Homo ludens, the playing human being, is a term coined in the first half of the 20th century; it became known by the title of a book by Johan Huizinga. “Game” was identified as the basic category of human behavior, and as a culture-forming factor. Huizinga tried to show that our cultural systems such as politics, science, religion, law, and so on originally developed from playful behaviors, and have solidified institutionally by ritualizations over time. Game rules could no longer be broken without social sanctions.

In contrast, Miguel Sicart, the author of this short book, does not follow the tradition of Huizingan play, understood as a contest that creates a separate world with rules that are no longer questioned. Sicart does not “oppose play to reality, to work, to ritual or sports because it exists in all of them. It is a way of being in the world, like languages, thought, faith, reason, and myth” (page 3).

The author sees his “theory of play as a reaction to the instrumentalized, mechanistic thinking on play championed by postmodern culture industries. [This theory is] an invocation of play as a struggle against efficiency, seriousness, and technical determinism” (page 5). Without naming it, the author counters a current trend, namely to use game thinking in non-game contexts (for example, at work) in order to increase motivation and productivity, what is known as gamification. The author does not rule out the rules; all contexts of play have rules of some type. However, he focuses on the temptations that happen in play: to break the context, that is, the rules, and to let oneself loose in the pleasures of play.

The book is more than a sober analysis of the relation between play and politics, aesthetics, design, and machine. Partly, the book--two-thirds text, one-third notes--reads like a manifesto for a paradigm shift in computer game design: “The designer of games should not act as a provider of anything other than context. A designer is a facilitator, a catalyst. […] Like a prop master or a stage director, the game designer proposes and deploys an object into the world, letting it speak for itself and be spoken through. These props not only do not resist appropriation; they encourage it. […] Let us not talk about ‘game designers.’ Let us bury that terminology. […] Game design is dead. Long live the architecture of play” (pages 90-91).

The author refers to several examples of computer games, assuming that the reader is familiar with them. Otherwise, the book is highly readable and does not contain too much sociology jargon. A book that provides a fresh and wider look at play and games, it should be read at least by all designers and players of computer games, as well as by proponents of gamification.

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