Patterns of Play
2005-2006: Roger Caillois' recurring patterns in how we play games
About two decades ago, I ran this series of essays riffing on the work of Roger Caillois and applying it to videogames. These were among the most popular pieces I ever ran at Only a Game. I was to return to Caillois’ work several times afterwards, most recently in an invited paper for the International Journal of Play entitled “The Extinction of the Play Element of Culture”. That’s fairly highfalutin’ stuff, but these original six essays are extremely accessible, and open up new ways of thinking about games if you’ve never engaged with Caillois ideas. Hope you enjoy them!
In his 1958 book Les Jeux et Les Hommes (usually translated as Man, Play and Games), the noted sociologist and intellectual Roger Caillois introduced a terminology for the patterns we can find in games. He used the term ‘game’ in a very wide manner, applying it to all play activities. This is a partial consequence of his native language, French, where the term ‘jeux’ and ‘jouer’ express the concepts of both play and game in English.
Caillois’ interest in games was sociological: the second half of Les Jeux et Les Hommes is an account of how societies relate to the patterns of play he identified, and makes for fascinating reading. However, the principle value of Caillois’ work for modern game design is that his framework for thinking about games provides a unique perspective for examining play.
The term ‘patterns of play’ was never used by Caillois, but I have coined it to provide a means to refer to his system. Caillois was keen to observe that it was not intended as a taxonomy.
The elements of the system are as follows. Firstly, there are four patterns of play:
Alea, or games of chance, discussed in Part 1 “The Rituals of Alea”.
Mimicry, or games of simulation, discussed in Part 2 “The Imagination of Mimicry”.
Ilinx, or games of vertigo, discussed in Part 3 “The Joy of Ilinx”.
Agon, or games of competition, discussed in Part 4, “The Challenge of Agon”.
Additionally, Caillois proposed that games can be considered to lie at various points on an axis between free creativity and rule-bound complexity:
Paidia refers to improvisation, discussed in Part 5, “The Anarchy of Paidia”.
Ludus refers to rules, discussed in Part 6 “The Complexity of Ludus”.
Caillois' built upon prior work by Johan Huizinga, considered one of the founders of modern cultural history. Huizinga’s work raised a challenge for how we live together that has largely been ignored in the decades since, warning that we were gradually eliminating the play element of culture, with serious consequences. That topic will have to wait for another time. For now, these six essays each open a window onto how we engage with videogames that I hope you will find as engaging as I do.
Next week: The Rituals of Alea