We are Homo ludens, and it’s playtime

From the cradle to the grave, the element of play holds a unique and vital place in our human experience. What makes us human is that we are Homo sapiens — capable of reason — but we are also Homo ludens, the player.

Other species will play, but not to the extent we do, in terms of the complex and intricate structures we create around it. Play, it has been suggested by historians and cultural theorists such as Johan Huizinga — who coined the term ‘Homo ludens’ — is a primary human condition.

If we consider the idea that the duality of human nature emerged from two basic instincts — eros and thanatos — it’s possible to apply the necessity of play to this original and innate tension of opposites.

Play teaches us how to dance in the middle, the place where life thrives. It teaches us about the paradox of life and how to work with this duality — holding it lightly in our hands with awe and wonder.

I’m reminded of the archetypal Trickster, the playful one, who teaches us the art of having nothing to lose. The meta-game here is simply the inherent joy of play, in and of itself. The Trickster shows us a third way of being — the dance — he is not interested in winning or losing and his essence is what keeps the cosmos in flow.

A personal and very simple example stems from my childhood passion for tennis. It only takes one sweet shot to put me in a moment of eros.

However, standing in opposition to this is thanatos, the inexplicable drive to self-oblivion within us all. A flash of pure anger at that same shot missed. Have you ever stood on the edge of a cliff and felt the thrill of knowing you could just jump?

This is the counterweight to eros and reminds us of the cyclical nature of death and rebirth. Things end and begin again.

In the late 1950’s, French writer and philosopher, Roger Caillois, penned a work called ‘Man, Play and Games’ in which he critically expanded on the work of Huizinger.

He placed the various forms of play on a continuum from paidia — unstructured and spontaneous activities (playfulness) to ludus — structured activities with rules (sport).

Caillois argued that with humans, the tendency is always to turn paidia into ludus, the result of which he felt partly accounted for the instability of culture and society. The push away from the imaginative depths of mythos and toward the surface rationality of logos.

Caillois went on to suggest that we can understand the complexity of play by referring to four different forms.

Agon is the most common form, referring to the competitive nature of sport. These games use skills such as speed, strength, memory and strategy and cover almost all of the largely followed and participated in sports today — such as football, basketball, baseball, cricket, tennis and chess.

Alea is Latin for luck and essentially requires little or no skill and sheer chance. This form includes games such as roulette or dice.

Ilinx is Greek for vertigo. Extreme sports such as skydiving, rock climbing, surfing and skateboarding would be filed here, as well as riding a rollercoaster or children spinning until they fall over. Essentially, anything which alters perception.

Of course, there are sports which involve dimensions of a number of these forms of play. Golf, for example, is a mix of agon and alea. It is a game of extreme skill and — due to the many variables of nature — luck.

Consider that a player does not even aim specifically for a hole-in-one. The goal is to land the ball close to the pin, downward of the hole in order to make for an easier putt. Hitting it directly into the hole might be viewed as lucky — you could even go so far as to say it is a slight error in judgement.

The final form of play according to Caillois is mimicry. Often seen in children’s games like dress-up, it also includes carnivals, theatre and storytelling. Mimicry, more so than other forms of play, intimately involves our imagination.

As a storyteller, this is why the art remains so compelling to me. It is perhaps the ultimate paidia. There are no rules. Hearing a story reconnects us to our imagination and to the ever-unfolding, living story at the centre of our being.

Akin to dreaming, it moves out us out of a linear (or ruled) sense of time and into unbound timelessness where our imagination can flourish. Carl Jung called imagination the ‘dynamic principle’ of play, stating that “the debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable”.

As the world attempts to push us more and more into logos — surface-level thinking that often requires us to choose a side rather than find the creative middle — there is a necessity of play to keep the fires of our imagination burning. As Einstein said, “play is the highest form of research”.

This something we risk losing through our highly structured education system. Play becomes secondary. In other words, our guiding principle leans towards becoming just a constant adaptation to external reality.

Imagination is rendered to, at best, useless, and at worst, reprehensible. Our connection to the internal nature of being — mythos, the ‘non-ordinary’, and life’s great mystery — wanes, along with both our intuition and our desire for creative expression, the very thing which makes us human.

Fundamentally, we understand that all invention has its source in childlike curiosity, imagination and playfulness. It puts us in touch with our unconscious material, allowing it rise to the level of conscious thought. It is here that our deepest values may lie, and without it, we birth nothing into this world.

Imagination is to what each of us owes that which is greatest in our lives.

Despite — or perhaps ‘because’ — the darkness around us feels particularly deep at this moment, staying connected to our true nature, that of Homo ludens, is more important than ever. Play is both a form of wisdom and a means of survival. It keeps us in flow and is inherent to whole humanhood.

Updated from an original essay by Asher Packman published by The Good Men Project in 2015.