Essay: The Implications of Information Technology for the Future Study of History (Kevin Schurer, 1998)

“The Implications of Information Technology for the Future Study of History,” Kevin Schurer (1998)

Schurer’s article provides an overview of the main problems regarding data archival: decay, obsolescence, and the need for context. He also states that many librarians (at least by 1998) had few computer skills. Beyond this, the primary focus of his essay is on how historians will interact with the data and how despite our profusion of information today, little of it may actually survive for future historians. He further extrapolates on how this will affect future history. In the end, he calls for governmental institutions to cooperate in order to preserve ‘machine-readable records’ for the future because individual groups have varying resources and “in order to share expertise and avoid the needless duplication of effort.” Beyond this, the article has limited application due to its focus on old technology and contemporary developments.

The Coolest Game Art Page Ever

We’re covering gender in games in the next class on game studies and so I was looking for the LHOOQ Tomb Raider Photoshop as some commentary material. I found it stuck on this website, Konstperspectiv, which is dedicated to ludic media art of all kinds!* The site has a list of art works along with images, a description of the original game, and a description of the artwork. In addition, there is a MASSIVE collection of links to books and articles on the subject as well as a list of videogame films! The only downside is that the site is in Swedish, so you’ll have to use a Google Translate to read the commentary.

It’s in the same realm of cool as the Digiplay Initiative.

*Ludic media art is a term I have created to describe art works that use games as their source material or inspiration, but are not necessarily games in and of themselves. It is derived from the now-popular Latin word for ‘games,’ ludus.

Six Days in Fallujah

1up and other news sites have been reporting about Atomic Games’ new title, Six Days in Fallujah, a game about the Battle of Fallujah in the Iraq War back in 2004. (Actually many news articles say it’s Konami’s game where Konami is simply the publisher.) The game has been stoking a lot of controversy due to its high-budget profile and controversial subject matter, something that games like Kuma\War don’t seem to have gotten (but which America’s Army certainly did). So it’s little surprise given games’ previous track record that detractors would be very quick to push to halt its production (something that Atomic Games is allowed to do under free speech rights and should at least be given opportunity to explore the subject matter in a decent manner).

The big problem I see already is that there has been so much framing of this game’s ‘accuracy’ and what that means to war and entertainment when in fact all that has been revealed is the concept and a couple of screenshots. Given our current affair with ‘realism’ in games, it’s more prudent to suggest that the game will only be ‘real’ in a sense of equipment and visuals rather than experience and context.

After all, the Battle of Fallujah was by no means the Iraq War – six days in Iraq is less than 1% of this entire quagmire that’s been lasting for more than 5 years now. A more accurate representation of the Iraq War then would have to put more focus on boredom, truck bombs, boredom, domestic raids, boredom, patrols, and a lot more utter boredom, followed by other sudden moments of sheer terror. You can’t stick a few marines in a firefight and call that an ‘accurate representation’ of this kind of war. There is also, of course, a concern for the representation of civilian casualties, a staple to any war. Six Days in Fallujah might represent a single battle, but the battle only served to set the stage for this kind of guerilla war.

So in what ways is this game going to be different than other FPS shooting fests? Atomic Games’ president Peter Tamte states:

“Our goal is to give people that insight, of what it’s like to be a Marine during that event, what it’s like to be a civilian in the city and what it’s like to be an insurgent.”

Wait a sec, what it’s like to be civilians and insurgents? Does this mean we’ll be playing as somebody other than a marine? The prospect is very intriguing, but whether or not these experiences will be simulated is doubtful (certainly from an insurgent’s point of view). How and whether these other narratives and experiences can be communicated is unknown at this point.

Which is both hopeful and disappointing. Given that the game’s developers have fantastic source material such as soldier’s diaries and eyewitness accounts to work with and (apparently) a large budget, the potentials of creating something truly unique certainly exist. Games have a capacity to show what a situation feels like, and what it feels like to be a person within that situation, whereas film and literature can only make us imagine and empathize. To be able to express a situation as it happens now, such as the War in Iraq is a unique opportunity that games have not been able to achieve yet. So Six Days in Fallujah could be incredibly historical.

