I grew up spending my summer weekends at a Japanese festival called “Obon” or “Bon Dance,” as it’s more colloquially referred to back home in Hawai’i. It’s an annual festival that happens between late July through the month of August, with a different Buddhist temple across the island hosting each weekend. Bon Dance celebrates and honors ancestors. But for a good majority of the folks back home on the islands, this festival is simply an annual gathering for the community to eat food, share culture, and dance together.

I bring up Bon Dance because I was shocked by how much of Huizinga’s Homo Ludens reading was focused on rituals and festivals. It was the oldest reading of the bunch (and it shows), but a lot of the concepts and frames were quite timeless, which in and of itself is an interesting quality of play. I’m primarily interested in this broader idea of “play as a social function,” as it pertains to cultural preservation and heritage.

My late grandmother was a dance leader, which meant she performed the folk dances in the innermost ring of several concentric lines of people, encircling the yagura (a wooden structure that sits in the center). In other words, my grandmother set the “order” and “rhythm” for the broader group, instructions on the movements to perform. It is the dance leaders that establish the rules, for lack of a better word.

But beyond the ideas that Huizinga expresses that directly conjure up a connection between dance and play, I was fascinated with his assertion that play is a form of world-building. He writes, “Inside the play-ground an absolute and peculiar order reigns. Here we come across another, very positive feature of play: it creates order, is order. Into an imperfect world and into the confusion of life it brings a temporary, a limited perfection” (10). Order in this sense is not only the rules of play, but a shared experience that allows for the suspension of time and space, the “pretend” or representational quality of play.

My grandmother was born on a sugar cane plantation in Maui. I think about what Bon Dance means to her as suspension of time and space — and I believe that this festival represents an opportunity for her to be grounded in a culture that she never fully experienced for herself. The kimonos she wore and the movements she knew by heart (the “order” of the experience) allowed her to embody a self that doesn’t exist outside of these festivals, a connection to culture that doesn’t exist so tangibly beyond those weekends in August. It’s both the suspension of reality and the order of play that is felt so strongly by an annual festival like Bon Dance.

But to wrap this up and perhaps, spend a bit more time reflecting on this experience for myself, I keep thinking about Huizinga’s notion of the “mask” or the “underlying consciousness of things ‘not being real’” (22). Without even getting into the religious or spiritual aspects of Bon Dance, I keep thinking about the circumstance of Bon Dance in Hawai’i as I experienced it growing up. It is not only a festival that has evolved over time (my grandma’s temple plays a lot of the music with CDs over speakers), but also across cultures. The food of the festival is different in Hawai’i than in Japan. Some of the simple choreography has taken on different moves, the folk dances remixed and reinvented by younger generations. Some people dance in full kimonos, others just in t-shirts and board shorts. Even the rusted, brown metal chairs that would be set out (in concentric circles mimicking the dancers) for non-dancers represents a dissonance between the festival in Japan and the festival in Hawai’i. One could argue that participating in this cultural festival requires an admission or acceptance of the illusion of it all — the performance of a tradition or ritual from Japan, a recreation of sorts that never perfectly succeeds. But that’s often just the experience of a diaspora and perhaps, that’s where play is most crucial. These rituals and festivals and games, with all their limitations and suspensions of reality, offer value to the collective and community. And as Huizinga writes, “But with the end of the play its effect is not lost; rather it continues to shed its radiance on the ordinary world outside, a wholesome influence working security, order and prosperity for the whole community until the sacred play-season comes round again” (14).

This past spring my wife and I drove out to Long Island to see her family. On this trip my sister and her wife joined in the car to attend a party for a college friend happening nearby. My sister and I share the car, which means that all four of us share the car. We travel together a lot on trips that can involve 4+ hours of driving/being trapped in a car, so an hour and a half out on Long Island seemed like nothing. Regrettably, that day we were all kind of testy and antsy (we were going to a baby shower for my brother-in-law and his wife who were expecting the first nibling of the family, VERY EXCITING!) and inevitably there was traffic on the LIE. As tension in the car was rising my wife did something she had never done before – she suggested we play an alphabet game that she had played on car rides as a child. The rules were simple: you scanned the passing surroundings and called out when a word on a sign/car/billboard started with the letter of the alphabet we were on. Bogost said “play invites and even requires greater attention, generosity, respect, and investment than its supposedly more serious alternatives do” (4). I have made this drive to Long Island a hundred times. It’s always boring, there’s almost always traffic, and we’re always mad about it. But actually surrendering ourselves to the situation and making a game out if it completely transformed our drive. All of the sudden, we went from being miserable and angry to actively engaging with each other and even observing our surroundings. It made the ride go by faster and being stuck in traffic actually gave us more opportunities to find what we were looking for. Rather than being stressed, frustrated, and angry about something we had no control over (traffic), we were able to play and even have fun together.

