IDENTIFICATION OF OUR IDEA OF PLAY
(temporary notes)
We're going to explicit our idea of play through quotations from different books about the subject. Please note that we used Italian books or Italian editions, so in this page You won't read original texts but our free translations of them.
Anyway a selected imagery will be used to summarize the whole content.
Johan Huizinga: Homo Ludens, Einaudi editore, Milano, 1946.
Foreword by Umberto Eco, 1976.
In Homo ludens the Author presents the conceipts of:
culture as a whole of social aspects in which art and sport are also included;
cultural invariable.
Play is then considered as a cultural invariable, something which features itself as a part of culture, but also at the same level as culture. So culture and play have the same characteristics.
FEATURES AND MEANING OF PLAY AS A CULTURAL PHENOMENON
Even in its simpler forms, and in the animal world, play is something more than a mere physiological phenomenon: it has an aim, a meaning. All the most important human activities like myth, cult and language have always benn mixed with play.
In our conscience play is opposite to seriousness, but actually playing can be extremely serious. And anyway the idea of play, just like all the group of conceipts which are usually related to hilariousness, cheerfulness, laugh, crazyness, is simply irreducible. It's like an axiom whose meaning is deeply set in our conscience.
So play can't be just as an opposition to seriousness.
Play is not real, ordinary life. It's a way to get temporarily away from it and to find new and different aims. Play is then not inferior to seriousness at all. Sometimes play can elevate itself to peaks of beauty that seriousness can't reach.
Go to imagery
Play features itself as a disinterested activity. It's out of the process which is up to satisfy human needs. It, on the contrary, makes a break in this process. So play is something which lives beside ordinary life, making it more beautiful.
Anna Kaiser: Genius Ludi: il gioco nella formazione umana, Armando editore, Roma, 1995.
PLAY WITHIN LANGUAGE
Playing with language is the first activity that human beings do when they can master a linguistic system. It's an activity which gives pleasure and cheerfulness. Playing with language gives people possibility to create new ways to communicate, to free themselves from the literal meaning of words, to explore the world of unexpected.
Irony within language gives an alternative way to communiacate strong feelings and meanings without sounding too heavy. Linguistic play has an unlimited paradoxical potential.
Go to imagery
LUDIC ELEMENTS WITHIN MYTH AND CULT
Myth has the aim to tell real facts in a non rational, sometimes contraddictory way. The narrator, then, plays the role of a Homo ludens. He doesn't expect the listener to believe the story, nor to teach something, but to play with them. Myth has the ability to give new meanings to the facts, and to take the listener through a fantastic voyage.
Go to imagery
Go to index
Go to homepage