Part 1 · Introduction — Play and Puzzles
Chapter 1
What Is Play?
8 articles
Huizinga's magic circle, Caillois's four categories, Wittgenstein's language games. We begin by naming what we are making with tools left by philosophers a century ago.
Articles in this chapter
- 1.What Is Play? — Starting with Huizinga's Magic Circle2026-07-10 · Komugi · 5 min
Making puzzles keeps bringing me back to the most basic question: what is play? What is fun? In this new series, I go ask the philosophers. Part 1 is Huizinga's magic circle — why people get dead serious inside a simple drawn line.
- 2.Reading 'Homo Ludens' Chapter by Chapter — The Order and Tension Play Creates2026-07-10 · Komugi · 6 min
Last time's 'magic circle' was only the entrance. From here I read the classic on play, 'Homo Ludens,' one chapter at a time, as a maker. Of the traits Huizinga lists in Chapter 1, two pillars I hadn't touched yet - order and tension - tested against Tetris and my own puzzles.
- 3.Splitting Play Into Four — Opening Caillois's Man, Play and Games2026-08-08 · Komugi · 7 min
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.
- 4.Drives You May Mix, Drives You May Not — Caillois, Reading Two2026-08-21 · Komugi · 9 min
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.
- 5.'Game' Cannot Be Defined — Wittgenstein × Baba Is You2026-08-14 · Komugi · 6 min
I sat down to write 'What is a puzzle?' for the site's intro page and froze. Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations says there is no single thread running through everything we call a game — only an overlapping web of similarities he named family resemblance. I test the idea against Baba Is You, the game that literally puts its rules on the board as word blocks, and come away thinking about genre as a family tree instead of a definition.
- 6.Inside Raph Koster's Philosophy — The Moment a Game Is Solved, It Becomes a Puzzle2026-08-10 · Kizuki · 12 min
A study of Raph Koster—author of A Theory of Fun for Game Design and designer of Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies—built only from what he has published himself. We read the claim that has barely moved in twenty years (fun is progress on prediction), his obsession with the game/puzzle boundary and the moment a solved game falls to the puzzle side, his first-person accounts of failure at SWG, Metaplace and UO, the dilemma of whether depth is ever rewarded, and the influences he actually credits, from modernist literature to the MUD-Dev list.
- 7.Inside Chris Crawford's Philosophy — Drawing Puzzles Outside the Line, Then Counting His Own Defeats2026-09-09 · Kizuki · 10 min
"Puzzles are challenges with no purposeful opponents." The shortest definition of a puzzle was written by Chris Crawford, the man who almost single-handedly started the field of game design writing. That definition placed puzzles outside of games — and forty years later he wrote, in his own words, that he had failed. Reading across his journal, his laws, his memoirs, his design diary and his talks for his philosophy, obsessions, failures, dilemmas and influences.
- 8.The Board That Fills the Boredom — Pascal's "Divertissement" and the Puzzle on Your Commute2026-08-07 · Komugi · 7 min
On the train, the person next to me was tracing a tiny four-by-four board. What they were filling wasn't the board — it was three stations' worth of boredom. Pascal wrote in the Pensees that all human unhappiness comes from being unable to sit quietly in a room. I hold his philosophy of divertissement up against Threes!, the puzzle we open on our commute. Am I designing fun, or a tool for looking away?