Rhetorical Strategy and Creative Methodology: Revisiting Homo Ludens

Johan Huizinga, much like his work, is difficult to pin down. The difficulties of reading Huizinga and his writing are many, and these difficulties include the far-reaching scope of his intellectual inquiry and the wide range of his scholarly curiosity. Even today, much of his work remains to be translated in English, such as his memoirs, correspondence, and critical collections of his numerous essays that speak on topics ranging from ritual play to chemical warfare. His most famous book of history, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, has received a good deal of scholarly attention because Huizinga was an early theorist who suggested the important role of concepts such as subjectivity, imagination, and literary devices in the writing of history. While somewhat less discussed, Huizinga also conducted considerable research and translation of the works of Erasmus, which still stands as a large and mostly unexplored connection between Huizinga and historians of rhetoric.

More familiar to readers of Games and Culture, of course, is Huizinga’s imaginative and somewhat unique treatment of play in Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (1938/1980), where he tantalizingly wrote, “All play means something” (p. 1). Rhetorical theorist Richard Lanham (1995) has suggested that the “rhetorical analysis of culture begun by Huizinga” provides a powerful justification for returning rhetoric and play to the center of educational purpose. At the same time, however, many interpretations of Huizinga’s writing—both within and outside of game studies—differ on some of his most fundamental claims. Among these is the apparent distinction he maintains between seriousness and play, a binary embodied by his well-known magic circle concept. Play, it would seem, transpires within the temporary, virtual world apart of the magic circle that is distinct in both space and time from the seriousness of the real world. Ian Bogost (2010) has argued that “Johan Huizinga struggled with the ambiguous link between seriousness and play in his classic study” (p. 54), a claim suggestive of how the complex relationship between seriousness and play contributes to the hermeneutic difficulty of Homo Ludens. Composition scholar Albert Rouzie has claimed that Huizinga’s work had the “effect of divorcing play from material reality” (2005, p. 29). Brian Sutton-Smith argued, “Nobody has claimed as much for play before or since” (2001, p. 202) Huizinga, and Roger Caillois critiqued Huizinga’s failure to take seriously “games of chance played for money” (2001, p. 5). More recently, John Ferrara has noted that, while influencing contemporary theories of game design, Huizinga’s writings ultimately “reflect the broad cultural disposition to classify games as purely diversions from real life” (2012, p. 23). Interpretations of Homo Ludens often disagree.

Here, I take the interpretive difficulties surrounding concepts such as play and the magic circle in Huizinga’s writing as exigent for a reconsideration of Homo Ludens. Through a consideration of the archival work of historian William Otterspeer, the political context in which Huizinga lived and wrote, and some of his less discussed essays, I argue that Huizinga purposefully and playfully maintained clashing points of view throughout his life’s work as a methodological strategy for knowledge making. Some of the interpretive difficulty with Homo Ludens can be addressed through an understanding of how Huizinga uses a variety of rhetorical devices—including oxymorons, compounds, and binary oppositions—as a creative methodology. By revisiting Homo Ludens with Huizinga’s creative methodology in mind, I suggest that the best way to understand why Huizinga makes so many contradictory claims about play and the magic circle is by conceiving it as a method for generating knowledge about both.

Purposeful and Playful Contrast: Reading Huizinga

While Huizinga draws heavily from philosophy and anthropology, in America, he is primarily understood as an historian because much of his work focuses on the transformation of culture across various periods (such as the Middle Ages and Renaissance) or the exploration of particular concepts in different cultural settings (such as chivalry in Christian Europe and ancient Japan). Huizinga’s scholarly curiosity, however, transcends any strict disciplinary identity. In the Netherlands, for instance, Huizinga-as-historian is understood within the context of his lifelong interests in linguistics and philology. Huizinga’s historical work can be characterized by its simultaneous impulse to both objectively describe history with language and to imaginatively create history through language. William Otterspeer has stated that Huizinga was “a poet, in the depths of his being” (2011, p. 58). According to Otterspeer, all of Huizinga’s work can be described as “a play of contrasts and reconciliation” (p. 50). Huizinga the historian, in turn, needs to be both contrasted and reconciled with Huizinga the poet. It is impossible, I believe, to fully appreciate Huizinga’s writing in general—and Homo Ludens specifically—without an understanding of how he uses contrasts to create knowledge.

