Die Schatten von Gestern – Huizingas „Homo Ludens“ und seine Bedeutung für die (Computer)Spielforschung

Abstract

The Shadows of Yesterday – Huizinga’s Homo Ludens and its Meaning for Game Studies Today
Huizinga’s Homo Ludens is a foundational work for contemporary game studies and often credited as the source for similarly important and controversial concepts like the magic circle. The paper recontextualizes the Homo Ludens through Huizinga’s other works on play and situates it in the historical circumstances that shaped its writing and publication. This enables a new perspective on Huizinga’s idea of play as a phenomenon that’s removed from everyday life, a concept that was subject to particularly controversial debate among game researchers. The paper argues that Huizinga’s position on the exceptional nature of play has to be understood as a political intervention to recover play from the attempts of political appropriation. This solution is then criticized in the light of more recent attempts to position digital games and play as a-political artifacts and activities.