I try to surrender myself to things I cannot control, but as seen above I am a work in progress. When Bogost writes “adults also don’t live in a world designed for us” and “misery gives way to fun when you take an object, event, situation, or scenario that wasn’t designed for you, that isn’t invested in you, that isn’t concerned with your experience of it, and then treat it as if it were” (3) it highlights all of the potential sites of play in everyday life if we can find them. Bogost later argues that play isn’t the goal, but the tool (12). To Bogost anything and everything can be play. I like the idea of thinking of play this way, its something I am using to entertain myself, not the thing entertaining me. Does this mean that there is possibility for play in something as mundane as packing the car for a vacation or going grocery shopping? Of course once I think about this I know its true. For example I hate the grocery store, but I hate cooking more, so I grocery shop and my wife cooks. The boundaries and contents are my budget, what we need for the week, and what is available in the store – voila! I think looking at it this way allows you to not fall into the David Foster Wallace trap where you have to somehow find empathy in every interaction in order to get through life. Maybe dodging other shoppers is a little bit more like Frogger than an exercise in imagining what is happening in the personal lives of the surrounding shoppers. To go into the other example, my wife loves the Tetris like challenge of packing the car for a long trip. As mentioned, I travel with an entourage, which typically means the trunk of our car is stuffed to the brim with duffle bags, suitcases, food, drinks, bags of board games, etc. In this case the boundaries and contents are the physical space available in the car and how to fit all of our stuff while still ideally being able to see a sliver of the rear window through the rearview mirror. These everyday instances of play do help ease the stress and mundanity of day to day life in late stage capitalism. I have found myself thinking a lot about this piece in the time since I finished it and how play can be freeing in a world where it feels like I’m always doing something I don’t want to.

I find myself perversely curious as to how Roger Caillois would have characterized modern video games. While his four categories and two axes are far from exclusive as he himself admits, I doubt that he would have been able to dream up just how intricate these games could be. Granted, Caillois died in 1978, considerably before mainstream adventure games took off. Pong and Space Invaders could firmly be categorized as an example of agôn (competition) with a dash of mimicry as the player clashes in a contest of agility and dexterity against a computer opponent.  Axes wise, I’d imagine he’d classify them as ludus (heavily rules-focused), perhaps giving Space Invaders a dash of paidia (childlike impulse) as players subject themselves to the artificial anxiety and fantasy of facing down unstoppable hordes of alien ships.

While early video games have simple mechanics and conceits which make them easy to categorize by Caillois’s standards, modern video games become much more complicated. For an example, let’s try to sort Kingdom Hearts (the original game, not the whole franchise).

For those who don’t know, Kingdom Hearts is a Playstation 2 era action role playing game in which the player controls Sora, a young boy who with his sword-like Keyblade must fight back the Heartless (and a number of Disney villains) to restore peace to the universe. Mechanically, it consists of button mashing and resource management to progress through various tasks and combat situations to earn more of the story’s plot. For the sake of brevity, I will omit the title’s several minigames.

To start broad and work our way in, the very premise of a role playing video game suggests ludic mimicry – the player is provided with a character and dropped into a new world that both thematically and mechanically has set rules that they must follow as that character. The player temporarily escapes their own identity and circumstances in order to take on the emotional and physical highs and lows of another entity. In Kingdom Hearts specifically, Sora has a set movement style, can only interact with his world in specified ways, and can’t behave in manners outside of his character – no whacking non enemy characters with the Keyblade, and unsurprisingly, no death. The story can’t continue on without Sora, so if he ever fails in his quest, the player is taken to a screen where they can choose to reload at an earlier point.

Interestingly, the player has very little choice in their control of Sora – his voice, appearance, and character growth exist independent of the player. The simulation occurs in the player’s ability to accept the conceit of the game and empathize with Sora, seeing the worlds of Kingdom Hearts through his eyes.

