Homo Ludens 2.

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In 1938, John Huizinga characterized culture as a form of play and described
man as a being at play, rather than knowing or working. In today’s media culture,
his words seem to have become true. Everything seems more and more to contain
play elements, from sports to Facebook, from the battlefield to the personal
workplace. Is life really just a game?

By Joost Raessens

A: He cheated. B: He’s lucky. C: He’s a genius. D: It is written. These are the

choices presented to moviegoers in the opening scene of Slumdog Millionaire
(2008). Jamal Malik, the protagonist, is just one question away from winning the
first prize of 20 million rupees in the Indian version of the television quiz show
Who wants to be a millionaire? Is it because he cheated, he had good luck, he
was a genius, or was it fate? The presenter, Prem – played by the star actor Anik
Kapoor – is convinced that the answer is the first, answer A, and has Jamal
arrested just as he is about to answer the ninth and last question. In the
interrogation that follows, which forms the thread of the film, we see flashbacks
of Jamal’s life, and how it came to be that he could know all the answers.

1. Until last year, Who wants to be a millionaire? was shown on RTL television in
the Netherlands under the title Lotto Weekend Miljonairs. Who was the
presenter?
A: Robert ten Brink B: Martijn Krabbé
C: Chazia Mourali D: Bridget Maasland

It is remarkable that Slumdog Millionaire was the grand winner at this

year’s Oscars, given that the tension of the film primarily depends on the format
of an important popular television genre: game shows, or more specifically, quiz
shows.1 One can say that this game format begins and ends with a ritual. In the
opening ritual, contestants are introduced and we see how different they all are.
Jamal Malik, for example, is an uneducated, 18-year-old Muslim boy who grew
up as an orphan in the slums of Mumbai and earns his living by pouring tea at a

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call centre. At the moment when the game begins, all of the candidates are equal.
The idea is that, despite their backgrounds, any one of them could in principle
win. In the course of the game, however, it becomes clear that some of the
participants have more appropriate knowledge for answering the various
questions. Then comes the final ritual: the host congratulates the winner and
presents a check for the amount that has been won.
The American media scholar John Fiske has identified this ritual-game-
ritual format as symptomatic for capitalist ideology: despite all the differences,
everyone has the same opportunities. Whenever someone ‘naturally’ proves to
possess the right knowledge, along with a bit of luck, they can rise up the social
ladder, with all the material advantages that provides. The fact that differences in
people's knowledge also correlates with social backgrounds would thereby appear
not to be visible.2 The fact that Jamal not only has the required knowledge but
also the requisite touch of luck becomes clear when at first he is unable to answer
three of the nine questions. But because director Danny Boyle has ingeniously
interwoven the quiz show with the story of Jamal’s life, he is able to show how
this ‘slumdog’ from the streets could acquire the necessary academic knowledge
to win this television event, even though in earlier episodes the so-called experts
– professors, doctors and lawyers – had been unable to get past the third
question.

2. Slumdog Millionaire was the big winner at the Oscar presentations on

February 22, 2009. How many Oscars did it receive?
A: six B: seven
C: eight D: nine

Man the Player

The concept of play has rarely been the subject of research in media studies.
Three developments at the end of the 20th century have changed that. Firstly, a
broad socio-cultural development took place that meant that contemporary
(post-) modern culture began to see itself ‘as a game without an overall aim, as

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play without a transcendent destination’.3 Secondly, we have witnessed the rise
and success of digital media, whose very design encourages playful use. We are
not thinking here of just the commercial computer games, but also of crossovers
in the areas of new media, art and games. These crossovers are what primarily
connects creative technological research to artistic practices capable of ‘initiating
participation’, in the way achieved by the Frequentie 1550 (2005-2007) and Fort
Amsterdam (2008) games developed by the Waag Society.4 Thirdly, art and
media curricula (at both vocational and university level institutions) have evolved
new disciplines, such as new media studies and computer game studies, in which
the theories of play by Johan Huizinga, Roger Caillois and others play an
important role.5 Socio-cultural, media-theoretical and institutional changes have
made additional research into the concept of play not only possible, but desirable
and workable.
One individual who made an important – if not the most important –
contribution to the debate on cultural significance of the phenomenon of play was
the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga.6 According to Huizinga, people are not so
much to be characterized as homo sapiens (the wise or knowing man) or homo
faber (man the maker), but as homo ludens: a being who is and must be at play.
This was also nicely worded by the 18th-century German philosopher poet
Friedrich Schiller: ‘Man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a
man, and he is only completely a man when he plays.’7
Huizinga was not only concerned with identifying areas of play in culture,
but with demonstrating that culture itself is fundamentally comprised of play.
Paraphrasing Schiller, one could say that culture is only culture in as far as it does
not deny its own playful character. In Homo Ludens, Huizinga discusses the
element of play in and of various cultural domains and analyzes the element of
play through the ages, with an emphasis on the present, while asking whether the
play element has been lost in contemporary civilization or, indeed, has increased.

