function belongs
almost wholly to the sphere of the festival, which is the playsphere. It is quite impossible to separate the contest as a cultural
function from the complex “play-festival-rite”. As to why the
Greek language makes this remarkable terminological distinction
between play and contest, this might, in my opinion, be explained
as follows. The conception of a general, all-embracing and
logically homogeneous play-concept is, as we have seen, a rather
late invention oflanguage. From very early on, however, sacred
and profane contests had taken such an enormous place in Greek
sociallife and gained so momentous a value that people were no
longer aware of their play-character. The contest, in all things
and on every occasion, had become so intense a cultural function
that the Greeks felt it as quite “ordinary”, something existing in
its own right. For this reason the Greeks, possessing as they did
two distinct words for play and contest, failed to perceive the
essential play-element in the latter very clearly, with the result
that the conceptual, and hence the linguistic, union never took
place. 1
As we shall see, Greek terminology does not stand alone in the
matter of play. Sanskrit too has at least four verbal roots for the
play-concept. The most general word for playing is kridati,
denoting the play of animals, children and grown-ups. Like the
word “play” in the Germanic languages it also serves for the
movement of wind or waves. It can mean hopping, skipping, or
dancing in general without being expressly related to playing in
particular. In these latter connotations it approximates to the
root nrt, which covers the whole field of the dance and dramatic
performances. Next there is divyati, meaning primarily gambling,
dicing, but also playing in the sense of joking, jesting, trifling,
making mock of. The original meaning appears to be throwing,
lThis argument does not occur in the German edition of Huizinga’s book, and the
presentation of it in his own English version is somewhat obscure. It is hoped that
the drift of bis argument has been re-constructed without undue distortion. Trans.
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HOMO LUDENS
32
casting; but there is a further connection with shining and
radiance.1 Then, the root las (whence viläsa) combines the me anings of shining, sudden appearance, sudden noise, blazing up,
moving to and fro, playing and “pursuing” an occupation (as in
the German “etwas treiben”). Lastly, the noun lilä, with its
denominative verb lilayati (the primary sense ofwhich is probably
rocking, swinging), expresses all the light, aerial, frivolous, effortless and insignificant sides of playing. Over and above this,
however, lUä is used in the sense of “as if”, to denote “seeming”,
“imitation”, the “appearance” of things, as in the English “like”,
“likeness” or German “gleich”, “Gleichnis”. Thus gajalilayä
(literally: “with elephant play”) means “like an elephant”;
gäjendralila (literally: “elephant-play-man”) means a man representing an elephant or playing the elephant. In all these denominations of play the semantic starting-point seems to be the
idea of rapid movement-a connection found in many other
languages. This is not to say, of course, that in the beginning the
words denoted rapid movement ex:clusively and were only later
applied to play. To my knowledge, the contest as such is not expressed by any of the play-words in Sanskrit; oddly enough there
is no specific word for it, although contests of the most various
kinds were common in Ancient India.
Professor Duyvendak’s friendly help allows me to say something
about the Chinese ex:pressions for the play-function. Here too
there can be no grouping of all the activities we are wont to
regard as play, under one head. Most important is the word wan,
in which ideas of children’s games predominate, but extending its
semantic range to the following special meanings: to be busy, to
enjoy something, to trifte, to romp, to jest, to crack jokes, to make
mock of. It also means to finger, to feel, to ex:amine, to sniff at,
to twiddle little ornaments, and finally to enjoy the moonlight.
Hence the semantic starting-point would seem to be “handling
something with playful attention”, or “to be lightly engrossed”.
The word is not used for games of skill, contests, gambling or
theatrical performances. For this, for orderly dramatic play,
Chinese has words which belong to the conceptual field of “position”, “situation”, “arrangement”. Anything to do with contests
is ex:pressed by the special word cheng, the perfect equivalent of
the Greek agon; apart from which sai denotes an organized contest
for a prize.
lWe must leave to one side a possible connection with tfyu-the dear sky.
