{"id":1635,"date":"2019-11-06T14:04:04","date_gmt":"2019-11-06T14:04:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/?p=1635"},"modified":"2019-11-06T17:33:02","modified_gmt":"2019-11-06T17:33:02","slug":"homo-ludens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/?p=1635","title":{"rendered":"homo ludens"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Flusser is well-known as a &#8220;media theorist,&#8221; and hardly known at all as a &#8220;games theorist.&#8221;  But games figure often and prominently in his thinking and writing from the time of his earliest publications in the 1960s.  I\u2019m honoured to be a contributor to a new volume called&nbsp;<em>Understanding Flusser, Understanding Modernism<\/em>, edited by Aaron Jaffe and published at Bloomsbury, probably 2020.  We agreed that I would write about Flusser&#8217;s understanding of games.  A draft of the essay is now with the editors.  It&#8217;s called &#8220;Games and Play: Being Human in the Universe of Technical Images&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Writing the essay has clarified a few points, one of the most important being that Flusser declared <em>play<\/em> to be characteristic of human beings.  We know that animals also play.  But Flusser&#8217;s concern was with the difference between human beings and their <em>apparatuses<\/em>.  This is the issue that lies at the heart of his frequent, although rarely detailed references to games.  It sets him quite dramatically apart from, say, Huizinga (<em>Homo Ludens: a Study of the Play Element in Culture<\/em>. 1938), or Callois (<em>Man, Play and Games<\/em>, 1961).  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The image: Pieter Bruegel the Elder,<em> Childrens&#8217; Games<\/em>, 1560, oil on board, 45 x 63&#8243;, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Flusser is well-known as a &#8220;media theorist,&#8221; and hardly known at all as a &#8220;games theorist.&#8221; But games figure often and prominently in his thinking and writing from the time of his earliest publications&#46;&#46;&#46;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1568,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"bgseo_title":"","bgseo_description":"","bgseo_robots_index":"","bgseo_robots_follow":"","_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[214,237,261],"tags":[299,283],"class_list":["post-1635","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-flusser","category-games","category-play","tag-callois","tag-huizinga"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1635","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1635"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1635\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1639,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1635\/revisions\/1639"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1568"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}