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3. According to Huizinga, one art form is not very playful. Which is it?
A: music B: the plastic arts
C: dance D: theatre

We can take the cultural domain of sports, for example, and soccer in
particular, in order to illustrate the current validity of Huizinga’s ideas. In the
game of soccer, we can immediately recognize Huizinga’s definition of play. Play
is ‘a voluntary activity or occupation executed within certain fixed limits of time
and place, according to rules freely accepted but absolutely binding, having its
aim in itself and accompanied by a feeling of tension, joy and the consciousness
that it is “different” from “ordinary life”.’ (p. 28)
Despite the increased importance of mediatised sports, they are moving
‘away from the play-sphere’ (p. 197). For Huizinga, sports are no longer an ‘aim in
itself’, but have become professional and commercial, even a form of political
propaganda, as we observed during the 1978 World Cup in Argentina and the
2008 Olympic Games in Peking. Even more important for Huizinga was the
reduction of pleasure in play. The fact that we risk losing the pure quality of play
was evident, for example, at the recent World Cup in Germany – ‘the laboratory
of calculation’ – when Zidane pulled out of the game: ‘man the player who
became unbearably frustrated by Materazzi, the ultimate guardian of the tactical
system.8 To counterbalance that, however, there are images such as those of
Maradona during the warming up for the semi-finals of the UEFA Cup in 1989,
dancing with his ball to the rhythm of Live is life with the joy of a child, or the
victory of Barcelona at the last Champions League final: ‘Latinos and Africans are
the trendsetters, be their names Drogba, Ronaldinho, Robinho, Messi, Babel,
Henry or Eto’o. Their play is characterized, aside from their skill, by playfulness
and passion. In them, we discover the child playing outdoors.’

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4. In the 2009 Champions League final, a playful Barcelona beat Manchester
United by 2-0. Who scored the goals?
A: Lionel Messi B: Samuel Eto’o
C: Thierry Henry D: Samuel Eto’o and Lionel Messi

Computer Games
One important domain where play can be seen is media culture. Here, I would
like to emphasize two interconnected elements of play: the fact that the game
absorbs the player ‘intensely and utterly’, despite the fact that he or she knows it
is not real. The first play element has to do with the fact that our society is
saturated with media, media that inundate the user in a time and space that are
distinct from ‘ordinary life’ and are characterized by new forms of freedom, rules
and pleasure. The second play element concerns the fact that our experiences –
both of the world and the ‘other’, as well as ourselves – are perhaps not
immediately, but to an increasing degree, subject to the media. We are aware – if
all is well, it is referred to as being ‘media-smart’ or ‘media-wise’ – that through
the media we experience only perspectives on reality, yet at the same time, just
like the media themselves, we behave as though these perspectives represented
reality. Having a preference for certain perspectives and switching between them
can also be referred to as a form of play.9
One of the media applications that can clearly be characterized as play is
the computer game. Since the early 1990s, the market for computer games has
enjoyed explosive growth, with Microsoft (Xbox), Nintendo (Wii, DS) and Sony
(PlayStation) the absolute market leaders. Worldwide, in 2008, the game
industry brought in 51.4 billion dollars, a turnover larger than that of the
Hollywood film industry. More and more people, young and old, men and
women, play computer games. The area in which we can directly witness the
melting together of seriousness and play is the genre of the so-called serious
games, computer games that are not only played for amusement, but also for
serious purposes. Think here of political games, such as Food Force (United
Nations World Food Programme) from 2005, and educational games, including

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the previously mentioned Frequency 1550 (Waag Society, 2005-2007), which try
to entice players to certain insights and changes in behaviour. These games
illustrate what Huizinga wrote: ‘Certain activities whose whole raison d’être lies
in the field of material interest, and which had nothing of play about them in
their initial stages, develop what we can only call play-forms as a secondary
characteristic’. (p. 199) Wherever the game is no longer an ‘aim in itself’, but
takes its right to exist from an ‘interest’ or ‘purpose’ – thereby becoming serious,
however well intended – in fact risks losing both its purity and its attraction.