Otterspeer’s book, Reading Huizinga, offers a good sketch of Huizinga’s life and how it informed his scholarship. According to Otterspeer, Huizinga’s life was, from the very beginning, marked by contrast. Huizinga’s father was raised in a devoutly religious household and—while religion, faith, and piety were key parts of Huizinga’s upbringing—his father fell ill with syphilis and then rejected religion in favor of science. His father’s turn from religion was key to Huizinga’s thinking throughout his life, as his family “settled into a framework of contrasts that would determine Huizinga’s thinking for the rest of his life: science versus religion, reason versus feeling, individuality versus community, change versus permanence” (Otterspeer, 2011, p. 25). To read Huizinga is to engage with large and often confusing experiments with binary pairs. For him, such binaries embody contrasting worldviews, and confronting the tension between such contrasts creates the possibility for transformation and the production of humanistic knowledge.

Huizinga’s writing is indeed marked by oppositions, such as seriousness and play that Huizinga uses to create knowledge. From his archival research, Otterspeer points to Huizinga’s own notes from Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, where Huizinga wrote, “Sensuality and chastity are not necessarily opposed; every good marriage, every true love, transcends any such contrast” (p. 26). One result of Huizinga’s methodology is that it can be difficult to reconcile different passages from the same text. Huizinga can sometimes appear as a staunch conservative, other times as a progressive liberal. On one hand, Huizinga might discuss the universal appeal and truth of Christian faith; on the other hand, Huizinga spent a great portion of his life studying and practicing religions of the Far East. He was part of “The Movement,” a group of college students in the Netherlands who advocated “art for art’s sake,” and he wrote that to ignore politics in creative work “was a great mistake” (p. 31). Each version of Huizinga is simultaneously true and incomplete.

The contrasts that characterize Huizinga’s life are analogous to his scholarly pursuits. However, as noted by Kossmann (2014), it was not Huizinga’s purpose to reconcile those contrasts through dialectical process (p. 226). Instead, language served as a technology for creating knowledge through contrast and tension. As an historian, he simultaneously sought for his work to be descriptive and creative. On one hand, he argued that historians must strive to present true and accurate accounts of the past. One the other hand, he wrote, “If we are to preserve culture we must continue to create it” (1936, p. 38). At the Johan Huizinga Conference of 1972—held in Groningen to commemorate what would have been Huizinga’s 100th birthday—Kossmann described this aspect of Huizinga as follows:

Huizinga gives the impression of being various personalities at the same time; man of letters, art critic, immensely accurate scholar, philologist, historian, philosopher of culture, a somewhat solemn and withdrawn professor and a playful mocker, an innovator and conservative, a rationalist and a mystic. (p. 225)

It is Huizinga’s insistence on history as creative and poetic that makes him stand out among historians of his own time. His work is situated firmly within the rise of modernist thinking, and much of the scholarly work around him was rooted in logical or rational methodologies for making and verifying knowledge. Huizinga’s early training, however, was as a linguist. His linguistic training underscores his lifelong interest in the role language plays in creating and shaping belief. Otterspeer claimed that, “As a young linguist, [Huizinga] had opposed a one-sided, rational approach to language” (2011, p. 113). Huizinga hinted to his early, linguistic self in Homo Ludens: “In the course of time we have come to realize that we are not so reasonable after all as the Eighteenth Century, with its worship of reason and its naïve optimism, thought us” (n.p.). Huizinga’s insistence that humanity cannot be adequately understood or defined through a one-sided philosophical system based in logic and rationality not only provides the exigency for his inquiry into play but also demonstrates that his scholarship is always attentive and indebted to language.

