homo ludens

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See also: Homo ludens

English

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Alternative forms

Etymology

Coined by Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga in Homo Ludens (1938), which introduces the concept, from Latin homō lūdēns (“playful man”).

Noun

homo ludens

  1. The human being viewed as primarily concerned with play, seeing it as an aim in itself.
    • 1989, Yishai Tobin, editor, From Sign to Text: A semiotic view of communication, John Benjamins Publishing, →ISBN, page 196:
      To a homo ludens, playing is an aim in itself and justifies any effort. A real homo ludens does not fuse “ordinary life” with playing. He transforms “ordinary life” into something qualitatively different.
    • 2000 April 13, Marina Warner, “A New Twist in the Long Tradition of the Grotesque”, in London Review of Books‎, volume 22, number 08, →ISSN:
      The sandpit, mud, lollipop sticks, goo, plasticine, oozing clay and, later, petri dishes and test tubes: playing with such stuff, Hall argues, has clearly influenced the materialisations of contemporary art, so much of it three-dimensional, inherently transient and labile, and playful. Homo ludens has supplanted homo faber.
    • 2001 [1999], Luciano Floridi, Philosophy and Computing: An Introduction, Routledge, →ISBN, page 221:
      It takes a homo ludens to eat the only fruit forbidden by God, unthinkingly and playfully. The afterlife is never seriously conceived of as a workshop, a library or a laboratory.
    • 2017 April 18, Philip Oltermann, quoting Jürgen Schmidhuber, “Jürgen Schmidhuber on the robot future​: ‘They will pay as much attention to us as we do to ants'”, in The Guardian‎, →ISSN:
      “Homo ludens has always had a talent for inventing jobs of the non-existential kind. The vast majority of the population is already doing luxury jobs like yours and mine,” he says, nodding towards my notepad.

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