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Games and Culture

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Play and Games

Peter D. McDonald1

Abstract
Caillois’s classic text Man, Play and Games leaves open a basic question: Why focus
on four specific kinds of play? Subsequent authors have offered their own rationa-
lizations and expanded upon his game categories but have not explained Caillois’s
approach. This essay performs a close reading of Man, Play and Games in order to
evince his methodology. I argue that Caillois holds to the idea that play reproduces
uncertainty in a safe and confined way but that a paradox troubles this vision and
pushes him into a baroque formalism. Instead of a simple relation between model
and copy, Caillois develops another, stranger concept of mimesis that continues and
extends his Surrealist writing about insects and the unconscious. My reading builds
on previous analyses of Caillois within game studies, sociology, and media theory to
revise the methodological presuppositions built into the categorization of games.

Keywords
Roger Caillois, form, mimesis, structuralism, self-reflexivity

Among game scholars, Roger Caillois is famous for inventing four categories of
play, which he calls agôn, alea, mimicry, and ilinx. Games of competition, or agôn,
pit players against one another in a contest of physical ability, skill, or wit. Games of
chance, or alea, center randomness and indeterminacy as in roulette or horse races.

1
DePaul University, Chicago, IL, USA

Corresponding Author:
Peter D. McDonald, School of Design, DePaul University—Loop Campus, 243 S. Wabash, Chicago, IL
60604, USA.
Email: peter.mcdonald@depaul.edu
2 Games and Culture XX(X)

Games of simulation, or mimicry, involve players giving up their identity and

becoming something else. Mimicry includes children’s make-believe, performances
like charades, and even extends to the vicarious pleasures of spectating. Finally,
vertiginous games, or ilinx, create the joyful sense of disorientation and disequili-
brium found in tag, ring-around-the-rosy, and roller coasters. In Man, Play and
Games (1962), Caillois details these categories and explains their systematic con-
nections. His work is among the first to differentiate between varieties of play, and it
has influenced generations of research on analog and digital games.
From its publication, Caillois’s typology was a site of contestation and revision.
Scholars have argued against Caillois’s theory for reasons such as a too rigid
contrast between play and reality (Ehrmann, 1968); a positivistic, colonial, and
teleological narrative (Turner, 1983); and its inability to account for the develop-
ment of video games (Dixon, 2009). Other critics accept Caillois’s approach to
play while feeling that his categories are not expansive enough. Several studies
introduce new qualitative distinctions between game types, such as games of
exploration (peripatos), reflective arrangement (asobi), surprise (repens), and
improvement through replay (repositio) among others (Lauwaert, Wachelder, &
van de Walle, 2007; Mandoki, 2016; Mitsukuni, 1987). Even those who accept
Caillois’s categories often go on to supplement his theory by justifying the quad-
ripartite division, for example, by turning to developmental psychology as its
ground (Biesty, 1987; Mouledoux, 1977).
In this essay, I argue that prior to accepting, rejecting, or revising Caillois, there
is another question that needs to be asked: Why did he invent just these four forms
of play? This question underpins the framework of Man, Play and Games, but I
have found no satisfying answer to it. Most of the time scholars do not question the
source and distribution of his four categories and instead treat them as a “tool” for
“functional descriptive” analysis (Bohman-Kalaja, 2007, p. 21). Such understand-
ably pragmatic use presupposes that the categories are practical and can be derived
from empirical and historical research. When the question is posed, however, it
often leads to claims about human nature or metaphysical principles. In an illu-
minating exploration of mimicry and ilinx within “fell running” communities, for
instance, Atkinson (2011) suggests that the liminal nature of play pushes humans
beyond rational decisions toward animality. In the following pages, I look at the
textual claims within Man, Play and Games to account for Caillois’s invention of
these categories. Instead of either practical heuristics or ideal types, I argue that
Caillois struggles with a paradox of mimesis that he resolved through a structur-
alist paradigm.
While the question of why is a fundamental one, it is not simple. Grasping its
immediate force requires that we go back to some basic terms and problematize
them. Before even thinking about the diversity of games, we need to ask why
Caillois investigates play. What drove him to focus on play and shift his attention
away from the sacred rituals and myths that preoccupied him as an anthropologist
and artist? After that, we should ask why Caillois thinks about the forms of play.
McDonald 3

