Man, Play, and Games

Couverture
University of Illinois Press, 1961 - 208 pages
2 Avis
According to Roger Caillois, play is "an occasion of pure waste: waste of time, energy, ingenuity, skill, and often of money." In spite of this - or because of it - play constitutes an essential element of human social and spiritual development.In this classic study, Caillois defines play as a free and voluntary activity that occurs in a pure space, isolated and protected from the rest of life. Play is uncertain, since the outcome may not be foreseen, and it is governed by rules that provide a level playing field for all participants. In its most basic form, play consists of finding a response to the opponent's action - or to the play situation - that is free within the limits set by the rules.Caillois qualifies types of games - according to whether competition, chance, simulation, or vertigo (being physically out of control) is dominant - and ways of playing, ranging from the unrestricted improvisation characteristic of children's play to the disciplined pursuit of solutions to gratuitously difficult puzzles. Caillois also examines the means by which games become part of daily life and ultimately contribute to various cultures their most characteristic customs and institutions. Presented here in Meyer Barash's superb English translation, Man, Play and Games is a companion volume to Caillois's Man and the Sacred.
 

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LibraryThing Review

Avis d'utilisateur  - breadhat - LibraryThing

This is a great complement to Huizinga's work, and I found Caillois to be a more engaging writer. He brings some really eclectic material to the table, including animal psychology and detailed ... Consulter l'avis complet

Review: Man, Play and Games

Avis d'utilisateur  - David Hildebrand - Goodreads

A fascinating book by a fascinating intellectual. He provides an interesting model for the classification of games which seems inherently Nietzschean. Highlights include: his definition of play, his ... Consulter l'avis complet

Pages sélectionnées

Table des matières

Competition and Chance
99
Revivals in the Modern World
129
ADDENDA
143
The Importance of Games of Chance
145
Psychological and Mathematical Approaches
161
Notes
177
Index
203
Droits d'auteur

Autres éditions - Tout afficher

Expressions et termes fréquents

Fréquemment cités

Page 163 - For, to speak out once for all, 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.
Page 23 - The last kind of game includes those which are based on the pursuit of vertigo and which consist of an attempt to momentarily destroy the stability of perception and inflict a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind.
Page 4 - ... not serious", but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner. It promotes the formation of social groupings which tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress their difference from the common world by disguise or other means.
Page 7 - The game is ruined by the nihilist who denounces the rules as absurd and conventional, who refuses to play because the game is meaningless. His arguments are irrefutable. The game has no other but an intrinsic meaning.
Page 4 - Summing up the formal characteristics of play we might call it a free activity standing quite consciously outside "ordinary" life as being "not serious," but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly.
Page 181 - Thus he will pull a chair toward him till it is almost overbalanced, then he intently fixes his eyes on the top bar of the back, and when he sees it coming over his way, darts from underneath and watches the fall with great delight; and similarly with heavier things. There is a washstand, for example, with a heavy marble top, which he has with great labour upset several times, but always without hurting himself.
Page 7 - The confused and intricate laws of ordinary life are replaced in this fixed space and for this given time, by precise, arbitrary, unexceptionable rules that must be accepted as such and that govern the correct playing of the game.
Page 14 - A whole group of games would seem to be competitive, that is to say, like a combat in which equality of chances is artificially created, in order that the adversaries should confront each other under ideal conditions, susceptible of giving precise and incontestable value to the winner's triumph.
Page 9 - 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...

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