Other observations will also question what being a serious game actually means. Iraq War veteran Sgt. Casey McGeorge states in an interview with G4:

“The first time in the game they [players] get too close to a car and are blown up…without knowing what is really going on, they might be able to get a small understanding of what we have had to go through on a regular basis.”

Such an experience, while ‘accurate’ in some ways violates the rules of meaningful play – that is, giving players adequate feedback in order to let them make intelligent decisions. Thus, ‘fair’ games don’t give us booby traps without first giving us some kind of warning (i.e. a blinking light, the voice of a helpful character). ‘Fair’ games are like the myth of police officers who keep part of their car visible in that dark corner to give speeders a fair chance. Life is not ‘fair’, and war is expecially so. But games have traditionally been fair – that’s been part of their ‘fun’. A serious game doesn’t necessarily have to be ‘fun’, but it should skirt the line between boredom and frustration to find other means of being intriguing.

Of course, most of this is simply ramblings and speculation about a game that currently exists as only two screenshots. But we can only hope that Atomic Games’s representations of the Iraq War will be as observational as Vit Sissler’s comments on contemporary representations of the Middle East in videogames.

Guitar Hero Robot

Wired reports the Cyth Bot, created by Cyth Systems, is a robot that has been programmed to play Guitar Hero for Wii. The robot uses a light sensor to detect the intensity of the color of each note and then play the guitar accordingly:

The bot currently has an accuracy rating of 75-80%, but this will likely change as they get better technology in there. Other modifications not currently in the robot would be the use of Star Power. The computer could detect if certain variables were present before using it: first, how high the Star Power was; second, how high the bonus rating is; third, how many notes are appearing on-screen. Instead of flipping the entire guitar, a mod could be made that would flick the Wiimote to activate it.

 What makes this interesting is that even with the current technology, the robot cannot currently play the game faster than a human. It is conceivable though that the robot could do so eventually.

What makes this interesting is the fact that a robot may eventually manage to reach 100% accuracy every time.  According to Brian Sutton-Smith in The Grasshopper, one thing that distinguishes games from other activities is the sense of challenge provided through arbitrary limitations promoted through rules. In the example of climbing Mount Everest, Sir Edmund Hillary would only climb the mountain if there was no other conceivable way of making it to the top (i.e. taking an escalator or helicopter). In this case, the fact that a robot could do the work might send some Sir Edmund Hillary rockstars off to another game.

However, like Deep Blue, the fact that a computer can beat a human at certain games does not mean that the activity has become meaningless: people still play chess, even if they do not use a computer to calculate the moves (at least fair players do not). Similarly, if all mountains had escalators installed, we would still enjoy climbing them for the challenge and the experience. Likewise, we’d still enjoy playing Guitar Hero, though the Sir Edmund Hillary in us might be a bit soured by the robot’s existence, suggesting the game is fairly simple.

In some ways, the Cyth Bot is similar to self-playing pianos of the 19th and early 20th centuries, as well as their modern equivalents. The difference is, self-playing pianos created a mechanical algorithm through hardware pre-designed to operate the same every time whereas the Cyth Bot uses input from the game, and thus has an infinite number of possible performances. However, machines that play real musical instruments can only play the song the same way each time: it may be a good individual performance, but there is little difference between a musical recording and the robot at that point.  

What is more interesting is two possibilities. First, that a robot might eventually be designed to play a game like Super Mario Bros. Second, that a robot playing a real instrument might be able to ’stylistically’ enhance its own performances based on variables in how it plays the notes. While it wouldn’t exactly have a ’soul’, it would be a damn fine simulacra of one.

