Uma leitura crítica de Huizinga: jogos como sistemas de ressignificação em uma sociedade lúdica

Abstract

This thesis proposes to define a play concept that makes it possible to understand the ludic attitude as more than an adornment of everyday life and, is this way, help in the analysis of human relations in different areas of contemporary society, whether social, cultural, political and economic, among others. For this, a bibliographical review is carried out, establishing an antithesis to the play concept of the historian Johan Huizinga to, finally, synthesize another concept. Here, the word play is defined as referring to any ludic activity, such as playing, gaming, dancing, reciting, acting and others. Initially, Huizinga’s research is approached, taking into account its potentialities and the criticisms made to them by its readers. Huizinga was chosen due to his relevance to the study of games and for being one of the main representatives of the European tradition of ludic studies. However, his work reflects the time and context in which the author lived. Huizinga’s game concept presented in his main work, Homo Ludens, is subjected to criticism by several authors of his time. Vilém Flusser’s conception of the production process through apparatuses will be used to connect Huizinga’s work to contemporary authors, in order to analyze the unfolding of his concepts today and the attempts to overcome his limits. This discussion is centered in the chapter Homo ludens 2.0: Play, media, and identity of Playful Identities, where Frissen et al. present the ambiguities of Huizinga’s thesis and seek to update his concept. Finally, Salen and Zimmerman’s work is used to understand game structure components from a game designer’s perspective. With this, Huizinga’s thesis and the antitheses of other authors and critics are synthesized in a concept that understands play as a re-signification system of concepts and materials, such as time and space; through institutionalized rules that are imposed or embraced; generating tension and fulfillment; and that can be replayed.