Ludoarchaeology

The Document

On February 25, 2013, the team finally found a document (Figure 2) dated January 21, 1945, that was confirmed to be a manuscript page of a major revision of Huizinga’s Homo Ludens. Paper quality, analysis of coffee stains, and radiocarbon dating proved that the document could be traced to the period between 1940 and 1946. This archaeological discovery is a milestone in the theory of games and play and has been warmly welcomed by the Australian Archaeological Society, the Royal Archaeological Society of Great Britain, and the Dutch Huizinga Foundation.

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Figure 2.

Page 41, annotated, 21 January 1945.

Figure 2: Page 41, annotated, 21 January 1945. In English translation:

…a free activity standing quite consciously outside “ordinary” life as being “not serious,” but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner. It promotes the formation of social groupings which tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress their difference from the common world by disguise or other means. (Huizinga, 1949, p. 28)

The text consists of an annotated version of page 41 from the 1938 edition of Homo Ludens with comments written in Dutch, English, and German handwriting. The notion that play worked “according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner” (Huizinga, 1949, p. 13) is shown here to be contested by Huizinga later in life. This essay considers how this revelation might reconfigure Huizinga’s views about rules and order. In particular, we show why game studies in 1945 utilized a notably different set of words and ideas than they did in 1938 and draw attention to the cultural ramifications therein.

No Country for Old Men (or Games Scholars)

The years 1938 and 1945 marked a gradual transformation from an alleged sense of “rules and order” to an inescapable “terror and chaos” for Germany and the whole of Europe. In 1938, Hitler prepared for war (and genocide) by creating the High Command of the Armed Forces. While Huizinga published Homo Ludens in Leyden, the Reichskristallnacht happened all over Germany. Two hundred and sixty-seven synagogues were burned, 7,500 Jewish businesses were destroyed, 91 Jewish citizens were killed, and at least 25,000 were arrested. ¹ The next year, World War II began and millions of soldiers and civilians were killed directly and indirectly. The war lasted until 1945, the year when Huizinga died. Not even the most idealistic anthropology could have maintained a merry tone with the world having turned from modernity to barbarity. The suggestion that playfulness might exist as an interest-free human activity that emancipates mankind and contributes to cultural progress must have sounded cynical in this context.

Theodor Adorno, one of the most important critics of Huizinga’s theory, famously said that “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today” (1949, reprinted in Prisms, p. 34). ² Ideas and notions like the free man, proper rules, or orderly manner, once common in philosophy and anthropology, must have sounded completely absurd, if not corrupt, in 1945. By invoking poetry, Adorno implies much more than the traditional practice of writing poems, he is expressing his cynicism about the power of writing in the face of barbarism. Here, poetry refers to an anthropologic quality of free activity that can be likened to Huizinga’s idea of ludic activity. Like Huizinga’s play, Adorno’s poetry cannot be forced to happen, and it can never force others to do anything. Like play, poetry is connected with no material interest. Poïesis is etymologically derived from the terms πoίησις and πoιέω, which means “to create.” Therefore, culture must be poetic, as it is the totality of human creation. Since poetry within barbarity is impossible, Adorno locates poetry within culture. Similarily, Huizinga locates the play element within culture.

There is a third position that must be mentioned here. Like Huizinga and Adorno, Marcel Mauss argued that a fundamental quality of human interaction must exist outside the rationality of exchange and of monetary interest. He proposed that the gift was an alternative to the rationalist calculation of capitalist exchange (Mauss, 1923/1924). To give without any expectation for pay allows us to act without alienation in a way that differs considerably from the exchange of commodities with the aim of profit making. George Bataille (1975) used Mauss’s conception of the gift to justify the possibility of a human sovereignty within economic systems. For Bataille, play fosters a type of sacrifice that resembles a gift. The game considered as a free activity—as Huizinga (1938) might argue—was interpreted here in opposition to alienated work. Gaming and labor became diametrically opposed, and the “sacred” within play was a source of hope to escape the master–slave dialectic of capital–labor relationships. In this regard, Bataille differs essentially from how Adorno and Benjamin thought about gaming: For Adorno (1984, p. 371), the “repetitiveness of gaming” is nothing but “an after-image of involuntary servitude”; “Nachbild von unfreier Arbeit”; Adorno, 1970, p. 401) and for Benjamin, the gamer’s actions resemble those of the proletarian worker, as they perform what is deprived of all meaning, the “drudgery of the player” (“Fron des Spielers”; Benjamin, 1939, pp. 72–33). ³

Why did the synchronous works of Benjamin and Huizinga, who shared a profound historical knowledge, a deep interest into play, and an admiration for European cultural values, differ so strongly in their appreciation of play? Although both authors were persecuted by the Third Reich, they maintained a strong commitment to Germany as a cultural home, to German as a language, and to humanistic ideas that were rooted in a German tradition of idealistic philosophy. Huizinga wrote some of his publications in German and studied at Leipzig in Germany. Benjamin always stayed connected with his political and academic friends in Germany.

