Caillois work Man, Play, and Games, while an improvement from Huzinga’s work Homos Ludens, seems to me like a hypocritical circle of game categorization. Caillois spends the entire first half of the book attempting to place games into four distinct categories –the Latin titles of which drive me crazy– only to go right back around…

While Huizinga provided a useful starting definition of play, I think that his work might have suffered a bit from his insistence on keeping everything in one amorphous category of “play.” Caillois, on the other hand, benefits from his attempt to establish a taxonomy that accounts for a variety of different forms of play and…

In Man, Play, and Games, by Roger Caillois, there were lots of things that were thought provoking. An interesting point came in the Corruption of Games chapter. “It may be of interest to ask what becomes of games when the sharp line dividing their ideal rules from the diffuse and insidious laws of daily life…

This weeks reading on Caillois was a bit mind numbing I must admit. The book/research was interesting itself but I could not understand Caillois’ obsession with categories. Everything he wrote about games was fit into a category, then a sub category, and after that categories were mixed and matched, or debunked as being able to…

Caillois’s book is a conflicting book, in my opinion.. I find the book fascinating from an academic point.. Caillois shows how games are important to both society and humanity, which is fascinating to see the reasons for why. Like when he delves into the sociological and the mathematical. However, I just disliked how he makes…

Caillois’ work Man Play and Games was refreshing after reading Huizinga’s work since this is probably the first discourse in the community of the study of games and play. Since I disagreed so much with Huizinga’s thoughts I thought I, and I really wanted to, would like Caillois’ book but every time he made a…

Roger Caillois’ book Man, Play and Games is, in many ways, a direct critique of Huizinga’s Homo Ludens. It attempts to build on the ideas of Huizinga’s work and both critique them as well as to build off of them. Overall the primary theme in in Man, Play and Games is that Homo Ludens, while…

I think that this book was an attempt by Caillois to draw a blueprint for the study of games and play. I understand his effort, and I see the value in putting theoretical ideas into boxes so they can be easily referred to by others. But to be honest I struggle a lot with this…

Caillois breakdown of play into disinct categories was much more helpful in understanding this academic, in-depth analysis of ‘play’ than the long drawn out writings of Huizinga. I still wonder though why someone feels the need to break down ‘play’ this far, but maybe thats because it is still an emerging field and people are…

Cross-cultural misconceptions were a key ingredient to imperialism.  To the conquered these misconceptions led to a gross underestimating of those doing the conquering, as for the conquerors misconceptions led to an undervaluing of foreign cultures and thus leading to the need to trivialize and eradicate them.  Caillois’s analysis of primitive society’s religious rituals as forms of “play”…