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Some Thoughts from Walter Benjamin
By Mark Young
President, Rational Games, Inc.
As I have a somewhat special relationship with the German philosopher/poet Walter Benjamin, I spent some time this month immersed in his rather fascinating essays on games and play.
From that, I take away:
Benjamin, writing in 1935 in his second doctoral thesis Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, focused mostly on the most basic of analog toys: a ball, a top and a kite, all made of natural materials. But what he has to say about play resonates equally with the latest digital game offerings.
Benjamin cannily reduces virtually all games to three archetypes:
Cat and Mouse: involving some kind of pursuit of a criminal, is seen in detective fiction, cinemas etc.
Protecting Mother: A heroic attempt to protect the precious honor of a team (soccer goalies?)
Fight for the Spoils: the Win/Lose battle over a scarce resource that only one side can win.
In all of these, he points first to the power of repetition omnipresent in childrens’ games: rather than imaginings of “as if”, the players insist on “over and over” much like a puppy chasing a ball.
This repetition creates habits and ultimately leads to mastery of a skill. But unlike the monotony of assembly line factory work, this kind of repetitive play is pleasurable and relaxing. At some point, however, children put away their “box of toys” and turn to the larger challenge of games of chance.
This takes them to card and board games but also to chess or even the Japanese game of go. But such a chessboard can be even viewed from the top of a skyscraper, as in the 1925 Dada film Entr’acte by René Clair.
The freedom of play:
This emerging “hellish” situation of freedom and equanimity, abrupt changes in games, where the “Spielraum” or “zone of exception” allows free choice to rearrange the customary hierarchical order and overcome determinism. The players literally destroy their toys and create new rules. The key figures here for Benjamin are both the Gambler and the Flaneur, who walk freely through town with no apparent purpose.
Finally the “kaleidoscope of play” is deliberately taken out of commission and we have a free fall of playfulness into Dada. Ludwig Wittgenstein took this further with his notion of “language games” with a strong link to poetry, and surrealism left the realm of rational thinking entirely.
Fertile ground for further ruminations. Stay tuned!
Comments welcome!