Why does he think in terms of form rather than categories like genre or type, and
what does that decision afford him? With some basic terms in place, we need to ask
why there are only four forms of play. Why not three, five, or twenty-two? What is it
about the structured interaction between game types that makes it necessary to have
four? Only then can we focus on the specificity of these four forms of play. Why did
Caillois organize his investigation in the precise terms of agôn, alea, mimicry, and
ilinx, and what other possibilities are concealed by that organization? The four
sections that follow take up each of these questions, and I show how answering one
opens onto the next. In the process of following his logic, Caillois’s theory of game
types transforms into a self-reflexive and generative investigation of method that
speaks to larger issues in the study of play.
At the core of this exploration is the relation between play and mimesis. Caillois
is a classic proponent of what I call the hypothesis of mimetic uncertainty. Briefly,
this hypothesis states that games repeat a real experience of uncertainty within a safe
and bounded environment. It is an idea with a long and influential history that goes
back to, at least, Freud’s (1920/1989) discussion of managing separation anxiety
through play. Freud’s grandson would throw away a ball, calling out “Fort!” (gone!)
and excitedly test his ability to bring back the ball, which stood for his mother, “Da!”
(there!). In the process, the child enacted the frightening absence of his mother in a
controlled way. While Caillois explicitly asserts a similar idea of copy and contain-
ment, his implicit treatment of play is more complex. He continually doubts and
revises the relation between original and copy, play and the world, in an ongoing
dialectic about mimetic uncertainty. By questioning the principle that creates diver-
sity within Caillois’s sense of formal containment, a new and stranger vision of
mimesis at work in his text comes into view.
Returning to Caillois’s foundational text and revising our account of it is crucial
because it continues to inform theories play and mimesis. Man, Play and Games
serves as a pervasive touchstone within game studies, especially for scholars defin-
ing play its various expressions. He also provides a more elaborate theoretical
framework for recent work that looks at play from the perspective of cultural studies
to ask about the broad social and political consequences of the proliferation of
videogames. Studies of the rise of gamification, the blurring of labor into play, and
the queer economies of video games all draw on Caillois (Brock, 2017; Cassone,
2017; Goetz, 2018). Beyond his specific work on games, Caillois’s theories of
mimesis inform a diverse array of contemporary fields. His focus on process and
feeling of resemblance without any epistemological ground differentiates him from
Platonic models of original and copy, and he reframes the Aristotelean mimetic
instinct as a metaphysics of libido and self-destruction. These traits have been
productive for work on mimesis in anthropology (Michael Taussig), media theory
(Jussi Parikka, Mark Hansen), theories of the gaze and subjectivity (Kaja Silverman,
Hal Foster), and the philosophy of embodiment (Elizabeth Grosz). A reexamination
of Man, Play and Games offers an important extension and complication of his key
concepts that should inform all these fields.
4 Games and Culture XX(X)

Why These Four Forms of Play?

Roger Caillois had a long and strange career as a scholar, artist, conspirator, essayist,
and editor. His intellectual trajectory deeply shapes the importance he places on
play, and Man, Play, and Games needs to be placed in the broader context of his life
(Carbone, Ruffino, & Massonet, 2017). His early studies with Marcel Mauss and
Georges Dumézil established a basic orientation for his future work. From these
anthropologists, Caillois took an engagement with the symbolic worlds and beliefs
of other cultures. The efficacy and violence of sacred rites captivated him, and as a
student he wrote about the power of noontime on the imagination, taboos and myths,
and the importance of destructive drives. His writing on play and mimesis is par-
ticularly indebted to his complex theory of festivals. Caillois depicts the festival as a
communal activity that renews the world by copying it and which brings something
new into being as a result (Caillois, 1950/1959). The ordinary, profane passing of
time degrades and wears away the creative energy imparted during the golden age of
the world, and the tumult of the festival is an act of recreating this original plentitude
and chaos through masking, excess, and lawelessness. Caillois interprets this as an
ontological merging of reenactment (or mimesis) and actual manifestation of the
thing enacted. By getting into masks and costumes, the festival does not merely
represent the outcome of divine events but actively brings the divine back into being.
His sense of a world suffused with magic would stay with him until his last writing.
Caillois’s recent English translator and editor, Claudine Frank (2003), notes that
his academic pursuits were tempered by his contact with avant-garde writers and
artists in France. He allied himself with the Surrealists and extended his anthropo-
logical thinking about festival to ask how its force could be unleashed in the present
through evocative symbols and art. Some of his most famous writing comes from
this period in the 1930s when he explores the revulsion and fascination evoked by
the insect world. In “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” Caillois (1984) puts
forward a kind of metaphysics of mimesis, where the camouflage of moths and
praying mantises becomes the symptom of a wider desire to give up on bodily
distinctions for the “lure of material space” (p. 31). This drive to become environ-
mental produces a kind of mimicry that is “not similar to anything in particular, but
simply similar” (p. 30). In these essays, Caillois develops the Freudian aspects of
Surrealism into a framework that understands sacred and uncanny images as pow-
erful forces for collective and social life. He also lays the groundwork for his later
consideration of insect mimicry as a biological form of play.
In his endeavor to put his theories to political ends, and to combine art and
anthropology, Caillois fell in with George Bataille. Together, they broke with Sur-
realism to start a hybrid institution called the Colle`ge de Sociologie. At the Colle`ge,
Caillois further developed and synthesized his scholar-activist identity. He argued
that political agitators can and should use research into the symbols a society holds
sacred to influence that society. Bataille went further and sought to expand the
practical side of this new anthropology by engaging directly in such rituals himself.
McDonald 5

