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

Roger Caillois, Man, Play, and Games
Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
Bernard Suits, The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia
Jobe Bittman, The Book of Antitheses US version, EU version
Weird Studies, Episode 6, Dungeons and Dragons
Weird Studies, Episode 7, Boxing
C. Thi Nguyen, Games: Agency as Art
Eduardo Vivieros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics
BF Skinner, American psychologist
Heraclitus, Fragments