5. The genre of the Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game

(MMORPG) has four distinct subgenres. Which subgenre is the most popular?
A: Social (Second Life, The Sims B: Fantasy (World of Warcraft)
Online)
C: Science Fiction (Star Wars D: Combat Simulations and First
Galaxies) Person Shooter Games (America’s
Army)

The MMORPG is an especially popular genre, played worldwide by

millions of people. Following the words of Huizinga, it generates ‘social
groupings’ (p. 13), here in the form of collective, virtual worlds that are accessible
online 24 hours a day, even when individual players are not. In order to
determine the specificity of this genre, researchers have called on the work of the
French sociologist, Roger Caillois. In his 1958 book, Man, Play and Games
Caillois further developed Huizinga’s ideas. Where Huizinga spoke about play in
general terms, Caillois distinguished four categories: agon (play with a
competitive element, such as soccer); alea (play in which luck is a factor, as in
lotteries); mimicry (play as pretending, as in role-play); and ilinx (play in which
dizziness is central, as in roller coaster rides). And, where Huizinga declared that
rules were central, Caillois distinguished ludus from paidea. In the ludus variant,
the player subjects himself to the rules of the game, while in the paidea mode,
play is characterized by creativity, improvization and spontaneity. Using both

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categories, MMORPGs can be categorized as games with high mimicry and
paidea content. They offer the opportunity to take on roles that people are unable
to assume in everyday life, calling on the improvization and creativity of the
players because there are no specific aims or objectives.
In an examination of this genre, cultural psychologist Stef Aupers tries to
find an answer to the question of how we can understand the power of attraction
that these games exert. According to Aupers, they offer a virtual solution for
problems that go hand-in-hand with the process of modernization. Because of
their emphasis on mysticism and magic, fantasy games such as World of
Warcraft, for example, offer an alternative to what Max Weber called the
‘disenchantment of the world’. Not only can problems of the real world be
resolved in the virtual world of the game, but problems in the real world can be
resolved by those playing the game. Research has shown that playing MMORPGs
has important effects on learning, which can make players better suited to
positions of leadership in business life. The players dare to take risks, are
competitive, play to win, are willing to experiment and are accustomed to
working towards common goals in a group context.10 Aupers’ researches a
phenomenon that, referring back to Huizinga, we can describe as ‘seriousness
becoming play’. John Beck, Mitchell Wade and IBM are phenomena in which we
see the play becoming serious again. (p. 200)

6. In which game can the player enter the land of Albion, based on the legend of
King Arthur?
A: Ultima Online B: Everquest 2
C: Dark Age of Camelot D: World of Warcaft

Playful Media
Keeping in the back of our mind Huizinga’s warning that we cannot extend the
concept of play indefinitely, I consider play an important concept for the analysis
of the use of media. When John Fiske, mentioned above, wrote about play in
relation to television, he made a distinction between two forms of play.11 First,

