Books about Play

Posted: January 27, 2025 | Author: nickfalkner | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: books, education, games, gaming, play, reading, reflection, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking | Leave a comment

Being a subset of interesting books from my collection, accompanied with explanatory texts of varying utility, as well as references to this blog.

A very rapid summary in far too much detail.

I recently had reason to distill my thoughts on why games, play, and the playing of games were a valid and even necessary area of discussion when talking about education. Some collaborators and I have been working on a new way to assist in research skills development that uses play mechanisms. I have had a lot of opportunity to read and think about this but I wanted to get it out of my head so other people could also understand why I thought the way that I did.

However, I realised when I was trying to write up my books about games and play, that I had quite a large amount of philosophy and theory behind it, as well as some motivating examples from other educators. I can direct people to the books but unless I really explain at least some of the journey, the books are just islands of fact in a desert, when really most of what I have here are stations on a longer and much more detailed journey. As with everything, it is not the fact, it is the context in which you encounter it and your mood and willingness to engage when that fact and context are coincident.

I also realise that there is a chance that anyone reading this may need to skim this. You will still have the books by name, which achieves the initial goal, and it is quite useful for me to write all of this up so that I have a record of it, should anyone else ask. The excuse to do this has allowed me to invest the effort, doubly so now that I have modified the original version of the text for publication on my (long dormant) education blog.

The layout of the following sections will be a collection of books and then some discussion as to why they’re here. Some are just good examples, some are more illustrative, some are essential. I shall attempt to make the difference clear.

Robert A. Sage

Myth

Theodor W. Adorno

Aesthetics

Genis Carreras

Philographics

Don Norman

The Design of Everyday Things

Myth: Robert A. Segal

Play is a fundamental part of being alive, for many creatures, not just us. Because we can’t communicate well with other species, it can be very hard to understand what is a habit or somehow driven by the surroundings, what is a (conscious?) choice for a creature to under a serious action, and what is play: to engage in activity for recreational purposes or enjoyment.

Obviously, many activities have both serious and play applications, so understanding whether an activity is play or serious cannot be determined simply by observing. For me, my pathway to understanding play began by seeking to understand how we, the human we, work with information, how we process what has gone before, how we understand it, label it, categorise it, express it, communicate it, and interact with it.

Thus I started with trying to understand how we formed the understanding of our early selves. I have had a number of books on the formation of human myth, how we talk about our pre-history and pre-written selves. There are many books of myth but I like this (tiny) Oxford University Press book from Segal about contemporary theories of myth, which contains the great truth that theories of myth are often subsets of some larger theory from a given discipline restricted to the area of myth.

Myths are not just stories in word or voice, but there is often a tie to ritual, physical activities that are associated with a long held traditional story or belief. This book covers many angles of the theory of myth, discussing in brief many approaches, and it was a (much larger but) similar text that led me to understand the importance of the physical in story-telling and communication.

A good story has many elements to it, in the use of voice and physical theatre, in the choice of location, even down to the timing of the tale and its cadence. But we only have to look to puppetry, an ancient art, or how children react to the use of small wooden animals, to see how quickly our minds can wrap narrative and assistive explanatory tool together. The idea that this could reinforce a ritual, reinforce a memory, and hence give us a mythic form that might carry information forward comes from books like this.

To restrict the domain of play to either the physical or the non-physical is to ignore the reality that we engage in physical and intellectual pursuits for our own amusement. From a personal angle, I am a somewhat infamous juggler of words, which is more intellectual, but I was for many years a keen underwater swimmer, as my terrible swimming style is no disadvantage when submerged. Water was my medium of play for many long Australian summers, as long as I could stay underneath it competing with my friends, diving for thrown objects, or diving to the bottom of the deepest pools I could find. It was a break from reality, a different space altogether: concepts I shall return to later on. Play has turned out to a very natural thing for me, but it took a lot of reading to understand how essential it was to my humanity and my serious work as well.