Cooking Mama: Unauthorized PETA Edition

In protestation of Thanksgiving, PETA is making us aware that we are torturing turkeys for this national holiday through the game, Cooking Mama: Mama Kills Animals (The Unauthorized PETA Edition). This is one of the latest rhetorical games (a game that tries to convince the player to accept a particular viewpoint) and while it’s better than the poor attempt at decrying KFC in Super Chick Sisters, it’s not taking full advantage of the medium. I’d also like to brag that I managed to post a review of this before Ian Bogost over at Watercooler Games, the current master of Rhetorical Games.

Mama Kills Animals is a parody/repurposing of the Nintendo DS and Wii game, Cooking Mama, a game that simulates cooking. PETA’s version features a psychopathic Mama who tortures turkeys for the Thanksgiving Feast and copies the gameplay of the original fairly well. The controls can be a bit awkward to control the hand. My old PowerBook G4 ran particularly slow on the organ removal part. The game has great aesthetic and humor through the banjo music and Mama’s diabolical personality.

Gameplay focuse on gross-out through imagery. Players tear off the turkey’s feathers and rips out its guts. There are copious amounts of gore and blood splatter that gets more intense the more the player mutilates the turkey. There are also other touches like hair in the stuffing and sawing off the turkey’s head. The rhetorics here is clearly one of grossing out the player to make him or her decide against preparing a turkey, albeit through a healthy dose of unrealism. At the least, the final depiction of the turkey as a horribly prepared meal seems to match my current cooking skills.

Scoring (and evilness) is based on how well the player performs the task. Note that players can also choose to be pro-turkey (or just do a really bad job) and get a scornful look from Mama and a rating of ‘Don’t Be a Saint!’ This suggests that the game supports a ‘pacifist’ mode, or at least a nod to players who don’t want to hurt the poor dead turkey.

Unfortunately, the end of the gameplay section uses the nonludic media of text to tell the player about the evils of turkey farms. After a round is completed, the player is told that turkeys have their throats slit while still conscious and millions are scalded in tanks of hot water each year. While PETA may have decided not to depict this in ludic form, telling this rather than showing through gameplay is not taking full advantage of the medium.

A more effective message would have involved gameplay where the turkey is actually killed. PETA may have chosen not to allow Mama to do this, thinking that gameplay would have been used by carnivorous sadists and adolescents to mutilate digital animals without remorse. Gameplay need not have been from Mama’s perspective though: the player could have also taken the role of a turkey who is forced to live in terrible conditions on the turkey farm, only to be cruelly slaughtered in a decidedly non-Kosher fashion. This give-and-take rhetoric of saying ‘yes, it’s ok to eat animals, even if we disagree with you, just so long as you don’t treat them horribly’ would be much stronger and accepting than the extremist inflexible rhetoric that ‘eating animals is wrong and disgusting.’

This lack of killing turkeys also makes the title a bit misleading: Mama only kills an animal (we think, at least) in the introduction, and is instead shown preparing a dead animal. While the preparations resemble mutilation more than actual cooking, the turkey is clearly not feeling any pain at this point, and so to the mind of a player who might be supportive of kinder treatment to animals (while still supporting eating turkeys), the game has no impact. By telling through text rather than showing through play, the designers of Mama Kills Animals have committed the ludic equivalent of the literary crime (or rather, lack) of showing rather than telling.

PETA’s reliance on text and video over gameplay to communicate its message is a flaw in an otherwise decent attempt at a rhetorical game – it certainly is a bit more effective than Super Chick Sisters by closely tying the player’s actions (preparation of an animal) with the rhetoric (eating animals is disgusting). The game’s release around Thanksgiving is timely, but it doesn’t seem very convincing of anything other than awareness of turkey raising conditions through text rather than ludic rhetoric, meaning PETA is really primarily preaching to the choir. The gross-out factor only gets this game so far and seems to reinforce the fact that I’m a poor cook rather than it’s a horrible thing that I enjoy eating well-prepared, defenseless, furry and feathered animals.

