Last year, we read Roger Caillois’ Man, Play and Games (1961) in a reading circle with my colleagues. I had read it when I started my PhD studies, so I had a vague memory of the different categories Caillois used in the book. After then, I had encountered the central terms – paidia and ludus, agôn, alea, mimicry and ilinx – time and again in different game studies publications.

What I had forgot was that most of these references actually got the categories wrong, or at least the implications that Caillois connects to them. In game studies they are treated as neutral categories that can be used to analyse different aspects of games and play. But Caillois gives them specific values and meanings, reading their role in culture from his particular perspective on culture. That perspective is unfortunately a 20th century French scholar, looking at other cultures and seeing them as backwards, while sitting behind his desk in Paris and considering his own culture as an example of progress.

Over the course of the book Caillois paints a portrait of how play is transformed over what he sees as cultural progress. “Primitive” societies are ruled by mimicry and ilinx, mistaking the person wearing the mask for the supernatural power it represents, and the feeling of vertigo for the effects of that power. The meanings given to mimicry and ilinx are not quite perfectly negative, but the implications Caillois discusses are valued as backwards and as holding society back.

The role of mimicry and ilinx is marginal at best in developed societies, and mostly negative when they do appear. Caillois describes riots as an example of ilinx, seeing them as an example of play inciting people into destructive actions instead of political reactions to injustice. It probably seems natural to describe theatre in modern society in terms of mimicry, but that seems to get the values Caillois connects to the term wrong.

In comparison, societies of progress are ruled by alea and agon. He never quite says which societies he is thinking off, but seems to describe the one he happens to live in. Caillois writes about the process of how a society transforms from backwards to developed, but sees the process as perilous. It seems that it is at least partially a matter of chance whether the process succeeds or not, and his own society just happens to be one that managed to navigate that process successfully. He does not give examples of societies that have failed the transformation, so it is hard to say what that would look like.

The process of turning from a primitive to developed society is also important for how he understands the role of paidia and ludus. It seems that ludus is only one possible end point for the development and it would be possible for the development from paidia to end up somewhere else. He never explains what the other alternatives would be, but ludus is just one form that play can take in a developed society. It seems the implication is that ludus is what the Western culture he lives in happened upon, but other cultures could have other forms of play, organised on some other principles – but this is not quite clear from the text.

Paidia and ludus, agôn, alea, mimicry and ilinx are not value-neutral descriptions of different forms of play, but descriptions of play in a particular cultural context, with both positive and negative values attached to them. Using the categories and ignoring the values is possible, but one cannot do that while pretending this is how Caillois understood the categories.

Finally, Caillois definition of play1 has a crucial feature that I have previously missed. The six essential qualities Caillois gives to play are:

  1. Free: in which playing is not obligatory; if it were, it would at once lose its attractive and joyous quality as diversion;
  2. Separate: circumscribed within limits of space and time, defined and fixed in advance;
  3. Uncertain: the course of which cannot be determined, nor the result attained beforehand, and some latitude for innovations being left to the player’s initiative;
  4. Unproductive: creating neither goods, nor wealth, nor new elements of any kind; and, except for the exchange of property among the players, ending in a situation identical to that prevailing at the beginning of the game;
  5. Governed by rules: under conventions that suspend ordinary laws, and for the moment establish new legislation, which alone counts;
  6. Make-believe: accompanied by a special awareness of a second reality or of a free unreality, as against real life.

Importantly – and this seems to have been missed by pretty much everyone citing Caillois – the definition is disjunctive (Caillois does not use the term himself). Something is, according to Caillois, play if the first four and exactly one of five or six obtain. Play is either governed by rules or make-believe, not both. Caillois thinks that make-believe plays the same role as rules in play and so one is enough to make something play, and also excludes the other.

As I have previously written, game studies is not great with definitions so it is not exactly surprising that this has previously been missed. It is probably the issues with the oft-cited categories Caillois establishes that are more pressing issue.

  1. Or games, since Caillois is writing in French. This is how game studies has often read this definition. I think this is similar to how Espen Aarseth described game studies understanding of Johan Huizinga and Homo Ludens: everyone who read Salen’ and Zimmerman’s Rules of Play adopted their reading and propagated it further. ↩︎