He formed a parallel secret society called Ace´phale and planned to decapitate one of
the members, believing that this would produce an unbreakable bond between the
survivors. Caillois parted ways with Bataille over this mysticism and fled to Argen-
tina as the Second World War began.
Up to this point, when games occur in Caillois’s writings, they provide fleeting
and unimportant examples. However, in 1943, he came across a copy of Johan
Huizinga’s germinal work of play theory, Homo Ludens, and reviewed it for the
Surrealist magazine Sur. What could have been a passing encounter would redir-
ect Caillois’s inquiry for the next two decades. Man, Play and Games draws from
over a dozen essays that Caillois wrote about games and represents the culmina-
tion of a sustained attempt to wrestle with Huizinga. We need to ask, therefore,
what forcefully redirected Caillois’s attention and how did it determine his under-
standing of play?
If Homo Ludens is a surprising interest for Caillois in some ways, in others it
could not be more apropos. Huizinga works from the vantage of anthropology and
cultural history, and a strain of anthropology that highlights the importance of
unconscious forces in the present. Huizinga cites Caillois’s teacher Marcel Mauss,
and Huizinga’s (1938/1949) description of play as “superfluous” echoes Bataille’s
(1985) ideas of useless expenditure (p. 8). If Caillois was put off by Bataille’s
version of the occult, he found a more acceptable version of secret societies in
Huizinga’s emphasis on their pompous formalism, disguises, and gestures as
encoded play. Throughout Homo Ludens, Huizinga evokes the festival atmosphere
that can occur war and ritual. Like Caillois, he believes that the “rite . . . is far from
being merely imitative; it causes the worshippers to participate in the sacred hap-
pening itself” (Huizinga, 1938/1949, p. 15). For all these reasons, Caillois must have
found in Huizinga a kindred spirit thinking along a parallel track. At the same time,
the book upended several of Caillois’s most cherished themes with its singular focus
on play and must have equally rankled him.
Organizing the affinities between Caillois and Huizinga was a relation between
play and the sacred (Henricks, 2010). For Caillois and the Colle`ge de Sociology, the
sacred was the living force of social cohesion—one that was in decline and in need
of reactivation during the 1930s (Hollier, 1988). In contrast, Huizinga frames the
sacred as itself a type of play. Not only does the sacred share the formal character-
istics of play—being set off in a magic circle, freely entered into, and so on—but it
also matches the content of the sacred with a profound seriousness. Huizinga (1938/
1949) writes that the “player can abandon himself body and soul . . . the joy inex-
tricably bound up with playing can turn not only into tension, but into elation.
Frivolity and ecstasy are the twin poles within which play moves” (p. 21). Caillois
was deeply invested in the unique power of the sacred, and his initial review of
Huizinga criticized his overidentification of the two concepts. Still, Huizinga’s
thesis that play animates sacred belief provoked Caillois for years to come.
In 1946, 3 years after his initial evaluation, Caillois (1950/1959) tackled the
relationship more directly in an essay fittingly titled “Play and the Sacred.” Here,
6 Games and Culture XX(X)

he contests the primacy that Huizinga accords to play, though he acknowledges that
the two spheres are intimately connected. Caillois argues that play and the sacred are
reciprocal parts of a single whole: the way humans represent the uncertainty and risk
of life. In this formulation, play is the “pure form” of uncertainty that “has no
content,” while the sacred expresses the “pure content—an indivisible, equivocal,
fugitive, and efficacious force” (1950/1959, pp. 157, 160). Elaborating this distinc-
tion, he makes it clear how form and content relate to the experience of uncertainty.
On the one hand, play:

Constitutes a kind of haven in which one is master of destiny. There, the player himself
chooses his risks, which since they are determined in advance, cannot exceed what he
has exactly agreed to put into play. (p. 159)

This statement accords with the idea of mimetic uncertainty that games are fun
precisely because they allow a paradoxically safe risk. In ordinary life, Caillois
makes clear, we do not receive any such reprieve from the unexpected consequences
of our actions.
Beyond the limited uncertainty of games, and the ordinary risk of life, however,
the uncertainty associated with the sacred leaves human beings entirely prostrate:

[c]ompared to [the force of the sacred], man’s efforts remain precarious and uncertain,
since by definition it is superhuman. He would be unable, in any case, to control it at his
pleasure and confine its power to limits fixed in advance. Also, he must revive it,
tremble in its presence, and supplicate it in humility. That is why the sacred has been
defined as tremendum and fascinans. (Caillois, 1950/1959, p. 158)

Here, Caillois defines the sacred as that around which limits cannot be placed
because it crosses all limits. It is a pure content that cannot be tied down to any form.
These contrasting relations to uncertainty define the difference between play and the
sacred. Play does not have any uncertainty proper to itself and can only put limits on
uncertain feelings drawn mimetically from other parts of life. Contra Huizinga, play
becomes secondary and parasitical on the sacred superabundance that renders life
mysterious.
We are now able to say why play mattered to Caillois. In play, he saw a reflection
of sacred power and a direct challenge to it. He points out Huizinga’s mischaracter-
ization of this relation and subordinates play to the sacred by contrasting the way that
each term deals with uncertainty. This orientation fundamentally colors all of Cail-
lois’s future investigations into games.

Why These Four Forms of Play?

The relation of form and content brings us to the second question in my series: Why
these four forms of play. My choice of the word “form” to describe the various
McDonald 7