Westworld

Michael Crichton died in early November at age 66. While his last books left something to be desired, the works of his middle years still fascinate today. One often overlooked piece is Crichton’s film directing debut, Westworld, a film that seems in many ways ahead of its time.

Westworld is a film that predates the plot of Jurassic Park by over a decade. It centers around a theme park filled with incredibly lifelike robots. You can do whatever you want, and the robots won’t harm you. That is, until they go haywire… Hapless humans chased by science amok became the central theme of Crichton’s later works, and may be seen as a response to the tech fixes of the 1950s and 1960s and growing fears and unease regarding nuclear technology.

The film covers many themes that Crichton explored throughout his novels. Science, thought to be the savior of mankind, is apt to fail. Scientists’ blind faith in technology and failure to see its negative aspects and failures contains dire results for humans.

As such, technology plays a star role in the film. The low-resolution (ultra-cool) images of ‘Gunslinger-vision’ may seem incredibly poor by today’s standards, but still possess a haunting retro quality. These images were produced through computerized special effects, and according to Wikipedia, some images took more than 8 hours to render. Massive walls of supercomputers and low-res monitors fill the sets in a 1970s CNC feel, and the distorted images from the security monitors produce a feel of early television. Likewise, the special effects of the human torch and fizzing electronics are fantastic low-fi solutions. It certainly feels like a film that can provide some fascinating analysis for new media theory, particularly a McLuhan reading.

However, Westworld’s technology provides its own loophole (at least in Western World): the guns are supposed to be unable to fire at a human due to an infrared sensor. The gun is unable to fire at hot targets, specifically people. These are the guns given to the visitors, and the robots have been equipped with the same guns. By all means, this should have made it impossible for a robot to kill a human (a sword, however, is a completely different matter). Such a failsafe makes the premise of the film impossible, unless some explanation is given to why the guns failed to operate.

The gunslinger, played by Yul Brinner (of Magnificent Seven fame), is fantastic, and central to the film. Garbed all in black, with shining white eyes and with the cold calculations of a robot, he simply dominates the film through his excellent acting. This seemingly unstoppable robot, complete with computer vision, predates 1984’s The Terminator by over a decade, and is unfortunately overlooked, but undoubtedly an influence.

The overall construction of the film is sparse, and in many ways artistic. The dialogue is often pretty terrible, and in some places the music is obnoxious. However, in many places, the film is without background music, and in other cases, Fred Karlin’s experimental score is downright amazing. Likewise, camera shots are in some places spartan, with camera angles and set design, particularly in the labs and in the night cleanup crew, demonstrating some fascinating cinematography.

Westworld spawned two sequels; Futureworld (1976) and the TV series Beyond Westworld (1980). Both could be avoided. Westworld, on the other hand, provides a fascinating look into Crichton’s style of storytelling before his more famous works. The film was nominated for three science fiction awards in 1974.

WTC Invaders

Wow.

In all honesty, there isn’t much that’s new here about using Space Invaders and unwinnable games as commentary (heck, I did it myself). The only new addition here is use of the WTC as the battleground and the scale, if the image is any indication (though I’d argue Commandopede already explored large-screen displays ).

However, I’m not convinced that the ‘Invaders’ anacronym is the correct metaphor. It wasn’t an ‘invasion’ but a dastardly terrorist attack and it came from suicide flyers who had hijacked planes rather than massed troop wave attacks (cannon fodder). Space Invaders has traditionally been used to comment on immigration and unwinnable battles rather than terrorism. Perhaps Defender would have been a better commentary, particularly since it includes hijacking ‘humanoids’ to create kamikaze aliens? I doubt Eugene Jarvis would care (though Midway might).

I also don’t agree with Taito’s possible decision to censor the exhibit and think it spells trouble for the game art movement. This would mean big trouble for other artists wanting to use game characters. If this happens, what’s to stop Nintendo from suing I Am 8-Bit artists over using Mario characters in sexual and violence commentary? ESPECIALLY since it’s a one-of-a-kind piece that’s not being sold. That sounds like fair use to me (but I doubt you’ll convince Disney or Fox…).