Theodor W. Adorno – Aesthetics

The next book is a rather odd choice as this is a set of lectures delivered by Adorno in 1958-59, which he used to base a book on … that he never finished. Theodor W. Adorno was a German philosopher, musicologist, and social theorist. He was a leading member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory and wrote many fascinating works including the amazing “Minima Moralia“, which is worth looking at in its own right as it is a collection of short themed observations, many of which are profound in their expression and content. However, this book is here for two reasons:

1. His definitions of aesthetics from Kant and Hegel and the ongoing discussion throughout the book are some of the clearest I’ve seen and show very clearly the difference between “aesthetic as decoration” and “aesthetic as fitness for.. everything”.
2. His deep commitment to interactive work with his students, where his own intellectual understanding of the work and his desire to present it in an engaging manner resulted in his own students not quite following. Rather than not following, he corrected himself and reset his context. Reading this book shows you a masterful thinker and philosopher being relatively really rather humble and I love it for that alone.

Returning briefly to point 1, I shall recall that aesthetics can be briefly described as the philosophy of the principles of beauty (among other things). Well, what then is beauty? I’m glad you asked. Kant basically defined beauty as everything attractive that was not useful – a ‘disinterested pleasure’. For example, an apple could be beautiful and hence aesthetically pleasing until you ate it, at which point your interaction was animal and essentialist – having found function/value, your interaction was no longer aesthetic. Hegel disagreed, quelle surprise, with Kant and redefined beauty as “the sensual appearance of an idea”. Now we could still interact with something in meaningful ways and indeed incorporate function into our definition of beauty.

This immediately admits the aesthetic of form in function, where aesthetically pleasing objects are also excellent examples of form, as is seen in a great deal of Japanese and Scandinavian artisanal handicraft, where function without good form is anathema.

You have to read the book to find out how much Hegel then went on to get wrong, according to Adorno, but one more thing to remember is that Adorno rejected aesthetic sensibilities as somehow objective or rigid, they were strongly associated with whatever matter you were regarding and that was where you derived their sense. This notion of relativism is quite liberating, as it allows for a multiplicity of aesthetic interpretations.

Genis Carreras – Philographics

This is a recent addition to my collection and I bought because it was a reminder of the complex pathway people have taken in their attempts to render complex concepts as simply symbols. One of my many interests is in wayfinding, in the physical and intellectual sense; this being the work of communicating pathways and directions to other people. This leans heavily on semiotics, the study of signs and symbols and their interpretation, as no map for wayfinding would work without a very clear sign vocabulary.

There are so many books I could put here but this is already long enough. This book is here as a simple symbolic placeholder to the importance of agreed contexts for shared understanding of symbolic representations, a vital part of the language of play. The range of human interpretation of words, actions, and symbols is vast and understanding if someone is playful or serious often hinges on this understanding. (Consider the Australian slang ‘sport’, which can be one of the most serious and threatening words anyone hears. It is not clear at all that this is the verbal equivalent of three giant flashing red lights and a tornado siren.)

Contrast this with the two images from this book, which seek to explain different concepts with simple symbols. Do they work? Perhaps. Are they interesting to consider, to view as guides to our own symbolic representation, and thus the way that we could consider play? Definitely.

Don Norman – The Design of Everyday Things

And here we are with the classic. How does the great naked ape, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, interact with the elements of its world? Norman’s book explains mugs, handles, defining the requirements of the things that a human is going to try to use in their pursuit of love, life, and work. In design, affordances, what the environment offers the individual, are reduced to what actions you can perceive are valid with an object. I have often extended this into the ethical sphere, as I believe that well-defined ethics provide the affordances for living with other people: what are the valid “handles” that one can “grab” and still be considered part of the in-group?

From a play perspective, we are back in the realm of semiotics: what do I need to show you so that you understand that the available affordances are playful rather than serious? What does that even mean?

I also find Norman invaluable for thinking about requirements analysis, as a simple affordance test on a prototype is a great way to show you all the things that actual people will do. Of course, in HCI and UI-design, the fact that you cannot predict everything a human will do is often a core concern, but reading Norman can help you to think about finding a coherent interaction model despite that.

Summary

So we’ve looked at the way we talk about ourselves, to understand how we might communicate play and serious, started a definition of aesthetics, wandered into wayfinding, and appreciated affordances. Let’s walk a little further into design before we finally start talking about texts that describe play.

Helen Cann

Hand Drawn Maps

Tomitsch et al

Design. Think. Make. Break. Repeat.

Bleecker et al

The Manual of Design Fiction

Roger Caillois

Man, Play, and Games

Helen Cann – Hand Drawn Maps

Again, there could be many books here. There is always Korzybski’s “The Map is not the Territory”, which is a very solemn version of “All models are incomplete but some are useful.” Maps are representations of something in the/a world, most often visual and two-dimensional, showing the things that are of interest to the map maker and also hopefully the map user. (Korzybski’s statement may be read as that if something was exactly the same as what it was mapping, it would be the thing – therefore, all maps are not exactly the same so what do you choose to change.)