categories of games might appear questionable to some readers. Granted that Cail-
lois uses that term in his early work, he generally refrains from it in Man, Play and
Games. So, let me frame the question another way: What is the proper term to
characterize the way Caillois divides play? Both “genre” and “type” might be better
candidates. If form suggests a set of rigid principles into which an arbitrary content
can be slotted, genre offers a more fluid and historical relation that highlights
repeated and salient features which can change over time. Genre accords with
Caillois’s recourse to a plethora of examples and the fact that he understands every
actual game as a mix of his four categories. Alternately, we might understand agôn,
alea, mimicry, and ilinx as four natural types—embedded in animal biology, human
psychology, or the laws of social organization. This fits with the examples Caillois
brings from animal play and insect life. Thinking of games as natural types also
obviates any account of how they are invented or transmitted—an account Caillois
does not offer—because each society would come preequipped with the same four
fundamental categories.
Alongside these considerations, we must also note that Caillois refuses to specify
the model of organization he is using. When referring collectively to his distinctions,
he makes use of relatively agnostic terms like “domain,” “classification,” “rubric,”
and “category” (Caillois, 1958/1961, pp. 9–13). On the other hand, when it comes to
differentiating between the four, he retreats from the intersubjective realm of games
to the internal world of “essential and irreducible impulses” (p. 14), “psychological
attitudes” (p. 43), “powerful drives” (p. 44), “principles of play” (p. 49), and
“forces” (p. 125). Rather than games themselves, these are descriptions of the
motives that lead people to play, of pleasures and needs.
Now, it would be possible to develop a theory of genre based on such basic
motivations, but Caillois does not do so. He is not interested in the contingent
histories that shape our understanding today. Equally, one could argue that game
types arise as direct expressions of distinct biological impulses, but again Caillois
does not take that route. He argues that existing games incorporate multiple impulses
in varying combinations and intensities. Neither “genre” nor “type” offers the right
kind of abstraction to get us from innate drives to culturally shared games.
The situation is different with “form.” Play’s defining traits—being free, sepa-
rate, uncertain, unproductive—Caillois (1958/1961) calls “purely formal” (p. 10).
Although he does not speak of his four classes of games as finished forms, he does
regularly describe an ongoing process of formalization. Throughout the book Cail-
lois speaks of the process by which games evolve more complexity and organization
until they become key elements of cultural and social structures. The relation
between a drive and its formal container is clearest in the chapter “The Corruption
of Games,” where Caillois wonders what happens when an impulse escapes from the
formal determinations of play. He concludes that that the four drives “necessarily
have to take quite different, and on occasion doubtlessly unexpected, forms” outside
of play (p. 44). Here, we can see the Freudian and Surrealist legacy of his thought,
where an obscure drive is able to express itself through a situation at hand—play just
8 Games and Culture XX(X)

happens to be a common situation. Caillois even ends the chapter with a table
identifying three different forms the drives can permeate: “Institutional Forms Inte-
grated into Social Life,” “Cultural Forms Found at the Margins of the Social Order,”
and what he simply calls “Corruption” (p. 54). The categorization of games is,
therefore, a categorization of forms that can capture and organize certain impulses
and treat them as playful content.
Caillois is evasive about describing these psychological impulses in any detail.
The most elaborate characterization appears again in the chapter on the corruption of
games, where he enumerates the desires at the base of each category:

The desire to win by one’s merit in regulated competition (agôn), the submission of
one’s will in favor of anxious and passive anticipation of where the wheel will stop
(alea), the desire to assume a strange personality (mimicry), and finally, the pursuit of
vertigo (ilinx) . . . [which] gratifies the desire to temporarily destroy [the player’s]
bodily equilibrium, escape the tyranny of his ordinary perception, and provoke the
abdication of conscience. (1958/1961, p. 44)

This is how the motives look when formalized by play, but each one takes on a
more extreme shade outside those constraints. To unrestrained agôn Caillois attri-
butes a brutality, violence, and greed that stems from a need to triumph beyond any
referee or rule. Alea without limit becomes superstition, where the desire for experi-
encing one’s destiny is replaced by a paranoid desire to evade and placate that
destiny by watching for its signs and omens. The extension of the drive to become
another person in mimicry ends in alienation, Caillois argues, because such extreme
identification leaves the player no original self to return to. Unbridled ilinx is visible
as drug and alcohol use, where the need for a temporary disruption seeps ever deeper
into the fabric of the organism until it becomes a dependency.
These drives are a strange set with no straightforward corollary in the psycholo-
gical theories of Caillois’s contemporaries. If games can organize each of these
drives and turn them into content, however, then there must be an element that
unites them and makes them formalizable. That organization appears as an economic
trade-off in the above examples. Play offers some compensation for the limitations it
places on the free expression of a drive. By examining the operative exchange, we
can see their common element.
Take agôn, for example. When the drive is contained by play, its scope is limited
by respect for the rules. In compensation for that restriction, rules simultaneously
heighten the pleasure of winning by creating “ideal conditions, susceptible of giving
precise and incontestable value to the winner’s triumph” (1958/1961, p. 14). They
produce situations of equality through an ethic of fair play and thus heighten the
uncertainty of who will win. Victory can feel absolute and unconditional only
because of that limitation—because of an increased indeterminacy. Alea makes a
similar trade of extension for intensity. The corrupted form of superstitious alea is
only a partial expression of the desire to renounce personal agency. In superstition, I
McDonald 9