All’s Fair in Games of War

1Up recently posted an editorial on cheating in games. While the article primarily serves as an overview of the different kinds of cheating that are possible in games, it doesn’t really take a much of a look into any of the philosophy behind it (for instance, no Huizinga or unspoken rules). Then again, given the audience, you can’t really be surprised at the lack of any kind of material like that.

One interesting anecdote in the article though is the use of pornographic spray tags in Counter-Strike. While Counter-Strike has its own share of subversive play from Anne-Marie Schleiner’s Velvet-Strike, which uses anti-war spray tags as commentary, this is certainly an interesting tactic:

“There are personal markings in Counter-Strike called ’sprays.’ As long as it’s a still image, you can make it whatever you want. Sometimes you see lolcats, and sometimes you see porn. So when someone stops to look at the naked lady painted on the wall, someone else comes up and knifes them.”

Actually, this seems like a very valid tactic. A pornographic tag seems like the perfect strategy for distracting male would-be soldiers, so I don’t see how it can be classified as cheating – it’s simply a non-standard tactic, and one which Snake employs in Metal Gear Solid to distract guards. Our country wouldn’t exist today if we hadn’t relied on non-standard guerrilla tactics to defeat the British in the Revolutionary War instead of lining up in Napoleonic rows like the British wanted for a ‘fair fight’. You can’t even complain too much that kids are viewing the tags because the game is M-rated and thus wasn’t designed for kids anyway (this and online disclaimers abound).

Another strategy that some will call cheating is the suicide bomber (or kamikaze) strategy in Halo. Wired journalist Clive Thompson loves to play Halo, but he’s nowhere near as good as many online players, who quickly trounce him. He doesn’t have the time or the skill to play Halo dozens of hours a week in order to master the game. Instead, he runs up to the other player, throws a sticky bomb at them which can’t be dislodged once it’s hit, and earns a kill. His character will inevitably die, but will just be respawned later. Thompson writes:

“This changes the relative meaning of death for the two of us. For me, dying will not penalize me in the way it penalizes them, because I have almost no chance of improving my state. I might as well take people down with me.”

So kamikaze tactics in Halo aren’t exactly ‘playing fair.’ Thompson isn’t using his skills with a weapon and with maneuvering through the terrain like the other players: he’s using a ‘cheap tactic’ of using a cheap weapon – the sticky bomb – to score a kill. Because death in the game is not death in real life, this is a logical tactic. Granted, it isn’t one that is going to make Thompson rise in the ranks, but it’s going to give him the ability to fight back in an otherwise lopsided fight.

Another tactic that’s often regarded as cheating is camping. Camping is used in games where players respawn after their characters have died in a limited number of predictable places. As a result, a player who has knowledge of the spawn locations can stay in a well-defended spot for long periods (or ‘camp’), and amass a large number of kills. This is a clearly frustrating tactic as it means other players often get very little reaction time before they can begin playing. As a result, designers often try to lessen the opportunity for camping and create rules which penalize players for doing so. Camping is an undesired strategy because in many respects it is a ‘broken’ strategy – it is one that works every single time it is used simply because it is much too difficult to remove the camper before he can make a dozen kills.

And here’s the difference between war and play. In a war, anything goes, so long as you can defend your actions afterward, something that is incredibly easier to do if you win (was Curtis LeMay ever charged as a war criminal for the firebombing of Tokyo, even though the Japanese were deplored for bombing civilians in Nanking?). In play though, there is a difference in playing to win and playing for enjoyment. A player who plays to win will not shy from using non-standard tactics to defeat his or her opponent, whether it is guerrilla tactics of spraying pictures of naked women to distract the enemy or utilizing game loopholes like camping. A person who plays for enjoyment (and here, I must add not only the enjoyment of himself but of others) will be more likely to play ‘fair’ by only using agreed-upon rules, often unspoken rules of culture and etiquette that determine what is a viable strategy. In such a game, relying heavily on broken strategies will usually not result in an ejoyable experience – but so will pairing a very experienced player with a novice.

