Episode 117: Time is a Child at Play: On the Mystery of Games

Weird Studies

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel

Society & Culture, Arts, Philosophy

4.8 • 688 Ratings

🗓️ 2 March 2022

⏱️ 69 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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? Support us on Patreon Find us on Discord Get the new T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau! Get your Weird Studies merchandise (t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc.) Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop Buy the Weird Studies soundtrack 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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Spectrevision Radio
0:03.3	Welcome to Weird Studies, an arts and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel.
0:23.3	For more episodes or to support the podcast, go to weirdst. This is J.F.
0:53.1	The instinct of play is, as Phil says, an arcanum. It's a mystery.
0:59.2	At a glance, play in games will seem the most superfluous thing in the world.
1:03.7	But the ubiquity of play among the so-called higher animals,
1:07.4	and particularly of games in human culture, suggests otherwise.
1:13.1	Heraclitus gives play and games a primordial function in a famous fragment that goes, time is a child playing at drafts. That,
1:20.1	at least, is the most popular translation of his obscure aphorism. The term time here is a somewhat
1:26.3	simplistic translation of a much richer Greek word, Aeon,
1:31.0	which has also been rendered as history, eternity, and a lifetime.
1:36.2	The second part of the fragment is also important.
1:38.9	A kingly power is the child's.
1:41.7	What Heraclytus characterizes as child's play isn't limited to the causal order
1:46.9	measured by clocks. It's a deeper principle that undergirds and sustains this order, arguably
1:53.6	a spontaneity and autotallic freedom that precedes mechanical necessity as such. For Heraclytus, games come first. The cosmos
2:04.3	doesn't adhere in the mechanical drudgery of work, one thing after another, but in a spirit of play,
2:10.6	an openness that manifests perhaps in the immediate aesthetic experience of the world's uncontrollable
2:17.4	and inexplicable beauty.
2:20.2	Recording this episode with Phil gave me the opportunity to mention a book I had the honor of writing a
2:25.2	forward for recently. The book of Antiphyses by Joe Bittman is an attempt to marry tabletop role-playing
2:32.1	games, my first and lasting love, with the practice of magic.
	...

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