Caillois Completeness
Thursday, February 18th, 2010 at 4:14 pm
The inimitable James Wallis has bravely salvaged his blog and started posting again, pointing this week to Roger Caillois’ book Man, Play and Games, and summarising some of its main tenets. In particular, agôn, alea, mimicry and ilinx were terms I’d heard unreferenced in a GDC presentation last year, and I’m pleased to stumble across their source.
Between work like this, the vast and ancient body of cultural experience pointed to by Frank Lantz when he insists that games are play rather than media, and the largely unplumbed depths of other fields such as architecture, games have a lot to go at in terms of discovering and building their heritage.