It would be easy to assume that since Kingdom Hearts is an action video game, it should also fall under agôn, or competition. After all, when we complete a video game, we tend to claim that we have “beaten the game”, winning a competition and emerging victorious. In the main storyline, one could argue that the player is competing against the various computer controlled Heartless Hordes and boss fights, leveling up until Sora bests the final form of the final boss. They are then rewarded with knowing how the (first installment) of the story ends, after which, they reboot the system to finish up any end game content that they’ve missed. The competition would hinge upon the player’s hand dexterity and reflexes.

However, one could also argue that the player is merely solving puzzles laid by the developers rather than competing against the computer. Just as Sora is limited in his movements, the game is programmed to spawn x number of y types of enemies at z time and b place. Each enemy has certain strategies that can be used to take them down. The game is designed to be finished, unlike Pong or Space Invaders, which are designed to be played until the player definitively wins or loses. As previously mentioned, Sora can’t definitively lose – he can only be sent back to a previous checkpoint or save state. Furthermore, unlike both arcade games, there is no chance of a high score in the original Kingdom Hearts, no official way to compete with your fellow video game enthusiasts.

The trickiest bit about definitively categorizing Kingdom Hearts is that it requires the player to subscribe to the game’s main conceit. In order to truly be mimicry, the player must empathize with and temporarily embody Sora rather than just puppet him. In order for the above agôn interpretation to be valid, the player must suspend their disbelief and believe that they are competing against the enemies that the game puts forward.

Or, the player can take the rules and constraints of the game and play their own way. Speedrunners can make the game purely agôn by choosing to ignore the story completely and compete with others in order to see who can complete the game the fastest. Imaginative players can indulge in pure mimicry by abandoning the plot progression to explore and role play their own stories in the existing locations. The video game itself can become the playground on which players formulate their own games. I would have loved to have heard Caillois’s thoughts on that.

Two years ago, my boyfriend and I were about to embark on the six hour plane ride from Los Angeles back to New York City after an enjoyable and exhausting vacation in California. Since we had to go to LA separately due to our own personal obligations before the trip, this would be our first ever flight together as a couple. I always like to download at least five movies before going up in case I don’t like what the airplane offers, so I checked in with him with some options that I thought he would like. Josh is a huge horror movie lover, so I was pretty sure that he would go with something scary. His answer surprised me.

“Really?” I asked. “Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile? The Shawn Mendes crocodile film?”

“Oh c’mon, like you aren’t also curious.”

Admittedly, I was. However, I was also worried about feeling trapped with Lyle if the movie was bad. It was then when I came up with an idea.

“Alright, so let’s play bingo boards then while we watch.”

“Bingo boards?” Josh looked at me, slightly confused. “How so?”

Since neither of us knew anything about the movie or any lore behind Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile, I suggested it might be fun to make wild predictions about fun things that could happen in the movie. We’d then take those predictions, put them on bingo boards, and then see how many of them became true. Josh agreed, and we ended up having so much fun that we played the game throughout the entire plane ride. In case you were wondering, the five squares that made BINGO for this movie were “Talent Show”, “Joke About Being Eaten”, “Disproportionately Very Tragic Backstory”, “Song Sung While Doing Chores”, and (my favorite one) “Car Chase”. Josh and I still play that game for new movies to this day.

Ian Bogost’s “Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games” reminded me a lot of this game. The floor jumping game and our movie bingo are both born from creating enjoyment from limitations and rules. To quote Bogost, “To treat things with respect and intrigue, we don’t need to understand their motivations and inner lives – whatever knowing the inner life of a tangelo or a floor tile would mean. We just need to pay enough attention to discover what they do and how they work – to discover what they obviously and truly are-and then to make use of them in gratifyingly novel ways” (Bogost 9). In my above example, a lot of the fun of my bingo game with my boyfriend is due to us recognizing that a film like, Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile is a genre piece that we can make predictions on and be amused when we get the plot correct and delighted when we’re surprised. We noticed that obvious and decided to fortify it with rules to make play. I’ve noticed a similar pattern when DM-ing for my campaign in “Dungeons and Dragons”. Oftentimes, my group has a lot more fun when there’s a set structure that allows them to figure out how to solve problems rather than if I just nebulously set them loose on a town. Specificity, structure, and commitment to the bit are what makes our adventures fun and lifelike!

This summer, as a result of moving, I reinvested in tending to my vinyl record collection. It had lapsed for a decade because I lacked the space necessary to accommodate the bulk of a record-playing setup — the player itself, the receiver, the speakers, a collection of records that threatens to overgrow whatever container holds it. But now I’d moved into a space that could better support the hobby.

