The Lives of a Cell
I’m flying to and from Orlando these weeks, guaranteeing several hours of undisturbed reading. I read Lewis Thomas’ book of essays in the air last week, The Lives of a Cell: Notes from a Biology Watcher (1974) [pdf]. It was quoted by a friend-of-a-friend on Facebook, and I recognized something in the quote and began reading the more »
Make-Believe
The best article I’ve read on Ebert’s response to “Are Games Art?”: An Apology for Roger Ebert. It is clear, it is elegant, and you don’t have to ‘buy’ it to see that the negative argument can exist in the absence of curmudgeonly ignorance. — There’s no need to delay my answer to the question, especially more »
Mulling: Potential
Yesterday’s post cites far more practitioners than theorists, which was maybe why it sounded wildly more obvious and applicable. My current unfinished post is on “Games/Art”, bouncing off of the next book on my list, Imaginary Games. Soon I’ll break from the games studies (to restock) and publish some notes I’ve been scribbling on some more »
Unnecessary Obstacles
Caillois introduced a spectrum from paidia (“play”, improvisation) to ludus (“games”, ordered, rule-bound, requiring skill or effort). To play a thing (or play with a thing) is to explore it in some sense. As I’ve noted before, to game a thing (eg. gaming the system) is more directed and manipulative. The relationship between play and more »
Man, Play and Games
Roger Callois’ Man, Play, and Games (1961) is a direct response to Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, and largely builds off of it while editing a few key tenets. The quotes immediately below are from an article I read for context on Callois’ background (Thomas Henricks, “Man, Play and Games- An appreciation and evaluation” [pdf]). It was hugely helpful more »
Patterns, Moods, and Scenes
A not-quite-coherent ramble on a few disparate ideas that I suspect should be related. I haven’t connected all of the dots satisfactorily yet, and maybe there’s not much too it after all. I haven’t decided. Publishing it anyway! I. When I write, I might sometimes play a certain kind of music to change my more »
Homo Ludens III
A last flourish on Homo Ludens, quoting the final paragraphs. I’ve got a few non-notes posts that are about ready to post, so tomorrow I’ll post one schizophrenic piece before moving on to briefly touch on Caillois’ Man, Play and Games. — Huizinga’s conclusions, on the human mind and spirit. In treating of our theme so more »
Homo Ludens II
A wide lens on the rest of Homo Ludens The first chapter was really the entire thesis of Huizinga’s big idea about Play (which was dug into in the predecessor post). The remaining chapters attempt to shore up this thesis by example, looking at the histories and semantics of various cultures and their attitude towards more »
Homo Ludens I
Happy New Year! I’ll be note-taking and synthesizing on play, ritual, and games in more detail. At the end of December I read some early influential works in “Game Studies”: Huizinga’s Homo Ludens and Caillois’ Man, Play and Games. They’re the kind of books that are referred to by many and read by few, which is too more »
December 02013
So ends the month of December. 16 posts (13 if you exclude my devblog), adding up to ~16,800 words, much slimmer than November’s 21 posts at 22.4k words. I’ve had steadily increasing traffic, too, although I don’t really consider that a terribly important (or reliable, truth be told) metric. On 17 December I had the more »