Take, for example, Huizinga’s first and most discussed work of history: The Autumn of the Middle Ages. ¹ This book, though read widely by medieval scholars in a variety of languages, was not initially well received in his home country of the Netherlands, despite favorable reviews in France and Germany. According to Hugenholtz, many historians in the Netherlands suggested that the book should be read as a novel, rather than as a work of history, due to Huizinga’s use of nontraditional source materials such as art and narrative accounts of everyday life. Medieval historians of Huizinga’s time tended toward what was known as scientific history, which relied primarily on charters and other official documents to reconstruct the past. Huizinga broke with this tradition because he believed the less scientific, more aesthetic sources he used might “reflect essential aspects of medieval reality” such as fantasy, imagination, and play (Hugenholtz, 2014, p. 93), a move that Hugenholtz has claimed “inspired historians to look at history generally in a totally new manner” (p. 103).

Just as an appreciation of Huizinga’s methodology in The Autumn of the Middle Ages sheds light on his approach to history, I contend that Huizinga’s methodology sheds light on his approach to play in Homo Ludens. To illustrate this point, the remaining pages of this essay discuss: (1) specific rhetorical devices Huizinga uses to structure his work, (2) his simultaneous descriptions of play as both natural and symbolic, and (3) how Huizinga’s political agenda and his philosophical disputes with logical positivism inform his work.

Huizinga the Poet

If Huizinga was, as Otterspeer has claimed, a “poet at heart,” then readers should expect a sense of playfulness to permeate all of Huizinga’s writing. He wrote, “All poetry is born of play” (p. 129), and the poet-player manifests in his prose through a variety of methods. Here, I argue that the playful and poetic moves Huizinga makes in his writing are, in fact, rhetorical strategies used to make knowledge about play. In Otterspeer’s archival work, he describes a wide variety of such strategies that permeate much of Huizinga’s writing. In this section, I use a shortened version Otterspeer’s descriptions and I discuss three rhetorical devices Huizinga relies on in Homo Ludens: oxymorons, compounds, and binary oppositions.

Huizinga uses oxymorons to glean fresh insights into familiar concepts. Huizinga referred to such a practice as “ostensible absurdity that resolves itself into irony” (quoted in Otterspeer, p. 84). For Huizinga, the function of this practice was to keep incompatible concepts at play to create unusual ways of thinking. Such a strategy has a long tradition in rhetorical theory, mostly notably in the work of Kenneth Burke. In Permanence and Change, Burke described this rhetorical move as perspective by incongruity. I quote Burke at length to highlight the concept’s methodological utility:

Were we to summarize the totality of its effects, advocating as an extortion what has already spontaneously occurred, we might say that the planned incongruity should be deliberately cultivated for the purpose of experimentally wrenching apart all those molecular combinations of adjective and noun, substantive and verb, which still remain with us. It should subject language to the same “cracking” process that chemists now use in the refining of oil. (1984, p. 119)

For Burke, perspective by incongruity was a thought experiment. Words, and the conventional ways we tend to pair them—a fine day, a devastating tragedy, a refreshing drink—embody everyday pieties, or “the sense of what properly goes with what” (p. 74). They represent the ways in which we are comfortable perceiving the world. The oxymoron is a way of shocking us into fresh insights and revealing unexpected connections: a purple day, a bombastic tragedy, a tiring drink. Homo Ludens abounds with such wordplay.

For example, a critical aspect of Huizinga’s theory of play rests on his descriptions of play communities as existing apart together (p. 12). Specifically, Huizinga uses the term to describe how players continue to share a bond beyond the act of playing. This could most simply be illustrated through the example of people incidentally meeting on a public basketball court and playing a game. Though they are together in the magic circle of that basketball game and apart once the game is over, they continue to be apart together after the game is over if they, for instance, create a regular game, or join a summer league, or create fan club for their favorite basketball player. Huizinga, however, noting that such continued connections do not always happen, presses this concept even further by suggestions that the feeling of being apart together “retains its magic beyond the duration of the individual game” (p. 12). This point is critical to Huizinga’s conception of play. Magic circles, while temporary worlds apart, also extend beyond the moment of play through the emotional resonances that stay with players. To describe a magic circle is to describe something both permanent and changing, both temporary and everlasting, both apart and together.

