Upon his release, he was banned from returning to Leiden. He was held in detention by the Nazis between August and October 1942. In 1942, he spoke critically of his country's German occupiers, comments that were consistent with his writings about Fascism in the 1930s. In 1916 he became member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1915, he was made Professor of General History at Leiden University, a post he held until 1942. He continued teaching as an Orientalist until he became a Professor of General and Dutch History at Groningen University in 1905.
It was not until 1902 that his interest turned towards medieval and Renaissance history. He wrote his doctoral thesis on the role of the jester in Indian drama in 1897. He then studied comparative linguistics, gaining a good command of Sanskrit. Huizinga’s book is a masterpiece of cultural history - worth reading by anyone interested in game studies who wants a sociological perspective and who is interested in the foundational concepts in the field.Born in Groningen as the son of Dirk Huizinga, a professor of physiology, and Jacoba Tonkens, who died two years after his birth, he started out as a student of Indo-European languages, earning his degree in 1895. Failure to understand the rules leads inevitably to choices that break the rules, break the game and shatter the magic circle.
Within the magic circle, the rules of the game hold. The rules of a game are binding and should leave no rule for doubt. “All are temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart” (10) From this notion comes the idea of the magic circle, one of the seminal notions in game studies, positing that there is an ordered and separate space in which the game or play occurs that has its own set of rules distinct from the real world. In my own experience, a game I ran more than thirty years ago could still trigger very clear responses from the players, as the deep meaning of the game generated equally deep roleplaying.įourth, play is bounded in space. Indeed, it isn’t all that hard to find podcasts and YouTube videos of live play sessions of tabletop roleplaying games that demonstrate this. Once finished, however, it finds itself being understood by the players as a distinct and unique cultural experience that everyone shared, can describe, realize was special and meaningful. It doesn’t just occur, rather “it plays itself to an end” (9). Third, play is bound in time and limited. Second, he contrasts “real life” or the ordinary with the playful life, noting that the playful demands that the player separate himself from real life and enter a temporary sphere of activity with its own dispositions and rules. Moreover, while noting that children play because they enjoy playing and adults only seem to do so when they are involved in some kind of ritual, he observes that adults actually enjoy playing as well, if only they would play more.
Huizinga offers four notions that might help us better understand structured play, games and why on a deep level, game-based learning and gamified instruction might themselves work.įirst, he notes play is voluntary. Huizinga writes: “ The more we try to mark off the form we call ‘play’ from other forms apparently related to it, the more the absolute independence of the play-concept stands out….play lies outside the antithesis of wisdom and folly, and equally outside those of truth and falsehood, good and evil: (6). (but not the seriousness of the rules, processes and engagement of play worlds themselves), play serves to show more about other core concepts in cultural history than might be suspected. In its rejection of the “seriousness” of the real world The core argument of Huizinga’s work is simply: “the great archetypal activities of human society are all permeated from play from the start.” (4) Indeed, if as he argues “all play means something” (1), one might reasonably conclude that in fact everything is dependent on play as a primary source of energy and meaning. Published originally in 1938, Huizinga’s seminal work has influenced scholars for generations and in particular was foundational in the work of Roger Caillois, whose Man, Play and Games will be considered in a future installment of this series. Of all the foundational texts in the study of game-based learning, playful learning and gamified instruction, surely Huizinga’s Homo Ludens is primus inter pares. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element In Culture.
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