If Huizinga had rewritten Homo Ludens in 1945, it would have marked a radical change in his conception of both playfulness and the freedom of play. We must read his statement from 1938 about play as an activity that is free of any interest and his description of players as “social groupings which tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress their difference from the common world” (Huizinga, 1949, p. 13) either as an escapist tactical move or as a description of academia and the free world hoping not to be affected by barbarity. Huizinga and his contemporaries must have viewed playfulness as a promesse de bonheur for a better world. It is specifically read in opposition to barbarity in Huizinga’s anthropological examples.

Playfulness is an easier tactic to implement than resistance. Even Benjamin, who was completely aware of the necessity for resistance against the terror regime, had his moments of escapism. That is why his good friend Berthold Brecht had criticized him in a poem: “Am Schachtisch sitzend in des Birnbaums Schatten/Der Feind, der dich von deinen Büchern jagte/Läßt sich von unsereinem nicht ermatten.” (“At the chessboard seated in the pear tree’s shade/The Enemy then drove you from your books/The likes of us? Ground down, outplayed”; Brecht, 1941, p. 828.) Brecht’s insight was that activities like playing chess, which are supposedly free of interest, do not contribute to the struggle against barbarity. Brecht criticized Benjamin, but he would have been even more critical with Huizinga had he known his proposition that a social group can “stress their difference from the common world by disguise … ” (Huizinga, 1949, p. 13). The argument that Brecht pronounced so well in his short poem was later reiterated in precise detail when Adorno criticized Huizinga’s theoretical standpoint. Adorno did not allow for a difference between “magic circle” and “common world” when he wrote about the “repetitiveness” of play and followed up on the suggestion of Benjamin to compare the players’ activities with those of the workers in a factory.

It must be said that Huizinga had never used the notion of a magic circle with a direct reference to games. Huizinga states that there is no formal difference between arena and magic circle, but he does not propose that playgrounds are “consecrated spots” or “hedged round by magic circles.” ⁴ This is rather an idea introduced and promoted by Salen and Zimmerman (2003b). Zimmerman (2012) claims that “Frank Lantz and Katie Salen have more or less invented the concept.” He obviously had a rather pragmatic concept of the magic circle in mind, when he talked about it in Rules of Play (2003b): “The magic circle is the idea that a boundary exists between a game and the world outside the game.” Not at all referring to what Huizinga believed to be the sacred or the magic of play, Zimmerman declared in a profane manner: “In my opinion, design concepts (such as the magic circle as described in Rules of Play) derive their value from their utility to solve problems. Their value is not derived from their scientific accuracy or proximity to truth” (Zimmerman, 2012, p. 585). No wonder he was praised for this pragmatic approach by a few and blamed by many. Gordon Calleja’s critique of Zimmerman’s viewpoint and rhetoric noted that Huizinga’s concept of a protected zone had its roots in a discourse of cultural studies and that it was Zimmerman who dragged the notion into design theory and practice. A conference in Tampere entitled Breaking the Magic Circle ⁵ was one of the events where scholars tried to come to terms with the magic circle concept of Salen and Zimmerman that has often been wrongly attributed to Huizinga. Annakaisa Kultima and Frans Mäyrä noted in their contributions to the debate “that the notion of magic circle was still fruitful for facilitating discussions from different perspectives” and “focused on the playful acts and attitudes that produce identity for any ‘game’, ‘game player’, or ‘game world’, and also on the necessarily dialectical nature of such productive differentiating gestures.” (Kultima & Mäyrä, 2007)

Mäyrä and Kultima propose a dialectical method that the late Huizinga would need to have adapted—as I suggest—and that the pre–World War II Huizinga might have lacked. What I want to say here is, if Huizinga has indeed extended an anthropological concept of play into a dialectic theory of play, player, and play worlds, it would have been a consistent next step to include the sociopolitical world—beyond play worlds—in the equation.

