homo ludens
Flusser is well-known as a “media theorist,” and hardly known at all as a “games theorist.” But games figure often and prominently in his thinking and writing from the time of his earliest publications...
Category: play
Flusser’s Untranslatability
There’s a conference coming up next year with the title “Flusser’s Languages.” One of the questions to be addressed is, “Is Flusser untranslatable?’ Yes, I think he is. And although the same might be...
“What if…?”:
What if we just took the “what if?” state of mind to be playing? I find I really need a definition, and this is both simple and versatile (I can’t be the only one...
Flusser, “Games”
This is my translation of a very brief, very early essay Flusser wrote about games, which makes homo ludens the designation for the human specie from the start. But this is not as a...
Play and Games
In German, the two words are the same, or at least have the same root. “Spiel” is a game, and “spielen” is the verb — roughly “to spiel.” They’re two different words in English,...
This is Play
This is the title of an article (Stephen Nachmanovitch, New Literary History, Vol. 40, No. 1, Winter, 2009), pp. 1-24.) about play in general, but specifically about Gregory Bateson’s theoretical approach to it – involving...