Enacting aporia: Roger Caillois' game typology as formalist methodology

Narrative rules? Story logic and the structures of games

Ever since scholars in the humanities have studied computer games, the relationship between play and narrative has been a much contested issue. Much dissent stems from incompatible basic assumptions about play and narrative, which, this paper argues, can be reconciled by a formalist approach to games and narrative on a structural level. First, event structures and story structures are shown to ...

This Might Be a Game: Ubiquitous Play and Performance at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century

Roger Caillois, Games of Chance and the Superstar

Superstars are not by accident a conspicuous phenomenon in our culture, but inherently belong to a meritocratic society with mass media, free enterprise, and competition. To make this contention plausible I will use Caillois’s book, Man, Play and Games, to compare the mechanisms underlying the superstar phenomenon with a special kind of game, as set out by Caillois. As far as I know, Caillois’s...

In search iof a "fifth dimension"

The work Les Jeux et les Hommes (1958) by Roger Caillois [1] may help us to get a firmer grip on the actual nature of digital games. Caillois identified four dimensions of games and playing: agôn (competition), alea (chance), mimicry (simulation), and ilinx (vertigo). In light of the new culture of digital games, this paper argues the need for adding another dimension to Caillois four dimension...

Fourteen Arguments in Favour of a Formalist Philosophy of Real Mathematics

The formalist philosophy of mathematics (in its purest, most extreme version) is widely regarded as a “discredited position”. This pure and extreme version of formalism is called by some authors “game formalism”, because it is alleged to represent mathematics as a meaningless game with strings of symbols. Nevertheless, I would like to draw attention to some arguments in favour of game formalism...