What kind of game is war most closely related to? Cultural ideas of ‘chivalric war’ aside, war is like a game in which the players play to win. However, it is also a game in which the victor and, in the global world, the ‘uninvolved’ spectators, play the role of referee. The victor declares violations to the ‘rules of war’ as often as he ignores his own violations, dismissing them as necessary strategies for the sake of winning. The spectator declares violations when he witnesses actions which seem deplorable to his tastes. These violations are usually based on rules that the victor has agreed through the coopreration of other nations, such as the Geneva Convention or the United Nations as well as cultural beliefs of ‘common sense’. As a result, each side must walk a careful line between respecting the spoken and unspoken rules of warfare with bending or breaking them as little or as much in order to achieve victory.

War is thus unlike a game because its rules and enforcement are performed by the victors rather than by a neutral referee or clear-cut rules of play. The rules governing the actions of people in society are declared as much as they are agreed upon by the people as they are by the lawmakers, something which war transcends out of its operation and may only gain again through reflection, though usually only after hostilities have ended.

Horus, Prince of the Sun – Review

Recently I came across an old film with art direction by Hayao Miyazaki, the legendary animator behind Studio Ghibli and such great films as Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke. Horus, Prince of the Sun (1968) is an animation from his early years as a key animator and background designer and is considered by some to be the first modern anime. The film was directed by Isao Takahata who went on to do Pom Poko and Grave of the Fireflies.

The name ‘Horus’ is misleading. Suggesting an Egyptian background, the Japanese name ‘Horusu’ is actually supposed to be ‘Hols’ as the characters are from a Scandinavian or Eastern European Stone Age era. I’ve never heard this name used before, and the OED says its root (hol) is ‘hollow’ or ‘hole’ which of course makes no sense to the story (unless of course it’s supposed to be ‘whole’). The film takes place in the frozen north with characters, costumes, and culture that seems related to the Finnish epic, the Kalevala while other elements, such as the unscrupulous adviser to the village leader, seem archetypes borrowed from Beowulf. Hols, a young boy, finds a magical Sword of the Sun while defending himself from a pack of wolves. He takes the sword and heads to civilization.

The villain of the story is Grundewalde, an ice demon who uses black magic, wolves, and monsters to assert control over humanity. This is significantly different from later Miyazaki films, which do not place the evil and darkness of the world in the hands of a single individual. Instead, evil and disaster arise from the nature of the world and from the hearts of people, and cannot be defeated by lopping off a head with a sword.

Hols takes on many heroic tasks in his effort to destroy Grundewalde and save humanity from his evil. He’s just a kid, but he’s got enough determination to make him a man. In a sequence reminiscent of Legend of Zelda, he fights a giant fish, and he also heads off into the woods fighting wolves. There is also the strange girl, Hilda, who plays the harp and entrances anyone who hears her songs.

The film contains some epic battle scenes as well, but they are a sharp difference from later Miyazaki films. The reason for this is it appears that the studio’s budget ran out and as a result, there are several sequences where still images or pans of still images made from key frames are used to illustrate motion. Thus, in a large battle scene between the villagers and a pack of wolves, there is no animation, but merely still images, which proves very shocking.

Though described as a ‘modern anime’, Horus, Prince of the Sun contains ties with earlier films. In it are many musical sequences, particularly the opening credits, which contains a lyrical song describing the adventurous and heroic spirit of Hols. As a result, it has more in common with the later Taro, Dragon Boy (1979) and seems more in line with an earlier era of Japan.

As there is better anime out there (and the film is hard to find), Horus, Prince of the Sun is probably best seen as a curiosity that is a key example of the evolution of anime, in particular Miyazaki’s style (or perhaps seen by big fans of Miyazaki or the Kalevala). This isn’t to say it’s not a bad film – if you ever get a chance to see it, definitely take that chance! It’s just not worth shelling out $60 or more to import.