I like public transit maps, because they so clearly show how you can get around cities, are almost always well-designed, and have to be useful to a large number of busy people. They are some of the most effective maps you’ll ever see because they have to be.

Amusingly, the London Underground Map is only useful underground. There had to be an active “London aboveground” program to show Londoners how to navigate the world above, because some things shown on the Underground map gave a totally false impression of what sensible aboveground navigation would look like. Why? Because the underground map prioritises connections, a breakthrough design by Harry Beck in the 1930s because he represented everything as a schematic diagram, rather than a mapping of the geographical reality. People on trains don’t need to know if the track is straight or curved, they need to know how many stations until they connect to go three more stations to Tooting Bec. I wrote a lot more about this about ten years ago.

Helen Cann’s book takes a playful perspective on maps and is aimed solidly at people who are building maps for fun, which is why it’s here instead of some other very serious books. It contains many creative prompts for building visual 2D imagery that conveys spatial and other relationships in a way that helps you navigate them. Maps, boards, cards, and games are all linked in my head and her book helps to understand why this is and why they are all subtly different.

This also admits the kind of graph/connection thinking that we see in the works of Franco Moretti – the Distant Reading Guy – where he carries out corpus analysis and NLP to derive relationships, determine changes, and explore hypotheses, without necessarily every personally reading the text. I like his stuff as a tool but I’m not sure I buy it as a solid methodology. Again, there’s a couple of blog posts on this here. Maps are fun!

Tomitsch et al – Design. Think. Make. Break. Repeat.

This is a book of design methods, roughly 60 different ways to engage in design with many perspectives and disciplines. It’s basically a short reference to scaffold the development of knowledge in the area of design: from product design to user experience and much in-between. I like this book for several reasons:

• Each section has a clear description, a reference list, step-by-step exercises, and a number of handy templates you can just start using.
• It’s very focused on getting you started trying something, to build knowledge through hands-on attempts.
• It has some really interesting case studies at the back.

I haven’t just learned about design from this book, I’ve learned about how to learn about design, and how I could construct other materials to make learning easier. This book has helped me to communicate ideas about play.

Bleecker et al – The Manual of Design Fiction

The last of the design books! Design fiction is probably one of my favourite things (I have many and don’t usually rank them so this is less exclusive than it may seem). At its heart, design fiction is the deliberate construction of narrative prototypes to suspend disbelief about the possibility and benefit of change. It is, like all fiction, inherently playful. We are building castles in the air and then sending in virtual construction inspectors to find our faults! How much more fantastically playful can we get?

This work is part of the core thinking about play and the research skills development tool that colleagues and I are working on. How can I get someone to understand that there might be another way to undertake their research? Let me rewrite that: how can I reduce the barriers to explore change? How do I encourage people to consider that there may be techniques and thinking that are not nonsense from other disciplines but valid contributors to academia? Again, let me rewrite that: how can I change your mind about which paradigms and methodologies are valid?

This book is a touch focused in the physical/reification space when, to me, design fiction has as much, if not more validity, in the area of ideation and knowledge development – this may all be nuance and I may just need to think more. It’s still a really interesting read and will add enormous amounts of interesting food for thought around group work, collaboration, and skill development.

Roger Caillois – Man, Play, and Games

I am deliberately presenting this book first, although it is very much a reaction to the next book, Homo Ludens. Caillois’ book is about the definition of what play is, with a wide range of culturally located definitions of the key games of given peoples, linking games even to moral aspects of culture, defining customs and institutions.

He accepts the essential need of humans to play and defines it (partially) as a voluntary sidestep from the realities of life, wherein rules constrain action and we all move to some outcome that has at least some randomness in its achievement. Children tend to improvise more, adults tend to strategise more, an increase of discipline with age and knowledge, perhaps or just another custom? He links some games back to mythic connection, where the games played by children mimic the actions of gods long ago, sometime deliberately as part of religious practice.

There are any number of important terms introduced here, including alea, which is best understood as chance but has many other meanings. When Julius Caesar took his armies across the Rubicon and into Rome, to take it as Emperor, he is supposed to have said “Alea iacta est.” which means “The die has been cast/I have taken my chance.” This statement is significant in its appeal to the fates, but also a recognition of uncertainty and a clear statement of bravado! (Recall that the study of probability is terrifyingly recent and many earlier cultures regarded what we would think of as random outcomes as clear indicators of favours granted by supernatural powers.)