Huizinga also uses peculiar compounds and hyphenations for the purpose of precision. In Otterspeer’s description of this practice, he has made it clear that these are not typical compounds, “but more idiosyncratic hyphenations” (p. 85). While the oxymoron provides a fresh perspective on familiar terms through deliberately incongruous pairings, compounds point to a precise characteristic of a concept Huizinga seeks to describe. Like Shakespeare in a sense, Huizinga—ever the poet—simply invents new words once he arrives at the edges of his many languages.

For example, in Homo Ludens, Huizinga creates a wide variety of hyphenated play terms, such as play-concept, play-element, play-instinct, and play-community. These are not merely grammatical hyphenations when understood in the context of Otterspeer’s archival work. When readers understand the ways language is critical to Huizinga’s methodology, these hyphenations become more important. For example, Huizinga uses such compounds in order to describe play as both natural and symbolic. To make this distinction, he creates the compounds play-element and play-concept. Some scholars have previously suggested that Huizinga both maintained a sharp distinction between seriousness and play and that he saw play as nonproductive. A frequently cited passage in Homo Ludens seems to support this notion:

Summing up the formal characteristics of play we might call it 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. (1980, p. 4)

From this definition alone, one might be tempted to label Huizinga’s play theory as nonproductive and divorced from material reality. ² However, this notion is complicated when Huizinga claims that play has its own ontological being. As a “thing,” it is objectively real in the same sense as gravity or dark matter. Evidenced by animal play, it is older than humans and therefore predates language. ³ This means that to study the play-element of culture is to understand how a nonhuman thing is articulated and expressed by people as a play-concept. Baseball, for instance, is one expression of play: In other words, when playing with bats and balls is subjected to certain rule structures that activity emerges as a game. For Huizinga, all humans play, and “it is through this playing that society expresses its interpretation of life and the world” (p. 46).

For example, many have claimed that the rules of baseball express deeply held beliefs in American culture about issues such as religion and social class (Daniel-Wariya, 2012; Evans, 2002; Evans & Herzog, 2002). In this way, playing baseball is an interpretation of America as a culture of equality where everyone gets a “fair deal” and has an equal chance for success. Christopher Evans has claimed, “No other American sport has the symbolic meaning of baseball” (p. 6) because it has so often—however, problematically—been seen as an expression of the “American Dream.” The implications for Huizinga’s conception of play become apparent later in Homo Ludens:

When speaking of the play-element in culture, we do not mean that among the various activities of civilized life an important place is reserved for play, nor do we mean that civilization has arisen out of play by some evolutionary process, in the sense that something which was originally play passed into something that was no longer play and could henceforth be called culture. The view we take in the following pages is that culture arises in the form of play, that it is played in the very beginning. (p. 46)

In other words, if people express their interpretation of the world through play, and if people have been playing since before the emergence of culture, then culture itself must be expressed in part through play. The previous two block quotes provided embody contrasting statements about the character of play: natural/symbolic. Huizinga insisted that play “is an objectively recognizable, a concretely definable thing” (p. 46). In this way, he distinguished between play as a “real” thing and the way cultures express play. This means that when play is subjected to specific sets of rules created through human language it is expressed in the form of a swinging bat and a throw to first base. This play-element is “connected with no material interest.” The play-concept, however, people’s symbolizations of play within rule-bound structures, is connected with material interest. While freely swinging a bat is play in a literal sense that may have no purpose and produce nothing, swinging a bat within the rule-bound context has a specific purpose (getting a hit) and produces things that have meaning and value within that context (a base runner). Huizinga claims that people play in rule-bound spaces of philosophy, art, writing, and even war. The play-concept is a term for humans playing in order to do things in the world of language and symbol that contrasts with the literal play in the world of nature and object.