do indeed posit the world as an overwhelming force, but that force requires my
active belief and paranoia to constitute it as a recognizable entity. Superstition
requires some minimal effort on my part—searching out signs, attempting to placate
the gods—before my agency can be fully abolished. Games of chance obviate that
need by producing a ready-made structure for the indeterminacy of fate to which I
can submit myself more fully. In a game of chance, I experience the drive of alea
without admixture or compromise. Play provides a purer pleasure to both agôn and
alea by heightening indeterminacy at the expense of each drive’s scope.
Mimicry and ilinx, by contrast, operate according to a winner-loses logic. If either
drive is fully realized, then that very intensity limits its impact. Caillois (1958/1961)
imagines that an excessive desire for mimicry causes a player to become stuck as the
person they mimic, even as she “tries desperately to deny, subdue, or destroy this
new self, which strongly resists” (p. 49). The desire is not to become any specific
other but to revel in the unknown identity of strangers, and getting stuck undermines
the source of pleasure. The formal limits imposed by play, whereby mimicry does
not allow a player to identify too deeply, help the individual trade a fixed identifi-
cation for the continued indeterminacy of make-believe. Where mimicry is threat-
ened by a psychological dead end, the danger for ilinx is a physical trap of chemical
dependency and “organic disorder” (p. 53). The player who is driven to disrupt her
bodily sense with drugs and alcohol becomes more and more reliant on those sub-
stances to produce a sense of disorientation. Ultimately, the player is trapped in a
new and more ironclad equilibrium produced by the drug. Trading in drugs for
games allows new and changeable forms of disorientation. In both cases, play
facilitates a transition between the momentary intensity of the drive and sustained
indeterminacy—either in the types of identification or the various disruptions to
which it submits body and mind.
Within each impulse is a tendency toward indeterminacy and uncertainty, and
it is precisely this component that makes possible the economic trade with the
formalization of play. Agôn and alea give up some range for an indeterminacy
that heightens pleasure while mimicry and ilinx give up some depth. In other
words, the element of uncertainty in each of these drives is what makes it possible
for play to organize their form. Caillois thus continues to make use of the idea that
play is the “pure form” for an experience of uncertainty that draws its content
from elsewhere.
Now that we have clarified that “form” is the appropriate term, it becomes easier
to state why Caillois makes use of it. His writing continues to depend on a relation-
ship between the uncertainty of play and the uncertainty of the sacred. Play is
secondary, derived, and parasitic on ordinary life which it mimics and repeats. As
such, play can serve as a symptom of larger social forces. Caillois is interested in a
sociology derived from games, and his mimetic theory makes it possible for him to
treat play as a scale model of the anxieties and motives of any given culture. Games
capture, separate, and articulate the pervasive tensions or uncertainties of a people
while affirming the importance of the sacred as a deeper and more profound
10 Games and Culture XX(X)

uncertainty. Caillois holds onto form because it gives him a framework that grounds
his project of a sacred sociology (Riley, 2005).

Why These Four Forms of Play?

If play is supposed to be a microcosm of social life, though, why does it only include
four eclectic motives? Alternately, if it is really a mirror of the “pure content” of the
sacred, why does it include more than a single profound uncertainty? More gener-
ally, we can ask whether there is any significance to the fact that Caillois picks out
no more and no less than four categories. Is he simply lumping and sorting the huge
diversity of games as best he can? Alternately, is there a deeper logic that relates the
game types and helps account for the number? Is the diversity an accident or
structured? If it is more than a haphazard grouping, how does that change our
understanding of game form?
Play’s diversity is important because it speaks directly to the nature of mimetic
uncertainty. If play is meant to be a pure form, then the principle that distinguishes
one game from another cannot arise within the game itself. A game needs a bound-
ary, for instance, but the location and type of boundary cannot be decided by the
concept of play—form alone cannot explain why the lines of a basketball court differ
from those of a football field. The profane, ordinary world provides infinite criteria,
but this extreme range makes it unsuitable for distinguishing between the funda-
mental attitudes of play. Caillois (1958/1961) calls similar distinctions based on
where a game is played, the equipment used, or the qualifications of the players
“meaningless” (p. 11). That only leaves the sacred to provide a game’s content. If the
sacred were the source of play’s contrasting impulses, however, that would attest to a
plurality of uncertainties within the sacred rather than the pure “indivisible” force
that Caillois describes. Moreover, the sacred was defined precisely as what cannot be
contained by any form. Each of the three possible sources of diversity—play, the
world, and the sacred—cannot provide that diversity within a mimetic paradigm. It
is in the context of this dilemma that Caillois turns to a structuralist solution that
necessitates exactly four kinds of games.
Caillois tries to resolve the tension of his mimetic frame with an approach
pioneered by his colleague Émile Benveniste. In the 1940s, these two French
émigrés corresponded about Huizinga’s theses on play. A year after Caillois’s
“Play and the Sacred,” Benveniste published his own essay redefining the relation
between these two concepts. Benveniste was a structural linguist who followed
after Ferdinand De Saussure, and his semiotic treatment of anthropology illumi-
nates Caillois’s approach. Benveniste (1947) describes the sacred as a unification
of the form of human actions—or ritual—and the meaning behind those acts—or
myth. Play, on the other hand, he identifies with the opposite tendency toward
disequilibrium. The playful misalignment of ritual and myth comes in two vari-
eties: Jocique, or wordplay, develops when “myth is reduced to its content and
separated from its rites,” while ludique or physical play exists when “rite is
McDonald 11

