The second part of a double helping of Make A Game of That, this time my thesis proposal! I'm sorry I haven't got much dedicated content out, but preparing this thing has taken most of my life for the last month. You don't even want to THINK about the reference list and reading I had to do for this tiny little 700 words. God help me putting out the 17000 I need for the thesis itself. Normally this would be kind of boring, who cares about some bullshit academia. Still, I think this is an interesting read for anyone interested in the developing distinct fields of ludology and play theory


The academic exploration of play and games has a somewhat brief but extremely vibrant history. Generally acknowledged as beginning with Huizinga in the early 1900's, games and play became a pet topic for a group of scholars in as diverse fields as developmental psychology and economics. This interdisciplinary interest in the topic has had the outcome of spawning a proliferation of divergent and conflicting studies, opinions, definitions and theories on games and play which has led to a rich but fragmented landscape of study.

One of the most visible issues in the scholarship of games so far is a noticeable hesitance to view the topic with cold rigour. From historian Johann Huizinga suggesting that analysing play is “ hovering over spheres of thought barely accessible either to psychology or to philosophy” (Huizinga, 1949) to the medical doctor turned animal play scholar Stewart Brown complaining he hates to try and define play “because it is a thing of beauty best appreciated by experiencing it. Defining play has always seemed to me like explaining a joke- analysing it takes the joy out of it”(Brown, 2009, p. 15) the annals of game scholarship echo with a kind of awed aversion to what might be termed a systematic mentality. Texts instead resound with a myriad of colourful examples of the effects of play, of games, of ludic anecdotes and of attempts to rationalise and categorise these within the limits of what that particular scholar was studying. For Huizinga in Homo Ludens (1949) this is ritual and ceremony, for Caillois in Man, Play and Games (1961) it is social ludic structures, for Sutton-Smith in the Ambiguity of Play (1997) it is the lenses through which play is viewed. All these views preserve the 'magic' of play, they never cross the line that Huizinga established- that play shall be distinct from reality, in a sacred realm of magic and mystery. (Huizinga, 1949)

Yet in recent times scholarship on games and play has broadened and deepened through studies of what happens when they are absent and experiments that harness them. These have suggested that the field is not just of interest, but crucial to almost all other fields where creativity, interactivity and learning converge. As Brown remarks “[Humans] are built to play and built through play. When we play we are engaged in the purest expression of our humanity, the truest expression of our individuality”( 2009, pp 5). Where-ever else such an important trait has been discovered within our species or within the characteristics of the physical world, the system- the underlying abstracted rules and principles of action- are desperately sought. Where it is not found, it is predicted (or even guessed at) and challenged. Such a venture has yet to fully materialise in the studies of games and play. Elements of the spectrum have been systematised, but typically high in the realms of social and formal ludic analysis, restricted to games rather than play.

The power of a systematic perspective is that it is more likely to generate models that are applicable to scaling concerns without need of rewording or re-evaluation. The theory of evolution has been so influential to our times not because it in itself was revolutionary, but because it came with the system of natural selection. The system of natural selection could apply to populations, to species, to entire eras of biological time. It could be adjusted simply to predict the outcomes of artificial selection, the basis on which Darwin founded his defence of the theory. In time it was applied to social movements (social darwinism), to economics (various), to cultural studies (memetics) to neurology (neural darwinism), to informatics (genetic algorithms) and many more besides. In recent times it has been argued that the system could be renamed “universal selection” because of its widespread predictive powers (Cziko, 1995). Much of this might not have occurred had not scholars sought and enumerated the raw logical system which lies beneath the theory of evolution. If, as in games and play studies, Darwin and his peers had restricted themselves to the specifics of their interests, be they finches, livestock breeding or pigeon fancying, our world might be a very different place.

Systematic perspectives are not easy to come by, and those who are first to bring them to the light are generally remembered, be they Isaac Newton, Adam Smith or Euclid. Yet each of what might be termed the great systems came to be because of a situation where large amounts of evidence were available for the harvest for a group of visionary thinkers somewhat unconcerned with the paradigms of the time. Such systems today might seem less broad to us- physics, economics, geometry, but before these systems arose, there was no unifying thread to bind all possible uses of what we now can only understand as that system together and make it seem thus. Thus, to determine whether such a perspective may yield results is not a simple task in and of itself.

Should, then, we ask whether such a system can be discerned for games and play? Not for some part of the whole, but from the first exploratory grasps of a child that Piaget identified as play in Dreams, Play and Imitation in Childhood (1962) to the great socio-cultural dance of Huizinga's imagining. It might be that this cannot be done, yet the situation the field finds itself in suggests that the question must be asked. The interdisciplinary interest in play and games across a huge diversity of scholars indicates that some underlying pattern may exist. Research by scientists and discussion by social analysts is increasingly suggesting that this is not merely a possibility purely for the semantically curious, but one with the potential to turn many ideas on their heads and revolutionise technology and philosophy both.

When the precedents are considered, it seems that at the very least the question must be posed. Posing that question is the goal of this thesis.