Huizinga also made frequent use of binary oppositions in his writing in order to develop new ideas that transcend those divisions. This point merits special consideration when it comes to Homo Ludens, as one could reasonably argue that Huizinga’s use of binaries in Homo Ludens is the hermeneutical center of nearly all misunderstandings of his work. While game studies researchers may only have had reason to read Homo Ludens, historians typically take The Autumn of the Middle Ages as his masterpiece. According to Otterspeer, the entire book is structured and made sensible through Huizinga’s use of binary pairs. Otterspeer has suggested that it “was a book full of contrasts—body versus spirit, death versus life, dream versus reality, form versus content, image versus word” (p. 45). For Huizinga, each side of such a binary pair embodied a particular conception of knowledge. In making use of such pairs, Huizinga sought to take seriously the worldview represented by each, and he strove in his writing to keep them in balance.

This balance is both critical to understanding Huizinga and central to what makes him so difficult to understand. Otterspeer has gone so far as to describe Huizinga’s binary opposition as “mirroring contrasts in such a way that they cancel each other out” (p. 85). Together, seriousness and play represent the most important mirror concepts in Homo Ludens. Because Huizinga makes such heavy use of this opposition, because he so thoroughly considers the worldview embodied by each side, it has sometimes been assumed that Huizinga believed the term terms to naturally oppose one another. This, I believe, is one reason Huizinga often seems to be so frustratingly of two minds. Consider what is perhaps the most frequently cited passage from the text:

To our way of thinking, play is the direct opposite of seriousness. At first site, this opposition seems as irreducible to other categories as the play-concept itself. Examined more closely, however, the contrast between play and seriousness proves to be neither conclusive nor fixed. We can say: play is non-seriousness. But apart from the fact that this proposition tells us nothing about the positive qualities of play, it is extraordinarily easy to refute. As soon as proceed from “play is non-seriousness” to “play is not serious,” the contrast leaves us in the lurch—for some play can be very serious indeed. (p. 5)

It is no wonder this passage is so frequently cited, as it seems to perfectly embody Huizinga’s struggle with the mirror concepts of play and seriousness. In order to read Huizinga’s work effectively, it is necessary to consider both the seriousness and the nonseriousness of play equally, as both propositions contain elements of truth and elements of error. Huizinga’s use of binary opposition, placed alongside the rhetorical devices of the oxymoron and the compound, can help readers better understand his work and to bring more precision to the wide variety of things Huizinga was talking about whenever he talked about play.

Reason, Nonsense, and the Magic Circle

In Homo Ludens, Huizinga wrote:

Were I compelled to put my argument tersely in the form of theses, one of them would be that anthropology and its sister sciences have so far laid too little stress on the concept of play and on the supreme importance to civilization of the play-factor. (n.p.)

Huizinga was responding to Enlightenment thinking that valued reason and rationality and considered anything that could not be measured, weighed, or studied scientifically as nonsense. Huizinga further claimed, “We play and know that we play, so we must be more than merely rational beings, for play is irrational” (p. 4). Like many other elements in human culture—art, ritual, magic, and myth—play cannot be measured or understood well from a purely logical perspective. Huizinga’s purpose was not to define play as “irrational” or nonserious but to employ the tension maintained by oppositions such as serious/play and natural/objective to create knowledge about various cultural forms of play.

Huizinga’s deliberate use of oppositional pairs means that he does in some senses believe play to be divorced from reality and of no material interest. Huizinga claimed, “The purposes [play] serves are external to material interests or the individual satisfaction of biological needs” (p. 9). Play—an objectively real and quantifiable thing—is not necessarily connected with human material interest or need. However, by claiming that the sciences of his own time have laid too little stress on the concept of play, Huizinga argues that researchers have only focused on the logical, rational, scientific side of play. Homo Ludens countered these scientific attitudes toward play by staging a confrontation between the play-element and the play-concept.