practiced for itself and separated from its myth” (Benveniste in Ehrmann et al.,
1968, p. 36). Benveniste’s theory is instructive because it demonstrates how a
structural opposition can produce a qualitative variety within a unitary sacred.
Man, Play and Games sets up a similar structural opposition between the orga-
nized and coherent play Caillois calls ludus and the anarchic improvisation he calls
paidia. Each of Caillois’s four types of game is distended between these poles. Play-
fighting and racing are freer varieties of agôn than chess, and ilinx can be as simple
as twirling in place or as complex as mountain climbing. The opposition also struc-
tures an overall relation between game types. Agôn and alea are more complex and
make more extensive use of rules, while mimicry and ilinx are built primarily around
improvisation (Caillois, 1958/1961, p. 75).
Caillois develops a sociology based on this division. Some societies, he argues,
secure their identity and continuity through a stultifying and mortifying combina-
tion of masked ritual and vertiginous ecstasy. These civilizations are caught in a
cycle of festive destruction and rebirth he first theorized as a student. Other soci-
eties move out of this initial state by developing the stabilizing, rule-based insti-
tutions that underpin agon and alea. The idea of the sacred in the latter case is
based on justice, destiny, and individual freedom. Into his mimetic sociology,
Caillois introduces a historical and evolutionary thesis that divides high from low,
primitive from civilized, and irrational from rational. He uses the Nietzchean
designation of “Dionysian” to describe civilizations where mimicry and ilinx pre-
dominate, in contrast to the “rational” or Apollonian combination of agôn and alea
(1958/1961, p. 87).
Compared to Benveniste, Man, Play and Games presents a more complex struc-
tural account that introduces a second opposition within this first one. In each pair,
one category becomes positively and the other negatively inflected. A line opposes
the creative to the destructive, the chosen to the accidental, and the active to the
passive. So, agôn and mimicry demand that the player push herself to her limits,
strive to overcome obstacles, and choose what kinds of roles to play. In the process,
the player helps to create new and lasting cultural institutions. Contrariwise, in alea
and ilinx, the player wastefully expends her previous economic gains, destroys her
sense of social and bodily stability, and tends toward the degradation of the existing
order (1958/1961, pp. 76–78).
Summarizing these two structural oppositions, Caillois plots out all the possible
combinations that can obtain between the four categories in his chapter “An
Expanded Theory of Games.” Two combinations are “forbidden” or impossible
because the basic impulses point in contradictory directions: ilinx destroys the
effort and skill needed for competition, and one cannot deceive fate with make-
believe. A second set of pairs he calls “contingent” because one of the categories
is virtually implied by the other. Every competition has the possibility of becom-
ing a spectacle, and so mimicry includes agôn in principle; similarly, every gam-
bling game has the chance to create feelings of vertigo and loss of self. Finally,
there are two “fundamental” relations of basic compatibility that exist along a
12 Games and Culture XX(X)

Figure 1. Semiotic square of game types in Man, Play and Games.

continuum. Games of competition can easily shade into games of chance with a
change to the rules, and the freedom of improvisation can become vertiginous if it
takes a small turn.
What Caillois calls forbidden, contingent, and fundamental relationships simply
recode the logical ideas of contradiction, entailment, and opposition. Translating his
terms in this way allows us to see how the whole system operates according to the
structure of a Greimasian semiotic square (Figure 1). Rather than an accidental
organization of types, or even a loose series of oppositions, there is a rigid over-
determination that creates a tightly controlled set. A Greimas square begins with a
single piece of content (A), in this case Huizinga’s focus on agoˆn, and uses that term
to generate everything else. The opposite of that term, (B), produces the first varia-
tion: Hot is set against cold, raw against cooked, and alive against dead. Further,
both terms are negated ( A and B) to produce a wider field—the opposition of
alive and dead expands to include those who are not really alive and the undead.
Indeed, the process is so inexorable that Jameson (1987) has called it “a virtual map
of conceptual closure . . . that is, as a mechanism, which, while seeming to generate a
rich variety of possible concepts and positions, remains in fact locked into some
initial aporia or double bind” (p. xv).
Caillois’s aporia stems from the mimetic relation that he establishes between play
and the sacred. Once he is committed to games-as-form and sacred-as-content, he
has no way of explaining the diversity of actual games. If the sacred included the
McDonald 13

four attitudes, it would be sundered and impure; if games had an internal variety,
they would be more than mere form. Out of this situation, and in order to defer and
displace a confrontation, Caillois has recourse to the structural oppositions of the
Greimas square. It allows him to import and disguise the barest metaphysical con-
trasts—rational and irrational, active and passive, good and bad—as if they were
unique and specific attributes of games. By employing a structuralist method, one he
borrows from Benveniste, Caillois can avoid answering the questions that his
mimetic presuppositions raise.
By his own account, Caillois sees the four categories as organized and interlock-
ing. Looking more closely at the structure, it becomes clear why there are four forms
of play rather than three or five. Each of the four categories designates not just a set
of games and a drive but a logical operation that allows him to erect a system from
nothing. The four forms serve this purpose only on the condition that they are treated
as natural, ready-made, and the only possible ones. Throughout his book, Caillois
changes his mind about where the four play-drives originate, whether they begin life
from within play or the sacred. Mimicry is both a sacred bond that unites the earliest
human communities before it descends into various games, and it is the biological
drive of a newborn playing peekaboo that later becomes a social custom. Caillois’s
method is designed to foreclose any question about the origin of the drives and
forestall the question of why. It is no accident that scholars have passed over Cail-
lois’s method; it is designed to deflect questions.

Why These Four Forms of Play?

The structuralist opposition throws us back on the aporia between play-as-form and
sacred-as-content that Caillois was trying to solve. Recall that this aporia is the
result of several simultaneous commitments: that play and the sacred are not
simply equivalent, that there are diverse attitudes behind our games, and that play
copies an uncertainty from the world and puts boundaries around it to make it safe.
His structuralist solution was an attempt to reconcile these ideas by generating
diversity within the sacred, but the empty oppositions show that he draws the
actual diversity from elsewhere. The Greimas square accounts for the number of
categories, but not the qualities within the typology. The question shifts once more
such that we need to justify why Caillois chose these four forms of play, and no
others, to exemplify the structuralist logic. I am not trying to solve his aporia but to
show where Caillois unconsciously went beyond himself. His structuralism reveals
that these ideas are indebted to another logic, and the last task of this essay is to
reveal that alternate source. Where did Caillois discover his four categories, why
does he select them, and what does that tell us about the idea of mimetic uncer-
tainty that links play to the sacred?
Based on Caillois’s commitments, there are two ways of cutting the Gordian knot.
First, we might suppose that he ultimately gives up on the idea of mimetic uncer-
tainty. By giving up on correspondence, the relation between play and the sacred
14 Games and Culture XX(X)

