Episode 117: Time is a Child at Play: On the Mystery of Games
The topic of games and play has fascinated JF and Phil since the launch of Weird Studies. Way back in 2018, they recorded back-to-back episodes on tabletop roleplaying games and fighting sports, and more recently, they did a two-parter on Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game, a philosophical novel suggesting that all human culture tends toward play. In this episode, your hosts draw on a wealth of texts, memories, and nascent ideas to explore the game concept as such. What is a game? What do games tell us about life? What is the function of play in the formation of reality?
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REFERENCES
\n\nRoger Caillois, Man, Play, and Games
\nJohan Huizinga, Homo Ludens
\nLudwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
\nBernard Suits, The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia
\nJobe Bittman, The Book of Antitheses US version, EU version
\nWeird Studies, Episode 6, Dungeons and Dragons
\nWeird Studies, Episode 7, Boxing
\nC. Thi Nguyen, Games: Agency as Art
\nEduardo Vivieros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics
\nBF Skinner, American psychologist
\nHeraclitus, Fragments