Such a move, I believe, is responding to the cultural zeitgeist of logical positivism, the philosophical school that most embodies Enlightenment thinking. Suzanne Langer has described positivism quite negatively: “The only philosophy that rose directly out of a contemplation of science is positivism, and it is probably the least interesting of all doctrines” (1996, p. 14). Langer argued that positivism provided no means of answering questions about art, myth, and ritual, and she suggested that each symbolizes experience through forms like sculpture, dance, and monuments (p. 51). To Langer’s list, I add Huizinga’s play-concept, the symbolization of human experience through play and its various cultural expressions. The tension between scientific study of the play-element and humanistic study of the play-concept is why Huizinga both says that play “lies outside the reasonableness of practical life; has nothing to do with necessity or utility, duty or truth” (p. 158) and that “civilization is, in its earliest phases, played. It does not come from play like a babe detaching itself from the womb: it arises in and as play, and never leaves it” (p. 173). ⁴

To more fully appreciate how seriously Huizinga took his theorizing of play and culture, it is helpful to examine the context in which he wrote. According to William Otterspeer, Huizinga spent the last 18 months of his life exiled from his homeland by the Nazis. This was particularly painful for Huizinga, whose work reflects the great pride he felt for the Netherlands. During those 18 months, Huizinga tried to translate his work into English, and he died in the midst of growing expectations that his country would be liberated from German occupation. To separate Huizinga’s work from this context is, I believe, a mistake, as the material realities involved in the outbreak of World War II provided powerful exigencies for his thinking. This is especially true when it comes to play. Like many other rhetorical theorists, Huizinga insisted that the humanities must work to create systems of values and ethics that work against totalitarian thinking.

Huizinga’s writing about play was deeply political, evidenced by essays collected in his last book, In the Shadow of Tomorrow. William Otterspeer refers to this book as an “epilogue” to Homo Ludens because Huizinga believed that the rise of modernism and rationalism had denied the role of play in shaping human culture through symbolizations of the play-concept. In other words, like Langer, Huizinga’s perspective is that “rational” theories of humanity such as logical positivism become dehumanizing when not countered with humanistic theories of symbolizing practices such as art, myth, ritual, and the play-concept. Huizinga identified the weakening humanities as a major threat to Western civilization in the midst of World War II. Suggesting “progress” had become conflated with rational theories of knowledge, Huizinga mused, “Who knows but that a little further on the way a bridge may not have collapsed or a crevice split the earth?” (p. 56). In other words, though a culture may “progress” in terms of scientific and technological knowledge, that culture’s vitality is threatened when humanistic thought declines.

As an example of his point, in his essay, “The Decline of the Critical Spirit,” Huizinga discussed the use of pseudo-science to justify theories of racial superiority. He claimed that such theories gain power because they are “uncontrolled by the critical impulse and preoccupied with a desire for self-glorification” (p. 86)

He furthered this argument in another essay, “Science Misused,” distinguishing between “true science” and “quasi-science.” While true science attempts to create knowledge and technology for social good, quasi-science gains credibility and political power by masquerading as science in order to further ideologies embodied by “scientific” theories such as racial superiority. ⁵ For Huizinga, quasi-science’s cultural and political influence is a powerful justification for humanistic study of the knowledge embodied by symbolizing practices such as the play-concept. Huizinga’s political writings show that his purpose was not to divorce play from material reality but to propose the study of play as a way forward. If a culture arose in the form of play, as Huizinga argues, then play may also be a way to prevent the fall of a culture through continuous creation and interpretation of culture through play.

Huizinga’s use of the term magic circle provides further evidence of his deliberate attempts to respond to logical positivism. While a “shorthand” version of the term used by Salen and Zimmerman has sometimes between used in formalist approaches to the study of games (Consalvo, 2009), scholars in game studies of course also recognize that Huizinga’s own use of the term did not mark a neat and formal separation of play worlds from reality, but instead a permeable boundary through which play is always contextual (Bogost, 2010; Calleja, 2010; Keogh, 2014). ⁶ In Games of Empire, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Greig de Peuter (2009) argued that, in The Autumn of the Middle Ages, “the medieval magic circle of play, with all its visual pageantry and elaborate rules, is firmly set in the context of declining empires convulsively gripped by plague, war, and peasant revolt” (p. xxxiv). In other words, the magic circle has both been used as a means to describe games formally as set apart from the world and as a means to show how games are set within and shaped by particular real-world contexts. Readers of Homo Ludens can indeed find abundant evidence both of the perspective that magic circles formally separate play from reality and evidence of their integration with culture. ⁷ Placed in the political context of Huizinga’s own time, his choice to use the term highlights two related points. First, Huizinga’s use of the term highlights play’s subversive form. Second, and as Huizinga must certainly have known, magic circles had been understood as sites of subversive and symbolic action even before he used the term in Homo Ludens.

