DEEP BACKGROUND
Only for the truly dedicated students of our medium. Most of these works were written before videogames were even invented.

Homo Ludens, by Johan Huizinga
The title means 'Man the player,' and Dutch historian Huizinga studies the nature and function of play in human civilization. He argues that the instinct for play influences many aspects of life: religion, law, war, sex, language, art, philosophy, poetry… In the game industry Huizinga is best-known as the originator of the term magic circle, a term we have adopted to refer to the artificial reality we enter when we play.

Man, Play, and Games, by Roger Caillois
Caillois picks up where Huizinga left off. Homo Ludens was chiefly concerned with the act of play itself, whatever the context; Caillois is more specifically concerned with games themselves. He introduces a classification for games based on four key qualities found in many of them: competition, chance, simulation (mimicry of real-world situations), and what he calls vertigo – the adrenaline rush of real or imaginary danger. The second half of the book is concerned with the social role that each of these play.

The Ambiguity of Play, by Brian Sutton-Smith
Sutton-Smith updates Huizinga and moves the discussion into the modern world. He examples play in great detail from different perspectives: biology, psychology, education, child development, and more. He also looks at how discussions about the function of play have changed over the centuries, from ancient considerations about power and communal identity to more modern notions about imagination and the nature of the self.

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, by Marshall McLuhan
First written in 1964 when people were just beginning to think hard about the implications of mass communication, this book was a seminal study. Instead of examining the content of different media, McLuhan looks at how we perceive media, and how they cause us to behave.

Next: Inspirations