Backing up a bit: I was born in the CD era, a few years after the medium had eclipsed tape cassettes as the way to own music. CDs could hold more songs and they were less fussy. But by the time I was really coming into my musical consciousness, the internet was taking over, and legally dubious digital spaces like Napster, Limewire, and The Pirate Bay offered ways to access a much wider range of music for a fraction of the cost. And from there: streaming. Pay a nominal fee each month, forget about questions of legality, and listen to (almost) anything.

So why vinyl? I believe it has to do with play, especially in the more expansive sense that authors like Bogost and Huizinga use in describing it.

The ritual of collecting and listening to records is highly ceremonial. It requires going to a record store (or perhaps a thrift store, stoop sale, or estate sale) and thumbing through overstuffed bins of faded album covers. This is one of the practice’s playgrounds. The other playground is at home, in front of the record player, where the ceremony culminates in sliding the record from its plastic or cardboard protector, taking pains not to get fingerprints on the grooves, placing it on the platter, and then delicately lifting and dropping the needle along the record’s edge.

These are signs of respect to a self-imposed order. As Bogost writes in Play Anything, “Fun comes from the attention and care you bring to something that imposes arbitrary, often boring, even cruel limitations on what you — or anyone — can do with them. Worldly limitations impose a new and welcome humility, for they force us to treat things as they are rather than as we wish them to be” (13-14). The worldly limitations of listening to vinyl — the necessity of getting up from dinner to flip the record, for instance — stands in stark contrast to streaming, which eliminates nearly all friction.

Listening to vinyl is less about satisfying a momentary urge (“I want to hear this song this very instant!”). In fact, as Huizinga writes, play “interrupts the appetitive process” (Homo Ludens, 9). When I listen to vinyl, I am subordinating my own desires to the limits of the present moment. I feel closer to the things themselves, the materials of my game — approaching a greater sense of the “worldliness” that Bogost praises as a hallmark of play (7).

I think this inverse relationship — between fun and constraint — is partially responsible for the strength of the vinyl industry right now. Although diminished compared to streaming, record-buying has made a huge comeback, and this rebound has roughly tracked with the growth of streaming over the last decade. This tells me I’m not the only listener who, when given what they want without limits, opts for some anyways.

This feeds into one of the core debates of record-collecting: whether buying records that were recorded digitally (as opposed to using analog methods) counts as real record-collecting. I admit this is a myopic view and an attempt to keep people out of a hobby that should be enjoyed widely. But it speaks to the need for rules in maintaining the illusion of a game. Even after being pressed into vinyl, any trace of the digital starts to break the spell.

On Labor Day, I watched the Mets play the Red Sox at Citi Field. I’m told that Honus Wagner, legendary shortstop for the Pittsburgh Pirates, once proclaimed: “There ain’t much to being a ballplayer, if you’re a ballplayer.” Although I’m no ballplayer, I found that there ain’t much to being a ballplayer — that is, understanding the game of baseball — if you’ve read Roger Caillois’s Man, Play and Games. My first observation was that the baseball players themselves might not be considered “players” at all: instead, these professional athletes “who must think in terms of prize, salary, or title,” are more accurately identified as workers (Caillois, 6). With this in mind, I expanded my conception of the playground to include my fellow spectators. As soon as I finished my crackerjacks, I got to work parsing the great American pastime according to Caillois’s classification of games. 

Agôn: The players on the field were clearly engaged in a game of agôn, wherein their competitive match hinged “on a single quality (speed, endurance, strength, memory, skill, ingenuity, etc.), exercised, within defined limits and without outside assistance, in such a way that the winner appears to be better than the loser in a certain category of exploits” (Caillois, 14). Indeed, the Mets emerged victorious over the Red Sox and their success earned them accolades from fans and sports commentators alike (and maybe a wild card spot in the MLB postseason?). Since both teams played each other at the same time, on the same field, and under the same conditions, spectators could conclude that, under the rules applied equally to both teams, the Mets must possess more discipline and perseverance than the Red Sox in order to clinch their victory (Caillois, 15). 