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there is play in a text (a television program, for example), in the same sense that
there is play – or latitude – in a door whose hinges are loose. This gives the
viewer in turn space with which to play with the text, and in so doing, to playfully
give the text an interpretation of his own. It is a characteristic of new digital
media that they do not restrict the user’s playing space to this interpretive
flexibility (or creative receptiveness), but expand it into the reconfiguration of
existing texts or (re)construction of new texts. We see this respectively in the
interactive use of commercial games, in which players play according to the rules
of the game, and in the development of artistic game modifications, whereby
artists play with the rules of the game. Just as the French filmmaker Jean-Luc
Godard played with the rules of the classic Hollywood film in his counter-cinema
of the 1960s, nearly 50 years later, artists such as Jodi (untitled game, 1996-
2001), Anne-Marie Schleiner (Velvet Strike, 2002) and Brody Condon (Adam
Killer, 1999-2001) are in their turn playing with the rules of the commercial
computer game (counter-gaming). Think for example of the way that Godard (in
his jump cuts) and Jodi (in showing source code) no longer make the underlying
technology invisible or transparent, but put it in the foreground.12
We also see this room for play on YouTube, the website for sharing online
videos. Begun in February of 2005, with the motto ‘YouTube: Broadcast
Yourself’, it was an immediate success. It is a website where users can upload and
watch video films for free. Each producer has his or her own ‘television channel’,
where all their short films can be seen. YouTube is a gathering place of existing
audiovisual material, including films, television programs and video clips, of
parodies and remixes (reconstructions) of this material, of material made by the
users themselves (constructions) and the ongoing comments of other users. It is a
website that is open in its objectives and its forms of use (paidea), so that
everyone can play in their own way. YouTube does indeed play with the rules of
television, but it also establishes new rules (ludus), for example, that the films
cannot be more than ten minutes long, that they must not cause offense and that
they respect copyrights. It is remarkable here that mimicry – playing television
and ‘looking like a pro’ – is catching up with reality.13 Not only do YouTube users
play television, but more and more television broadcasting corporations are

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playing YouTube, with their own websites, such as Uitzending gemist in the
Netherlands, where viewers can see broadcasts they missed on television.

7. YouTube is the world’s most popular online video sharing website. In May of
2009, how many videos were watched on YouTube in the United States? (Source:
Nielsen)
A: 6 million B: 60 million
C: 600 million D: 6 billion

An important cultural function of digital media is that they are

increasingly being used for playing or experimenting with personal identities.
Play can here be seen as an important form of (new) media wisdom: ‘Play – the
capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving’.14
Consider here the ways in which individuals present themselves on personal
websites and in role-playing games, such as the previously mentioned World of
Warcraft, or the study Sex is a Game (Rutgers Nisso Group, 2006), which
researched how young people use the Internet to experiment with sex: how they
came into contact with others, flirted and engaged in cybersex. The most
important play media in this context are undoubtedly mobile telephones and so-
called social media, such as weblogs and social networks, including Facebook,
Hyves, LinkedIn and Twitter. These are ideal social connections that playfully
express what the users think they are and how they wish to be seen by others. As
Huizinga described, play is indeed ‘a very deep layer of our mental being’. (p. 6)

8. Social media connect people across the entire globe. Which of these
networking sites is primarily focussed on the Netherlands?
A: Facebook B: Hyves
C: LinkedIn D: Twitter

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The Ludification of Culture
Contemporary (media) culture appears to be increasingly comprised of play
elements, a fact that leads us to refer to a ‘ludification of culture’.15 Nonetheless,
we should exercise some caution here, not only because many media users only
make limited use of the potential play elements (such as making game
modifications and YouTube films), but also because, again as Huizinga had
already written, ‘The attempt to assess the play-content in the confusion of
modern life is bound to lead us to contradictory conclusions’. (p. 199) The
tendency of seriousness to turn into play often goes hand-in-hand with the
opposite tendency, as we saw above in speaking of MMORPGs and ‘serious
games’. It is also often unclear whether something is used instrumentally or is in
fact play (is Facebook communication or playing with identity?), or whether
something is ‘pure ‘play or corrupted (as in soccer), or whether play is escaping
the critical scrutiny of reality (playing according to the rules or playing with the
rules themselves). In order to face these questions and problems, a ‘ludic turn’
must take place in media theory, so that serious attention can be paid to the
concept of play, literally to games and metaphorically to a playful dealing with the
media. It seems to me that theories of play, such as those of Huizinga, once
subjected to critical analysis, brought up to date and improved, will be able to
make an important contribution.
Let us finally return to Slumdog Millionaire. Boyle closely relates the
game structure of the television quiz show to the narrative structure of a typical
Hollywood genre: the rags to riches story. In this genre, ‘rivalry or competition’
(p. 133), described by Huizinga as a specific characteristic of play, has an
important role. The hero (Jamal) must complete an extremely difficult task
(winning the quiz show) which is connected to the completion of a promise
(finding Latika, the love of his youth). The format of the quiz show, which invites
viewers to test their own knowledge (agon), and the style of the film (the racing
rhythm, hectic visual editing, the stirring music), giving viewers the feeling of
being on a roller coaster ride (ilinx), all contribute to the playful character of
Slumdog Millionaire.

