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What Does Play Become When It Spills Out? — Reading Caillois, Part 3
Part 3 of reading Caillois's Man, Play and Games covers the chapter on the corruption of games. Play breaks down, Caillois writes, not when we play too hard but when the enclosure of time and place disappears. And for each of the four drives he also lists a respectable home outside the game. So leaving the circle is not the accident; leaving it without a frame is. I test this against Cookie Clicker, Rust and A Little to the Left, and redraw the notifications and streaks on my own daily puzzle.
Drives You May Mix, Drives You May Not — Caillois, Reading Two
I tried to add a screen shake to the record-chasing mode of our daily puzzle, then crossed it out the next day. Even a single drop comes in two kinds: the one that mixes and the one that clouds the glass. Opening the next part of Caillois's Man, Play and Games, I found the six possible pairs already sorted into three neat boxes. Checking them against Dicey Dungeons, Beat Saber, Vampire Survivors and Tetris Effect: Connected, I look for the one place where the forbidden pair can be smuggled through.
Splitting Play Into Four — Opening Caillois's Man, Play and Games
Until now I've been reading Huizinga; today I switch books to Roger Caillois's Man, Play and Games. Caillois splits play into four — agôn (competition), alea (chance), mimicry (simulation), ilinx (vertigo) — and draws a slope from paidia (turbulent play) to ludus (rule-bound play). As a maker, I ask again which drive my own puzzles are built around.
Is a Win by Luck “My” Win? — The Philosophy of Alea and Desert
Late at night, Balatro handed me a personal-best score. Delighted, I sent it to a friend, who replied, “That was luck, right?” Can I call a win that chance dealt me my win? In this Nature of Play — Fragments piece, I sit two philosophers who would answer opposite ways face to face: Caillois, who insists chance is a first-class form of play, and Aristotle, who holds that a victory lives in a person’s activity, not in fortune. Slowly the two begin to set “a single throw” and “a long win-rate” on two separate plates.