Huizinga used the term specifically for the purposes of violating boundaries. In other words, the rhetorical function of using that specific term over any number of other terms Huizinga might have used—play space, playground, sandbox, fantasy world, and so on—is that it highlights the fact the play manifests in places that are unexpected, such as politics, religion, and war. ⁸ Evidence for this claim can be seen in scholarship that evoked the term either before Huizinga or without any apparent knowledge of his play theory. Suzanne Langer, for example, devoted an entire chapter to the term in her Feeling and Form and did so with no references to Huizinga. Extending Cassirer’s theories of symbolic form and the mythic consciousness, Langer discussed ritual dances as symbolic of sacred power:

Dance really symbolizes a most important reality in the life of primitive men—the sacred realm, the magic circle. The Reigen as a dance has nothing to do with spontaneous prancing; it fulfills a holy office, perhaps the first holy office of the dance—it divides the sphere of holiness from that of profane existence. In this way it creates the stage of the dance, which centers naturally in the altar or its equivalent—the totem, the priest, the fire—or perhaps the slain bear, or the dead chieftain to be consecrated.

In the magic circle, all daemonic powers are loosed. The mundane realm is excluded, and with it, very often the restrictions and proprieties that belong to it. (1953, p. 191)

Like Huizinga, Langer’s background information on magic circles came from anthropological sources about tribal dance and ritual. ⁹ Langer’s invocation of the term in Feeling and Form indeed illustrates that the magic circle intends to wall off the sacred world from the real world. Everything within the circle is symbolic of gods, demons, spirits, and the dead. Huizinga’s conception of the magic circle as a space of play necessarily violates the magic circle’s sacred boundary. While John Ferrara has claimed, “Huizinga emphasized that the circle is a hard boundary separating the game world from broader reality; nothing comes out of the circle into real life” (p. 23), he makes this claim without realizing that, by placing play within the context of magic circles at all, Huizinga violates the so called hard boundary that magic circles create. Huizinga’s point in using the term is to show that play is present in places we might not initially expect, places that people identify as serious, sacred, and even dangerous.

At the same time, Ferrara and others who have claimed that the magic circle divorces play from everyday life hint toward Huizinga’s understanding of play’s symbolizing powers. Ferrara has claimed, “Huizinga described games as creating their own reality” (p. 22), just as Brian Sutton-Smith has said Huizinga believed that, “in play, man creates a poetic world alongside the original world of nature” (2001, p. 202). These conceptions of Huizinga as divorcing play from reality hint at the fact that magic circle has been used to describe symbolization through dance, movement, and song before Huizinga’s use of the term to describe the symbolization of play. Therefore, the use of the term in Homo Ludens is intended to highlight play’s symbolic possibilities within the virtual worlds ¹⁰ of magic circles. Langer argued that, through symbolization, “what is created is the image of a world of vital forces” (1953, p. 193). Langer claimed that images in virtual worlds were “semblances” of reality, meaning that they are composed through the aesthetic appeal of dance and “resemble” various things to different people (1953, p. 49).