would become accidental: There might be no connection at all, or Huizinga might be

right that they are simply equivalent. In either case, Caillois’s four categories would
have to come from close study and archival research into the history and anthro-
pology of games. A second possibility is that Caillois implicitly understands
mimetic uncertainty in a sense that is different than he explicitly claims. In partic-
ular, the concept of mimeticism that he developed as a Surrealist and that animates
the game genre of mimicry is a more complex alternative to the relation of original
and copy and may provide a recursive and reflexive undercurrent to his thought.
The idea that Caillois ultimately gives up on any correspondence between play
and the sacred does not stand up to the most cursory examination. In that case, we
would expect that his categories would develop to fit the actual evidence. However,
the most original contributions he makes through mimicry and ilinx are also themes
that dominate his previous work (Macé, 2013). Caillois was fascinated by tumult,
excess, licentious behavior, and disruption and put them at the center of his dynamic
and catastrophic understanding of biology, psychology, and sociology (Murkherjee,
2010). He designated such states with special terms: paroxysm, ivresse (intoxica-
tion), and vertigo, the last of which he uses to translate ilinx. By reframing these
ideas as play, Caillois was able to simultaneously keep tumult alive and contain its
threatening aspects (Frank, 2003). Mimesis, as I described above, was equally
important as a way of understanding unconscious impulses and the power of ritual
(Cheng, 2009). The account of mimicry in Man, Play and Games picks up where his
research on insects and sacred masks left off and is indebted to those earlier studies.
Caillois’s categories are therefore too overdetermined to be explained as the results
of disinterested research into games.
Let us consider the alternative, that Caillois has a different account of mimetic
uncertainty. Specifically, he has a unique image of mimesis that is expressed in
games of mimicry. These games involve a relation between original and copy, but it
is complexly mediated in even the simplest cases. When children imitate
their parents, for instance, they seem to copy adult behavior. Yet, when Caillois
(1958/1961) describes a “little girl [who] plays her mother’s role as cook,” he also
points in the same breath to an element of “travesty” that accompanies it and renders
it self-reflexive (p. 21). Mimicry focusses attention on the “very fact that the play is
masked” rather than what the masquerade is meant to represent (p. 21). Caillois goes
on to argue that the point of such games has nothing to do with convincing replica-
tion but rather with another set of effects: “the basic intention is not that of deceiving
the spectators . . . the masquerader does not try to make one believe that he is really a
marquis, toreador, or Indian” (p. 21). Games of mimicry have a different test of
success for both the performer and the spectator.
For the performer, the attempt to copy something is secondary and almost incon-
sequential compared to the process of leaving an old identity behind. First, the mimic
“forgets, disguises, or temporarily sheds his personality” only to subsequently “feign
another” (1958/1961, p. 19). For the spectator, the mark of success is not verisimi-
litude but violent emotions that go beyond a reasonable and rational response to the
McDonald 15

mask: “[t]he rule of the game is unique: it consists in the actor’s fascinating the
spectator” and of “inspir[ing] fear in others” (pp. 20, 23). This is a strange model of
mimesis, and its primary results are the affects of tremendum and fascinans that
Caillois earlier associated with the sacred.
He finishes working out this version of mimesis a few years later in his book-
length study of insect adaptations. There he contrasts three kinds of mimicry: dis-
guise, camouflage, and intimidation. Disguise and camouflage operate according to
a straightforward model of original and copy. However, responses of panic and
hallucination to some insect adaptations cause Caillois to add the category of inti-
midation. He uses butterfly wings as a primary example. The ocelli or “eyespots” on
butterfly wings are hypnotic and terrifying for predators who might freeze or startle
when they are unfurled. Yet, ocelli according to Caillois (1960/1964) are not frigh-
tening because they copy eyes, but the reverse: “eyes are frightening because they
resemble ocelli” (p. 90). His point is that eyespots mimic a predator’s ability to
detect eyes, the unconscious heuristic that the animal has evolved to comprehend the
world, but which should never actually be present within it. Ocelli are the manifes-
tation of a nightmare and the realization of a fantasy. Extending this analogy, what
games of mimicry try to copy is not something in the world but the unconscious
principles that animate the world of the spectator.
In summary, three traits distinguish a game of mimicry from simple mimesis.
First, rather than effacing its difference from the original, it draws attention to the
consequences of being a copy. Second, rather than judging its similarity to an
original, it depends on the production of affect. Third, rather than copying something
that exists in the world, it produces that thing for the first time as a reality. What
would it mean to think about play—not just specific games—in these terms and is
there any evidence that Caillois does so?
Two of these traits—the manifestation of unconscious elements and the produc-
tion of affect—are already visible in the earlier discussion of play-drives. The drive
to compete, to passively submit, to become other, and to destroy one’s own equili-
brium—each of these unconscious impulses appears for the first time in play. Only
after these four drives become objective and tangible within play can they subse-
quently break out of play’s form and become corrupted. According to Caillois, play
does not mimic competition over money in the marketplace, rather it creates a
nonrational desire to compete for its own sake. Despite the safety provided by play’s
form, games also provoke powerful emotions. Caillois talks about the competitor’s
pride in victory, the gambler’s humble piety, the audience’s terror, and the dervish’s
ecstasy. In this model of mimesis, emotions signal a successful similarity beyond
original and copy.
As for the quality of self-reflexive travesty, Caillois hints at it in places. We can
see the genre of mimicry reflected in his general definition of play. In the following
passage, Caillois (1958/1961) corrects Huizinga’s treatment of secrecy as a simple
element of play, holding instead that:
16 Games and Culture XX(X)

secrecy, mystery, and even travesty can be transformed into play activity, but it must be
immediately pointed out that this transformation is necessarily to the detriment of the
secret and mysterious which play exposes, publishes, and somehow expends. All that is
mysterious or make-believe by nature approaches play: moreover, it must be that the
function of fiction or diversion is to remove the mystery. (Italics in original, p. 4)