Of Huizinga, Adorno (1984) wrote, “He fails to realize how much the element of play is itself an afterimage of praxis rather than of semblance. In all play, action has fundamentally divested itself of any relation to purpose, but in terms of its form and execution the relation to praxis is maintained” (p. 401). Adorno grabs Huizinga’s text by the metaphorical notion of “disguise” and talks about play having “divested itself” of purpose. He replaces Huizinga’s somewhat blurry notion of the “common world” ⁶ with “praxis,” or socially relevant action. Praxis and labor are key factors in a tradition of materialist Marxist theory for the formation of society and should not be undermined in importance by either “the sphere of play” or a mysterious magic circle. Adorno (1984) remarks:

The element of repetition in play is the afterimage of unfree labour, just as sports—the dominant extraaestetic form of play—is reminiscent of practical activities and continuously fulfils the function of habituating people to the demands of praxis above all by the reactive transformation of physical displeasure into physical pleasure, without noticing that the contraband of praxis has slipped into it. (p. 401)

But neither Adorno’s sharp remarks nor Roger Caillois’ attention on gambling with monetary interests (Caillois, 2001) stopped generations of games scholars from repeating the formula of the magic circle and reiterating Huizinga’s dichotomy of work and play. Georg Lauteren (2007, p. 2) finds it “surprising … how much effort is spent reconciling an almost 70 year-old model of thinking with a contemporary subject of investigation” and accuses Salen and Zimmerman (2003a), Montola (2005), Harvey (2006), and Rodriguez (2006) of doing so.

Paradise Lost, Beauty Gone

The differences between Huizinga’s appreciation of the play element and Benjamin, Adorno, and Bataille’s views on play can be traced back to their idealistic or materialistic standpoints, respectively. Huizinga never references Friedrich Schiller directly, but the way he contextualizes play points directly to the position Schiller developed in the Aesthetic Letters (1794). “Playing, so we say, has a certain inclination to be beautiful,” (Huizinga, 1949, p. 19) says Huizinga in a Schillerian tone. Huizinga’s statement is actually a resonance of Friedrich Schiller’s famous phrase: “ … man should only play with beauty, and play only with beauty” (Schiller, 2000, p. 62). Though Huizinga differs from Friedrich Schiller’s idea of a “play instinct” and dismisses it explicitly, he sticks to “the idealistic concept of playing as an inexplicable ‘last’, which remains ultimately resistant to empirical investigation” (Lauteren, 2007, p. 3). But, as I have pointed out earlier, an idealistic interpretation of play turned unthinkable and unspeakable in 1938 due to the grotesque barbarity of Nazi Germany. Briefly after the war, Jürgen Habermas phrased what was evident even before World War II: “And where it ever had existed, the unity of work and play dissolved” (Habermas, 1958, p. 220). Habermas acts here as the voice of both the Frankfurt School and a specific approach to dialectical materialism and the possible relationship between labor and play. It is not by chance, therefore, that Habermas shares the beliefs promoted by Benjamin, Adorno, and Bataille, that labor and play are two different things that might have an influence on each other but that never can be harmonized as one. ⁷

Huizinga’s Doubt

The book Homo Ludens was published in Dutch in 1938, translated into German in 1944 and then English in 1949. Many of its key notions, like the magic circle, were not christened as such by Johan Huizinga. Additionally, the critiques that Adorno, Habermas, Bataille, and Caillois penned so convincingly had only been written after the drastic changes in viewing society, culture, and civilization which followed World War II. But, it is clear from the evidence presented in this study that Huizinga (1938, p. 41) was also apprehensive about his ideas such as “vrije handeling, die als ‘niet gemeend’ en buiten het gewone leven staande bewust is.” (“free activity standing quite consciously outside ‘ordinary’ life”; Huizinga, 1949, p. 28). There are a few sections in Homo Ludens where Huizinga struggles with his own concept. Is war of a playful nature? Huizinga says on page 210: “Modern warfare has, on the face of it, lost all contact with play” (Huizinga, 1949, p. 210). On the same page, he speaks about his “gnawing doubt whether war is really play.” He comes to the conclusion at one point, that “war has not freed itself from the magic circle,” but keeps the reader uninformed why this is “despite appearances to the contrary.” (Huizinga, 1949, p. 210) Considerations like these show Huizinga’s awareness that the materiality of the world was in direct conflict with his idealistic concepts.

While Huizinga is remembered for an optimistic appreciation of the play element which views it as a noble activity that enhances culture and is constituted within culture, he is actually quite pessimistic: “A happier age than ours made bold to call our species by the name of Homo Sapiens” (Huizinga, 1949, first page of the unpaginated foreword). This shows that Huizinga was aware of both the changes being implemented in 1938 by the Third Reich and horrors yet to come when he introduced his theory of the Homo Ludens that is often read in defense of “free activity,” “fixed rules,” and “orderly manner” (Huizinga, 1949, p. 28). The Homo Ludens of 1938 was not an unproblematic, cheerful guy sitting on a hill or inside a magic circle, but he was in serious doubt and probably in deep despair. No matter whether the documents mentioned in the beginning of this text are authentic or not: Everything points toward the possibility that, if Huizinga had revised his book in 1945, he would have revised it as the excavated pages show.