Review of Roger Caillois’ “Man, Play, and Games”

There are several books which form the foundation of modern ludic theory, one of which is Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (previously reviewed), the other being Roger Caillois’ Man, Play, and Games. I recently finished the latter book, and here is why it is still relevant in some places (and not so in others).

To begin, Caillois is building off Huizinga’s work, where he established that play is a central part of human culture and society and produces the creative instinct by which progress is made. Rather than being mere frivolity, play creates art, science, and culture. Caillois expands the concept of play by dividing it up into a table composed of the play categories agon (competition), alea (chance), mimicry (simulation), and ilinx (vertigo) and by the degrees of paidea (freeform, spontaneous play) and ludus (rule-based, structured play). These six concepts are important to our understanding of play and games, though today the ideas are more greatly refined.

Agon, alea, mimicry, and ilinx are all distilled forms of play. Agon is the struggle, the contest between two or more opponents to see who is better. Alea is passive reliance on chance, awaiting the throw of the die or roulette. Mimicry is the use of masks, of acting, of ‘playing at’ being someone else. Ilinx is the sensation of bodily movement, of dance and spinning, and of the roller coaster. Many games contain elements of more than one category (a game of Magic: The Gathering is based on the luck of the draw as well as the skills of the players) and even a supposedly ‘pure’ activity may be found to contain other elements (a player at dice will attempt to do anything in his power, any strategy to help ensure success rather than simply doing nothing). Paidea and ludus are also important in the study of rule-based games and ’sandbox’ games like Sim-City (Gonzalo Frasca’s Ludology Meets Narratology is an excellent companion piece).

However, Caillois’ ideas become more controversial as he begins to apply them to the operations of society, and more importantly, to the evolution of human culture from primitive to civilized. Unlike Huizinga, who uses his descriptions of culture ot illustrate examples of games and play as being central to the operation of culture and civilization, Caillois uses them to define the natures of different cultures, with a clearly insensitive ethnocentric approach (though it’s not like Huizinga wasn’t ethnocentric either). While Caillois’s examples are fascinating (though not in as much detail as Huizinga’s), his attempts ot define cultures seem biased towards his concept of his own culture’s superiority. For instance, I doubt he would deign to apply his methods of analysis of masks and the bull roarer and their relation to mimicry and ilinx towards Christianity (he does not even discuss the subject).

The deepest error is his firm statements that the ‘primitive’ knows deep inside that the mask is a lie. It is akin to stating that the Catholic ‘knows deep down inside’ that the holy sacrament is not in truth the blood and body of Christ but merely wine. Indeed, it is spiritually so through the sense of allegory. The same is true of the mask. the mask and its representation of a god or spirit is serious business (and not simply because death and violence can result from its revelation to the uninitiated). The mask is truth, a representation of the spiritual, the intangible, even though there is really a mortal behind it. It simply operates under a different logical system than the visible and tangible – which is not to mean that the logical system of native culture is inferior to that of Western culture, but merely that this logic system is in its own respects incompatible with that of Western civilization, though some of its elements may be crucial to the nature of humanity.

As a result, I can’t highly recommend more than the first few chapters of the book, the two most important ones (the first two, covering agon, alea, mimicry, and ilinx as well as ludus and paidea) of which are reproduced in Salen and Zimmerman’s excellent Rules of Play Reader. I can recommend the first six chapters or so (the first four are the true meat of the book) as well as the second appendix, but I place the others at suspect. The second appendix is important for its descriptions of the history of game studies up until that time and also his debunking and criticism of some previous work on the subject.

Overall, Caillois is still relevant today, and the interplay of agon, alea, ilinx, and mimicry is still important to our fundamental understanding of games and play, though ultimately some of his work is dated and in other places better refined through modern ludic theory.