Man the Player

Here’s an interesting quote from Masters of Doom, by David Kushner:

…Plato said, “Every man and woman should play the noblest games and be of another mind from what they are at present.” In the fifties, the anthropologist Johan Huizinga wrote that “play…is a significant function…which transcends the immediate needs of life and imparts meaning to the action. All play means something.” He suggested a new name for the human species: “Homo Ludens,” Man the Player. Marshall McLuhan wrote in the sixties that “a society without games is one sunk in the zombie trance of the automaton…Games are popular art, collective, social reactions to the main drive or actions of any culture…The games of a people reveal a great deal about them…[They] are a sort of artificial paradise like Disneyland or some Utopian vision by which we interpret and complete the meaning of our daily lives.”

I didn’t want to lose track of this.