This is a complex passage, one whose evocation of Bataille’s notion of expen-

diture lends it gravity and dynamism. In miniature, we can see the three elements of
mimicry: The secret becomes an unconscious drive, it is made public and its energy
is used up to cause an effect, and it draws attention to the process itself. If this is true
of all play, as Caillois asserts, then games of mimicry not only copy something in the
world but travesty the act of play itself.
In an expanded analogy, games correspond to ocelli: They make visible an
unconscious element that was never meant to be visible. The unconscious heuristic
for recognizing an eye, in turn, corresponds to the four play-drives Caillois identifies.
Following this logic, the original eye from which the heuristic is derived corresponds
to the general act of play. Games provoke intense emotions because they cause the
unexpected and uncanny return of play. Games, in this reading, are self-reflexive and
they explore the consequences of that self-reflexivity. In this regard, Caillois is quite
close to Bateson’s (1972) roughly contemporaneous theory of play as metacommu-
nication. Caillois takes the general quality of play’s self-reference and wonders how
that signal changes depending on the kind of play at stake.
According to this alternative version of mimesis, Caillois selects precisely these
four drives because they take up qualities internal to play, present them self-
reflexively, and explore the consequences of that performance. Caillois’s four cate-
gories are more than mere empirical examples because they follow a modernist
involution toward the nature of play as a medium. These are games that play at play
and in the process demonstrate what it means to play. Admittedly, this is not how
Caillois understands his project, but I have tried to show that his understanding is
inconsistent and paradoxical. In his zigzagging logic, in the eclectic examples he
musters, and in his broader body of work, there are the outlines of an alternative way
of thinking about mimesis. Caillois’s method leads to a dense set of questions that
are relevant for anyone asking about the relation between play and the world.
Treating his four categories of play as four methods by which play reflects on itself
is a provocative challenge to Caillois’s legacy.

Other Questions
Caillois turned to play as a way of expanding his conception of the sacred, he
developed it into a sociological method for analyzing the prevalent uncertainties
in a culture and tried to organize that diversity along structuralist lines, but he
ultimately needed an eclectic idea of mimesis as travesty to understand the diversity
of those uncertainties. In summary, that is the answer I offer to the question: why
McDonald 17

these four forms of play? Yet that answer is only a preliminary one; it forces us to
reevaluate Caillois and reconsider the ways that we laud, challenge, ignore, reinvent,
and borrow from him. To end my reflections, I briefly turn to some of the new
questions that this perspective opens up.
Accepting agôn, alea, mimicry, and ilinx now becomes a complicated gesture
because these categories no longer look so natural or free of presuppositions. Cail-
lois asks us to commit to a method of connecting play to the world. He asks us to be
structuralist and to treat medium-specific self-reflexivity as the crucial differentiat-
ing feature among games. He does all this without admitting his views, which leaves
us without tools to determine the scope and limit of this commitment. Accepting his
approach comes with new tasks for historicizing and contextualizing the discourses
that categorize play.
Rejecting Caillois is no easier. I have tried to show Caillois’s questions are often
more important than his answers, and those questions remain whatever one thinks of
his interpretation. Criticizing his definition of play or his evidence for a particular
game type is not enough to get out of this orbit. There is no way to borrow from him
in a piecemeal fashion—each part of the argument hangs from a spiderweb of
connections. One must wrestle with the validity of his method and commit to an
alternative relation between play and the world. Rejection cannot rest content with
textual analysis, as I have done, but must explore the conditions that make his
arguments valid or invalid.
Adding to Caillois’s game types becomes both more difficult and more interest-
ing. It is no longer adequate to identify a kind of play that was poorly captured by his
breakdown. That subdivision was never empirical in the first place. Clarifying self-
reflexivity as the criterion for distinguishing forms and showing that the number four
was an arbitrary structural imposition means that a new path is open for discovering
fundamental types of games. What makes this exciting is not just the act of enumera-
tion but the fact that the self-reflexivity and travesty of these categories reflect the
nature of play. If mimicry can teach us about play’s capacity to expend and expose
secrets, then other categories may equally demonstrate obscure and rich dynamics.
By moving from description to self-description, play has the potential to unearth the
unconscious heuristics that bind us to it. The task, for those willing to follow Caillois
down this rabbit hole, is to discover these connections in each particular game.
Taken together, these questions offer a new direction for scholarship on Caillois
and on what we might learn from the study of games.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, author-
ship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of
this article.
18 Games and Culture XX(X)

ORCID iD
Peter D. McDonald https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5371-3539

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Author Biography
Peter D. McDonald is an assistant professor of game design at DePaul University and a
fellow at the DePaul Humanities Center. His work has been published in The American
Journal of Play, Analog Game Studies, Loading . . . , and The Routledge Companion to Media
Studies and the Digital Humanities.