Caillois took issue with Huizinga’s work, as he felt it lacked recognition of the variations of play and the needs served by play in a cultural context. While Caillois is, to me, the better text in terms of its utility because of its cultural inclusion, it’s still important to read Huizinga.

Summary

All of this is designed to provide tools, vocabulary, and background to really start to understand that games are important, culturally and personally, which provides us with a way to discuss useful games in well-defined manner. One of the biggest problems with educational games is that they are often a non-game activity which has had game elements bolted onto it. That does not make it a game, nor does it make it play. We shall return to this.

Johan Huizinga

Homo Ludens

Bernard Suits

The Grasshopper

Eric Zimmerman

The Rules We Break

Helen Fioratti

Playing Games

Johan Huizinga – Homo Ludens

At its core, Homo Ludens is about the necessity of play to culture and society. Animals play, but humans play in ways that assist us in becoming more than a small in-group, limited by the Dunbar limit and the size of our cerebellum. Play, to Huizinga, is one of the primary drivers that creates culture and is necessary if we are to generate culture. (We need more than play but there must be play.)

Huizinga, in a rather dour way, leads off with the fact that play must be fun, which is why animals also do it despite many of the playful species lacking the additional brain stuff that we and other sentients or proto-sentients appear to have.

As Caillois agreed with (mostly), Huizinga had five rules: that play is free, it is not everyday life and in fact it is noticeably different from everyday life, play has a sense of absolute order (think rules here), and nobody actually benefits in any real or monetary sense from play.

Play was not just free, play was freedom, and that concept explains a lot of the subsequent rules and text. Although Huizinga did not follow up on culture as Caillois would have liked, he did note that cultural perceptions change the nature of play: while western children might pretend to be an animal, a first-nations’ shaman would be culturally considered to have become one. Even the way that we talk about play shows how fragile our definitions are once we start thinking.

My paraphrase of all of this is that once we engage someone in play, they will potentially engage with the activity that we had planned, all the while inhabiting a totally different context due to their own cultural experience and perception.

This is not a book I can summarise easily as it has an enormous amount of classification, ideas, and content. I will share some important ideas from or derived from the work that I am using in developing new tools:

• The “magic circle”: this is the space in which the normal rules of reality are suspended and others now apply.
• The notion of metaphor as play, the metaphorical representation of wisdom/lesson as god forming myth in a model that is inherently playful. Thus all myth-making, a strong civilising force, is a playful activity.
• Poetry is play. I just like this one.

Bernard Suits – The Grasshopper

Words cannot contain how much I love this book. Suits takes direct aim at Wittgenstein’s assertion that definition is impossible, demonstrated by an inability to define what games are, by providing a definition. But he does so through the most charming and heart-wrenching of conceits. You are probably familiar with the fable of the hard working ants and the lazy grasshopper, where the ants worked all summer and the grasshopper just played music, then winter came and the ants lived and the grasshopper died because … ants are just not very nice, apparently. The conceit at the core of “The Grasshopper” is that the grasshopper is a philosopher of play and can thus not commit to beneficial labour as it contradicts his principles. He makes great contributions in his philosophical discourse with his students (ants dressed up as grasshoppers), who beseech him to take food that they have worked for, for him, but he refuses, committed at the deepest level to his philosophy of play.

Suits’ rules (slightly paraphrased) are:

• There are a set of rules for the game
• You cannot take the most direct path to achieve the outcome
• Players willingly accept both the previous rules, adopting a ludic mindset.

As you can see, we’re back in the realm of an excursion from reality, with its own rules, mind space, and no definition of benefit. In fact, the Grasshopper provides an example of total detriment by comparison but he would rather die firm in his philosophy than give up his principles

I am not doing this book justice, but I hope I am conveying its essence. I draw on this in a lot of what I do, as a communicator, because I am always seeking to draw people into a semi-ludic space to explore new ideas and I must have their consent and commitment to the ludic mindset to do it: people must give themselves the authority and freedom to play.

Eric Zimmerman – The Rules We Break

This is a book about how to actually make games but also how to evolve and adapt games. Zimmerman goes through possible problems with games and is also reinforcing all the things that people want to see in games: is a game too predictable, does a winner emerge too early, do people drop out too fast, or is it simply “not fun”?