Similarly, Huizinga claimed that “play is based on the manipulation of certain images, or a certain ‘imagination’ of reality (i.e. its conversion into images)” (p. 4). Play, shaped by the social site of magic circles through the rules and customs that compose them—but also shaping those sites through the violation of boundaries—creates a semblance of something from the real world, an image that potentially resembles and means something to both players and audiences. Play enters the sacred space of magic circles from the outside world and brings that world along through symbolization. Just as play brings the real world into the virtual,

it adorns life, amplifies it and is to that extent a necessity both for the individual—as a life function—and for society by reason of the meaning it contains, its significance, its expressive value, its spiritual and social associations, in short, as a cultural function. (Homo Ludens 9)

Play shapes and is shaped by the magic circle, and it symbolizes and expresses to and about the culture with which it is simultaneously separated from and embedded within.

Conclusion

In this essay, I have confronted the hermeneutical difficulties of Huizinga’s Homo Ludens through a discussion of his rhetoric and methodology. Here, I close with some reflections.

To begin, I believe that a fuller understanding of Huizinga’s rhetoric and methodology can contribute to more nuanced readings of his work in general. Otterspeer’s Reading Huizinga has a two-fold purpose. First, it attempts to account for the elements of Huizinga’s writing style that contribute to the fact that nearly all of Huizinga’s scholarly work has been fundamentally misunderstood or mischaracterized at some point. Second, by providing analysis and context, he seeks to help future readers better understand Huizinga in the hopes that it will bring fresh interest and insight to his work. The experience of reading Homo Ludens for the first time was among the most interesting ones of my scholarly career, especially as he often to move from one basic premise to another wildly and unexpectedly. That joy of wallowing in the pleasant frustration of comprehending his work is something I hope all students interested in play can experience. At the same time, learning about the methods behind Huizinga’s apparent madness has been revelatory for me in terms of understanding the deep insights Huizinga brought to the surface about the connections between play and culture. This essay both attempts to help and to urge such students to delve deeper into an appreciation of Huizinga’s rhetoric and methodology. In an essay titled, “Jerked Around by the Magic Circle,” Eric Zimmerman (2012) reflects upon hearing critiques of the magic circle during conference presentations:

Invariably, these presentations have a single aim: to devalue, dethrone, or otherwise take down the oppressive regime of the magic circle. They begin by citing either Johannes Huizinga’s Homo Ludens or Rules of Play (the game design textbook I co-authored with Katie Salen), and then elaborate mightily on the dangers of the magic circle approach. They proceed to supplant the narrow magic circle point of view with one of their own—an approach that emphasizes something like social interaction between players, a wider cultural context, or concrete sociopolitical reality. Dragon slain.

My hope is that by better understanding Huizinga’s rhetoric and methodology, scholars new to the area of game studies can better understand the ways Huizinga actually used the term magic circle and avoid engaging the straw man Zimmerman describes. While scholars in the field have both used the term to describe the formal properties of games and to describe their real-world embeddedness, like Huizinga, these scholars also understand that there are merely different ways of looking at games in any particular moment, not dogmatic ideologies about whether or not games are part of the real world. Frankly, there is just a lot more that is interesting about Huizinga’s work than that “debate.”

Additionally, I want to say simply that scholars in a variety of fields—including, but not limited to, game studies—should consider revisiting Huizinga’s work because he still has a great deal to teach, despite the many decades since his death. For scholars who have only read Homo Ludens, they might be surprised to discover the wide range of topics Huizinga actually covered in his career and the somewhat unexpected places where discussions of games and play manifest. He both wrote and then translated his final book, In the Shadow of Tomorrow, while exiled from his homeland due to German occupation. While Huizinga discusses scientific theories of race and chemical warfare in that text, play always bubbles to the surface. A reconsideration of his work in general may reveal unexpected connections among play, games, and culture.

Finally, Homo Ludens offers a rich terminology and descriptive theory for the relationship between games and culture. While his use of the term magic circle has garnered the bulk of attention, many other concepts remain to be explored in any number of interesting ways. For example, while I discussed his play-concept and play-element here to illustrate the ways play can be simultaneously seen as symbolic and real, many other such play-compounds exist in the text. What edges of play do they mark? What possibility spaces do they open? I believe this alone provides good reason to reconsider Homo Ludens, though it only scratches the surface of Huizinga’s historically deep mind.