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9. Where Jamal puts his faith in love, his brother Salim sooner believes in the
power of the pistol. Which French filmmaker said, ‘All you need to make a movie
is a girl and a gun’?
A: Jean-Luc Godard B: Jean-Pierre Melville
C: Henri Verneuil D: Henri-Georges Clouzot

Ultimately, the movie only partly has a happy ending. While Jamal wins a
substantial amount of money and – much more importantly for him – finds
Latika again, Jamal’s brother Salim is shot and killed. Moviegoers forgive Jamal
the fact that he actually twice corrupts the play – he is not playing for the game
but for the money, and he is not really playing for the money but for love. In one
of the final shots of the film, we are given the answer to the question with which
we began this article. ‘This is our destiny,’ says Jamal. ‘Kiss me,’ replies Latika.
The correct answer is therefore D: It is written.

Notes
1. For an analysis of game shows such as Idols, Big Brother and The Weakest
Link, see the issue of Sociologie on the theme of ‘De spelende mens’, Stef Aupers,
ed., number 1, year 2, 2006. That elements of play can be the cornerstone for a
film was argued by Jan Simons in Playing the Waves: Lars von Trier’s Game
Cinema, 2007.
2.‘Quizzical Pleasures', in John Fiske, Television Culture, 1987
3. Lourens Minnema, ‘Play and (Post) Modern Culture: An Essay on Changes in
the Scientific Interest in the Phenomenon of Play’ in Cultural Dynamics 10(1),
1998, pp. 21-47
4. Marleen Stikker, ‘Kunstraad schaadt kunstsector door verouderd kunstbegrip’,
2008. See also: Nathalie Hartjes, ‘Spel tussen tafellaken en servet. Brody Condon,
Geert Jan Mulder et al – ‘Next Level: Art, Games and Reality’, 8weekly, 2006.
5. Marianne van den Boomen et al., eds, Digital Material, 2009 and Joost
Raessens & Jeffrey Goldstein, eds., Handbook of Computer Game Studies, 2005

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6. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture,
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), translation of Homo ludens. Proeve eener bepaling
van het spel-element der cultuur, 1938. Homo ludens was rereleased in Dutch in
2008 by Atheneum Boekhandel Canon.
7. The 15th letter in Friedrich Schiller’s Letters upon the Aesthetic Education of
Man, published in German in 1795. For a plea for a playful society, see Pat Kane,
The Play Ethic: A Manifesto for a Different Way of Living, 2004.
8. For this and the following quote, see Willem Vissers, ‘Spelende mens herwint
terrein op voetbalveld’, in de Volkskrant, 4 July, 2007.
9. ‘Play’, in Roger Silverstone, Why Study the Media, 1999.
10. John Beck and Mitchell Wade, Got Game: How the Gamer Generation Is
Reshaping Business Forever, 2004. See also Virtual Worlds, Real Leaders, IBM,
2007.
11. ‘Pleasure and Play' in John Fiske, Television Culture, 1987
12. Alexander Galloway, ‘Countergaming’ in Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic
Culture, 2006. See also Joost Raessens, ‘Computer Games as Participatory Media
Culture’, 2005, in Handbook of Computer Game Studies (see note 5), Britta
Neitzel and Rolf Nohr, eds., Das Spiel mit dem Medium. Partizipation –
Immersion – Interaktion, 2006, and Mark Pesce, The Playful World: How
Technology Is Transforming Our Imagination, 2000.
13. ‘Any amateur can (…) look like a pro,’ from Jim Feeley, ‘Lights! Camera!
Vodcast! How to make your own viral hit’, in Wired, 14 May, 2006. For an
analysis of YouTube, see Eggo Müller’s ‘Formatted spaces of participation:
Interactive television and the changing relationship between production and
consumption’, in Marianne van den Boomen et al, eds., Digital Material, 2009.
14. Henry Jenkins, ‘Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media
Education for the 21st Century’, 2006. See also: www.playful-identities.nl.
15. Joost Raessens, ‘Playful Identities or the Ludification of Culture’, 2006

Answers
1.A; 2.C; 3.B; 4.D; 5.B; 6.C; 7.D; 8.B; 9.A.

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Joost Raessens is professor of media theory at Utrecht University.
www.raessens.com

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