Il Gioco

This booklet is an anthropological argument about **play as a world-making capacity**, not a minor leisure activity. It starts from a simple but far-reaching claim: when we play, we enter an **alternative reality** that is “not meant literally”, and yet it is experientially real while it lasts. Play, in this view, is a basic human (and partly pre-human) technique for moving across “multiple realities” or “provinces of meaning”, each with its own internal rules. ### 1) Why play exists at all: an evolutionary premise The text grounds play in an evolutionary account: in mammals (and especially in species with prolonged infancy), extended **parental care** creates a protected “nursery” environment that relaxes immediate survival pressures. In that safe space, young animals can invest time in low-risk experimentation, rehearsing behaviors and social signals that would be too costly outside the “as if” frame. For humans, language dramatically amplifies this capacity, because it lets us build richly structured imagined worlds, talk about absent objects, and stabilize fictional scenarios through shared symbols. A key intermediate point is that the booklet refuses a “servile” conception of play (play as merely training for adult utility). Instead, it follows a line associated with Huizinga: play is treated as a primordial generative force from which many high-value cultural forms can later emerge. ### 2) A typology of play: Caillois’ four axes To organize the phenomenon, the booklet adopts Roger Caillois’ classic typology: any game tends to combine four basic orientations, in varying proportions. * **Agon (competition)**: play structured around contest, relative superiority, winning and losing. * **Alea (chance)**: play structured around fate, luck, danger, relief, dread. * **Mimicry (imitation/role-play)**: play structured around becoming “another”, staging, masquerade. * **Ilinx (vertigo)**: play structured around dizziness, disorientation, ecstatic loss of balance. This typology is not used as a sterile classification. It becomes the engine of the booklet’s central move. ### 3) “Corruption” or spillover: when play leaks into the ordinary world The strongest thesis is that these four ludic patterns can “corrupt” themselves, meaning that the internal rules of play can **expand beyond the protected frame** and restructure domains that are no longer recognized as “just a game”. In other words, play is presented as an ancestral matrix that can generate both religion-like complexes and distinctly modern institutions. The text then traces four emblematic spillovers: * **Agon becomes work and projective rationality**: competition, once detached from the immediate pleasure of the contest, produces the separation between present effort and delayed reward. That distance (sacrificing the present for a future goal) is described as the embryo of “work” and of goal-oriented planning. * **Alea becomes self-awareness and mythic narration**: games of chance intensify attention to inner states (relief, anxiety, hope, despair). Once exported, this becomes an engine for reflexivity and for narrative structures (victim, hero, destiny), feeding the growth of mythic imagination. * **Mimicry becomes ritual and theatre**: role-play and staged imitation can thicken into culturally authorized performances that transform identities. Here the booklet links play’s “as if” capacity to ritual and theatrical forms (with Turner as a key reference point). * **Ilinx becomes magic and eventually science**: vertigo, when no longer contained by safe play, can turn into existential anxiety. The text connects this to De Martino’s “crisis of presence”: magic appears as a culturally organized attempt to domesticate that destabilization, and the rationalizing impulse embedded in such attempts can also open toward systematic doubt and, ultimately, science as an institution of disciplined suspicion about “what is really the case”. At this stage the booklet lands a synthetic conclusion: from a biologically enabled “free” space of play, humans develop the capacity to create alternative worlds, and when those worlds spill over, they can crystallize into religion, myth, ritual, magic, work, narrative, theatre, and science. ### 4) “A good game is short”: play, framing, and liminality The second half asks a sharper question: if play’s power is to open an “as if” world, what makes it safe, intelligible, and socially useful? Here Gregory Bateson’s idea of **framing** is central. Play works because participants communicate a meta-message: “this is play”, meaning the actions are bracketed and should not be interpreted literally. The booklet uses the classic ethological puzzle (how animals avoid real harm during play-fighting) to show that framing is a practical communicative achievement, not just a philosophical idea. This leads into a comparison between **play and ritual**. Both have entry markers and exit markers; both open a liminal zone of heightened performativity and transformation. The crucial difference, though, is that ritual is socially treated as producing **irreversible real effects**, whereas play is acknowledged as **reversible** and explicitly “subjunctive”, a temporary “as if” world. ### 5) Modernity as pervasive liminality, and the danger of endless play In the final section the booklet connects these tools to a diagnosis of late modern life. Drawing on Thomassen, it frames modernity as a historical regime that repeatedly questions boundaries, hierarchies, and authorities, while also intensifying the moral demand for authenticity and sincerity (with references to Trueman and Seligman et al.). The resulting paradox is that people are asked to be “truly themselves” precisely when the self is conceived as radically fluid and indefinite. This is where the figure of **homo ludicus** (via Ortoleva) appears: late modernity is described as marked by both the intensification of addictive play-practices (gambling, videogames) and the spread of **gamification**, importing game-like rules into domains that are not play (workplaces, education, professional training). The technological environment further undermines the older requirement that play and ritual need separated “sacred” space and time. The critical worry is that when framing collapses, the boundary between playing and working, and more generally between what is consequential and what is superfluous, becomes unstable. The text even suggests that generalized ludification can signal a reverse movement of “de-civilization” (again via Thomassen). A concluding illustration uses Machiavelli’s letter to Vettori: Machiavelli can enjoy low tavern games and then return to the serious work of the study precisely because the two worlds are sharply separated. Late modernity, by contrast, erodes that separation: there is no longer a clear “tavern” versus “study”, and public performance (including through social media) flattens distinctions between kinds of interlocutors and kinds of reality. The final note is ambivalent and slightly bleak: folk wisdom says “a good game is short”, and the booklet asks whether a world where the game never ends can still be “beautiful”, or whether endless performativity risks turning into a cultural nightmare precisely because it offers no exit, no closure, no stable return to an ordinary world.