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THE PLAY-CONCEPT AS EXPRESSED IN LANGUAGE
33
To Professor Uhlenbeck, my former colleague at Leyden, 1 am
indebted for examples showing how the play-concept is expressed
in one of the so-called primitive languages-Blackfoot, one of the
Algonkin group. The verbal stern koani serves for all children’s
games. It is not connected with the name of any particular game;
it means child’s-play in general. As soon as it is a quest ion of the
games of grown-ups or half-grown-ups, however, they no longer
speak of them as koani, even if it is the same games that children
play. On the other hand, koani now comes back again, curiously
enough, in the erotic sense and especially for illicit relationshipsas we would say, “dallying”. Organized play according to rules
is called kachtsi, and this also applies to games of chance as weIl as
to games of skill and strength. Here the semantic element is
“winning” and “competing”. The relationship between koani
and kachtsi, therefore, resembles that between 7tIXL8LIX and &ywv in
Greek, except that the Blackfoot terms are verbs, not nouns, and
that games of chance, which in Greek would come under 7tlXf~c.u,
in Blackfoot come in the category of the agonistic. Everything
that belongs to the sphere of magie and religion, i.e. dances and
ceremonial, is expressed neither by koani nor kachtsi. Blackfoot has
two separate words for “winning”: amots for winning a contest, a
race, or agame, but also for winning in battle-in this case in the
sense of “playing havoc” or “running amok”; and skets or skits,
used exc1usively for winning games and sports. To all appearances
the play-sphere proper and the agonistic sphere are completely
merged in the latter word. There is, further, a special word for
betting: apska. A very singular feature is the possibility of giving
any verb a secondary meaning of “for fun”, “not seriously” by
adding the prefix kip-, literally “merely so”, or “only”. Thus, for
instance, aniu means “he says”; kipaniu, “he says for a joke”, or
“he only s;;,ys”.
All in all, the conception and expression of play in Blackfoot
would seem to be akin to, though not identical with, Greek.
So we have already found three languages in which the words
for contest are distinct from those for play, namely Greek,
Sanskrit and Chinese, while Blackfoot draws the line slightly
differently. Should we therefore inc1ine after all to Professor
Bolkestein’s opinion that this linguistic division corresponds to a
deep-seated sociological, psychological and biological difference
between play and contest? Not only does the whole ofthe anthropological material to be expounded hereafter, militate against
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HOMO LUDENS
34
such a conclusion, but so does the linguistic counter-evidence.
Over against the languages we have just named we can set a whole
series of others, equally discrete, which may be shown to present
a wider conception of play. Apart from most of the modern
European languages this holds good of Latin, J apanese and at
least one of the Semitic tongues.
As to Japanese, Professor Rahder’s kind help has enabled me
to offer a few remarks. In contrast to Chinese and very like the
modern languages of the West, it has a single, very definite word
for the play-function and, in conjunction with this, an antonym
denoting se’riousness. The substantive aso bi ,and the verb asobu
mean: play in general, recreation, relaxation, amusement, passing
the time or pastime, a trip or jaunt, dissipation, gambling, idling,
lying idle, being unemployed. They also serve for: playing at
something (e.g. the fool) , representing something, imitation.
Noteworthy too is “play” used in the sense ofthe limited mobility
of a wheel, tool or any other structure, just as in Dutch, German
and English. 1 Asobu, again, means to study under a teacher or
at a university, which is reminiscent ofthe Latin word ludus in the
sense of school. It can also mean jugglery, i.e. a sham-fight, but
not the contest as such: here again there is another if slightly
different demarcation between contest and play. Lastly, asobu
is the word used for those J apanese aesthetic tea-parties where
ceramics are passed admiringly from hand to hand amid utterances of approbation. Associations with rapid movement, shining
a nd jesting seem to be lacking here.
A closer investigation oftheJapanese conception ofplay would
lead us more deeply into the study ofJapanese culture than space
allows. The following must suffice. The extraordinary earnestness
and profound gravity of the Japanese ideal of life is masked by
the fashionable fiction that everything is only play. Like the
chevalerie of the Christian Middle Ages, J apanese bushido took shape
almost entirely in the play-sphere and was enacted in play-forms.
The language still preserves this conception in the aso base-koto ba
(literally play-Ianguage) or p…
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