There are many notionally educational games that are merely the activity in question with a strange game frame around, in the style of “Let’s get to Mars by solving this algebra problem”, which often fall very rapidly into the “not fun” category because it’s not a game at all. It’s a learning activity with set process and correct outcome, wearing some silly clothes.

This is another book about design, very hands on, and built to try things. Imagine running students through a redevelopment of a combined text generation exercise as a game where one student writes the title, another writes the slug, another writes key elements, but they only have two words to do it from without any discussion, then they combine it and look at the whole they’ve created from that cue. Not only does this book drive that sort of creativity, it helps you to analyse whether it’s working and how to fix it.

You will look at games differently after reading this book AND have lots of great things to try in the classroom.

Helen Fioratti – Playing Games

Again, many books could be here but I have a soft spot for this one as I picked it up in Florence while I was starting my ponderings about games. There are so many different games in the world, card games alone would keep you busy for a lifetime, let alone variants on boardgames.

In many ways, understanding what has gone before is both informative and interesting, and understanding the rise of new games as new technologies or practices emerged is important to thinking about games in general. Why did a certain game gain a particular variant? How do games change when they are played with a “house” (casino) vs playing against other people?

As I noted, there was a time where people played games of chance without understanding probability. Oh wait, that’s Vegas. I’ve never been to Vegas because it scares the hell out of me – it’s like a trap invented for people who sometimes think that they are more clever than they are.

Games are part of who we are, who we were, and who we hope to be. A good historical reference of games is essential and this one is quite acceptable.

Summary

I hope that I have now motivated why play is both essential and useful as a tool, given that it allows us to move into another space with other rules – ideal for us seeking to get students to experiment and engage in new spaces with less overhead. So let’s get to the final two books in my collection that are relevant here.

Peterson and Smith

The Rapid Prototyping Game

Engelstein and Shalev

Building blocks of Tabletop Design

Engelstein and Shalev – Building Blocks of Tablerop Game Design

An incredible reference and the most amazing way to understand every game you’ve every played and every game mechanic you’ve ever used elsewhere. It’s almost impossible to read sequentially as, despite being very thorough and technically interesting, it’s an encyclopaedia, not a narrative work.

In many ways it’s the archetype (with the design guide above) of the written work that I discuss below: a well-written, technically correct, and thorough capture that introduces every important concept, paradigm, framework, methodology etc.

It also gives an example of the way that categories matter in the formation of the work. A different set of categorisation choices would put some things in a very, very different place.

Peterson and Smith – The Rapid Prototyping Game

Finally, the cards that inspired the tool that I’m currently working on – there are substantial and meaningful differences but the cards themselves made me think of what else we could do. Smith wanted to teach his game design students other techniques and wanted to engage them and mentioned to Peterson that he wanted a good range of techniques to draw from. You can find his own blog on this here. Smith found the encyclopaedia above (Engelstein and Shalev) and thought it was a great resource that he could turn into a playful activity by using cards. Why? because what he was trying to do wasn’t working

“You see, the students were still struggling.  They were afraid of failing. They were unoriginal.  They made games like Chutes and Ladders or Monopoly.”
Smith, https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/the-rapid-prototyping-game

His goal: build something the students could play with that broke a complex task down into well-defined and manageable categories that enabled the students to isolate particular categories and work on them. Decomposition, simplification, and information management all being used to make something complex far easier to work with. By using random allocation, via the cards, he was able to break students out of their “I’m going to make Monopoly” because they might not get the elements to do it – in fact, it was quite unlikely.

Smith and Peterson’s model used three dice throws to establish medium (board, card,…) , format (competitive, cooperative,…) , and objective (exploration, building,…). Then they used four decks of cards to let students draw from a much larger range of options for Mechanics, Themes, Victory Condition and Turn Order.

For the tool I’m working on, we have more decks of cards, because a 6-sided die only allows six options, whereas we often have up to twenty. While what I’m doing is definitely inspired by this approach, it is more inspired by the idea of play as a super-positional rule space that allows exploration in a free space with different rules, which I approach far more formally than the original card authors do.

Final Summary

Thus, my books on play along with, not promised at all, an unpacking of my process that led towards the idea that my wonderful colleague Dr Rebecca Vivian then reified as the cards themselves. I hope to be able to share more on this soon.

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