Alea: If the ballfield was the site of legitimate competition, then the stands were where alea, or games of chance and destiny, thrived. In between each inning, announcers led the crowds through games like “Follow the Cap”, “Running for Dunkin’”, “8th Inning Karaoke”, and the infamous T-shirt cannon. Nestled into our seats, the spectators remained “entirely passive” throughout these games: we did not deploy “resources, skill, muscles, or intelligence” (Caillois, 17). Instead, when it was time to grasp for a lucky t-shirt or appear, triumphantly, on the big screen, all we could do was wait, “in hope and trembling, the cast of the die” (Caillois, 17). Even as we watched the baseball game play out below us, the spectators were immersed in an entirely separate world of play. Interestingly, the spectator play was bound by similar — if opposing — limits as the baseball play: our games in the realm of alea could only take place when the competitive play of agôn was at a standstill. The spectators’ play occupied the negative space left by the professionals’ play. 

Mimicry: Although I don’t own a blue and orange cap, hundreds of the baseball fans at Monday’s game sported Mets-themed (and Red Sox-themed) outfits and accessories. These fans proudly demonstrated their “identification with the champion” after the game was won, reenacting the bat-swinging motions of the players and acting out the tension of the final inning through sportscaster-like recollections of the game on the train ride home (Caillois, 22). Luckily, no one took their mimicry of the game so far as to wage a brawl between fans of the opposing teams (who, by engaging in such a clash, would be mimicking the stakes of agôn they’d just witnessed on the ballfield). 

Ilinx: Finally, the dizzying thrill of ilinx was apparent in the behavior of Mr. and Mrs. Met. Laboring under the weight of their giant, baseball-shaped heads, this rowdy couple surrendered “to the intoxication of many kinds of dance”, unleashing a contagious frenzy of jumping, bobbing, and swaying across the stands (Caillois, 25). The pleasure of joining in on Mr. and Mrs. Met’s movement was heightened by the truly vertigo-inducing decision to set the stadium lights to strobe, creating the effect of being inside a Gravitron while the beat of Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September” propelled the spectators briefly away from the baseball field and into a new, imaginary playground, separate from the rest of reality but nonetheless grounded in a strong feeling of play (Caillois, 26).

Instead of meeting face-to-face this week, I’ve created a 15-minute video that introduces some of the nitty-gritty elements of the class (our Commons Group+Site, a Padlet “icebreaker,” and the basic assignments you’ll complete), plus the tiniest bit of introduction of the course’s themes:

DH780 Day 1

A brief introduction to our course this term.

A few links/notes:

• The Padlet you’ll use to introduce yourself is here
• You should have received an invitation to the Commons site (i.e. this site you’re on now) and Group. If you haven’t, email me
• Note that your readings for next week are available in .pdf in our Group Library

That’s it: see you in a week!

Fall 2024 students: I’m excited to meet you and work with you. Feel free to peruse what’s here, but know that the schedule is still a work in progress, so stay tuned.

Note that the first session, on August 29th, will be async/remote (the only such session: for all others we’ll be face to face at the good ol’ GC). I’ll post a video giving a brief intro to the course and ask you (by way of certifying “attendance”) to introduce yourselves in this space:

DH 780 Introduction: games people play

We’lll use this space to get to know each other a bit over the first couple of sessions. Please share your preferred pronouns and a pic or avatar if you like. And please tell us: a) the first game you remember playing, the most recent game you played, and your favorite game.

Note that I’ve left all the posts from prior students below: feel free to walk through it, since you can get some sense of the course’s themes that way as well.

All best and see you pretty soon!

I posted about this in October, but now that you’re working on final projects, know that you can schedule time with Nicole, our Student Advisor, and/or our GCDI team to talk through ideas. Here’s Nicole’s self-introduction, with contact info:

I am a PhD candidate in English at the Graduate Center, where I broadly work on topics related to the environment, media studies, and the history of technology. I have also taught various coding and tech skills at the GC and elsewhere—for example: JavaScript (w. HTML/CSS), D3, git/GitHub (w. Markdown/Command Line), Python, accessible design ideas, & etc.—and have worked broadly on applied digital media and digital humanities projects.

I am reaching out to share that I am available to meet with students to discuss coursework and project-based questions as well as program related queries (i.e. advising on course selection and the like). I will be holding office hours for students this semester by appointment.

Alternatively, for quick questions, students can always just message me on the department’s Slack or email me.

Friends, it’s time to pass Go and collect $200! We’ve reached the end of the Syllabus Proper, and it’s time to flex some direct democratic muscle. I’ve created a Padlet that we’ll use to generate ideas for the final two sessions and vote for them as well:

People’s Choice: topics for the homestretch

Made with Padlet

Feel free to add new ideas or comment on the ones I’ve created. We’ll work on this in class, too. I believe I’ve configured the link properly to allow all to access it, but LMK if you have issues.