# Homo Ludens

Source: https://dinand.com/reading-notes/homo-ludens/
Author: Dinand Tinholt

> Johan Huizinga, a Dutch historian, argued in 1938 that play is older than culture.

![A crowded town square filled with dozens of children playing games, from hoops and stilts to leapfrog and blind man’s buff.](https://dinand.com/assets/reading-notes/homo-ludens.jpg)

*Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Children’s Games, 1560. More than eighty games in one square.Image: “Children’s Games”, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1560. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, via Google Arts & Culture. Public domain, via [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pieter_Bruegel_the_Elder_-_Children%E2%80%99s_Games_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg). Resized for this page.*

Johan Huizinga taught history at Leiden and published Homo Ludens in 1938. His claim is large. Play is older than culture, he says, because animals played long before people built anything, and law, poetry, war and philosophy all grew partly out of play.

He describes play as an activity set apart from ordinary life in time and place, with rules that bind everyone inside. Game designers later took his image of the magic circle and built a field on it. He has a sharp line on the spoilsport, the player who walks out. Players forgive a cheat sooner, because the spoilsport breaks the whole world the game created.

## Simulations work because they are play

Inside a well-made simulation, leaders try the risky option they would never test with real money. The circle gives them permission. The Prussian general staff learned this from Kriegsspiel, a war game played on a table with blocks and dice in the 1820s.

I build games and simulations too, from [Many Worlds](https://dinand.com/experiments/many-worlds/), which plays a decision out across thousands of futures, to [Agentic Enterprise Sim](https://dinand.com/side-projects/agentic-enterprise-sim/). Huizinga adds a warning. Once real money and real careers ride on the score, people start gaming the rules, and the play turns into something else.

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