Authors: Tom Chatfield
For many years the conviction has grown upon me that civilization arises and unfolds in and as play … Civilization will, in a sense, always be played according to certain rules, and true civilization will always demand fair play. Fair play is nothing less than good faith expressed in play terms. Hence the cheat or the spoil-sport shatters civilization itself. To be a sound culture-creating force this play-element must be pure. It must not consist in the darkening or debasing of standards set up by reason, faith or humanity. It must not be a false seeming, a masking of political purposes behind the illusion of genuine play-forms. True play knows no propaganda; its aim is in itself, and its familiar spirit is happy inspiration.
The writer was Johan Huizinga, one of the greatest and most influential of cultural historians. In 1942 he was taken hostage by the Nazis and imprisoned, dying in 1945 from ill health. Yet he chose, in his last published work, to address a topic that all his life had seemed to him of the most profound human significance – that of play.
Huizinga entitled his book
Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture
(
Homo Ludens
means ‘Man the Player’). Its central thesis was that in the human sense of fun there was something that lay outside of, and provided a vital counterbalance to, the potentially dark forces of ambition, discipline and reason. Writing on the eve of one of the bleakest decades in human history, Huizinga argued that true civilisation demanded the presence of ‘happy inspiration’ within even the most serious matters of justice, government, warfare and education. Far from seeing play as irrelevant at such a time, it seemed to him all the more urgent to make the case for the vital force of this ‘play-element’ in a world that had proved all too easily manipulated by the postures of authoritarian ideology.
Huizinga, whose work has become a touchstone for many writers on the theory of games, could scarcely have imagined what this world might hold six decades after his death. Yet at least some of his hopes have proved prophetic. Today, the swelling pressure of play can be felt across the world in business, in communications, in politics, in leisure: a discipline capable of smuggling the art back into science, and the human touch back into the mirthless and dogmatic.
Inequalities of wealth and opportunity have kept this movement mainly confined to more developed nations thus far, yet this pressure remains an essentially popular one. It’s more than an economic fact that the allure of conventional consumer products, and of conventional earning opportunities, is increasingly being trumped among millions of people by a very different hierarchy of priorities. These games must somehow be paid for, of course, as well as produced, but the impulses they satisfy and stir up are quite a different thing to the worthy world of ‘work’ as it was conceived at the beginning of the modern era. Video games symbolise the ongoing story of the development of the mass media, writ larger than ever before: the human hunger for tales, for fiction, for the playful and the titillating, for delight and distraction.
For all their economic potential, there is something essentially subversive in games that has the force to crack open even the great playground of capitalism. Games tend to expose the element of play in all things: the fantasy of money, the magical abstractions of a name. They represent a refuge from the world, too, with the potential to be more than merely an exercise in evasion and irresponsibility: something that can function both as a critique of what is lacking in many lives and as a channel through which those lives might be changed.
If video games are at root both a popular and a populist art, with all the opportunities for pandering and crudity that that implies, they are also uniquely refined in their dedication not simply to visceral gratification, but to abstract and defiantly individual delight. What we learn about ourselves through them may change the way we conceive of, and seek to govern, the societies we inhabit; and it will certainly transform the ways in which we understand and regulate everything from property to employment to identity.
Johan Huizinga was above all a historian of the Middle Ages, a period that he described as ‘brimful of play: the joyous and unbuttoned play of the people, full of pagan elements that had lost their sacred significance and been transformed into jesting and buffoonery, or the solemn and pompous play of chivalry’. What might he have thought, had he had a glimpse of the world a century after his death and been able to watch countless people spending their time within quasi-medieval fictional worlds, whiling away their afternoons gathering virtual resources to be used in the crafting of armour or weapons, or in funding a fine castle for their virtual selves to inhabit? He would, perhaps, have glimpsed in this strange and gleefully anachronistic pillaging of times past a cultural force not so different to old Europe’s own ‘joyous and unbuttoned’ borrowings in the service of fun. And he couldn’t fail to notice just how profound an influence certain medieval, or pseudo-medieval, notions have had on these worlds, from guilds and trades to chivalry and legends.
Huizinga might have been appalled, delighted or merely bemused by the curious reversals inherent in any virtual world – people undertaking menial and entirely fictional tasks in order to gain the kind of simple satisfactions absent from the daily texture of their lives. Then again, it has always been the essential character of play that its objectives are valued as they are experienced, and not for anything inherent or enduring in them, a fact close to the heart of its ability to supplant worldly logic with an altogether more mercurial set of relations.
In the end, we share one question in common with every other age: will our creations seduce us away from the task of making the world we are born into a better one; or can they help us to civilise it and ourselves? Games alone cannot teach us what it means to live a good life any more than they can by themselves drive us into narcissism or failure. But they can, if we are able to understand and use them well enough, play a powerful part in our struggle to live both more happily and better.
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