Games create a Magic Circle in which the rules of reality are different than in ordinary life.

Simpler toys and games are more historically persistent and universally appealing than complex toys and games.

Assertions.

Assertions.

Games fuse subconscious muscle memory with intellectual understandings of complex situations.

conscious decisions that must be made in almost no time at all.”

“You’ll notice that all three games are breathlessly fast. They go beyond ‘think on your feet’ fast — they are what I think of as sub-tactically fast, even faster than basketball. You have to play almost on pure instinct, interspersed with occasional

Playing games develops reflexes and instincts that carry over to outside the game world.

It is interesting to me that games can be both intellectually involved and subconsciously reflexive. Rules, once understood, are buried in muscle memory. Actions are sublimated into complex understandings of the game world. [Jake Fee]

which are part of the way the universe works.”

“The structure of events and the position in which we find ourselves is accessed by divination, which produces relevant interpretable patterns. The questions we ask of these systems are our response to the progressed positions of the various sequential patterns

78, self-denial. Descent falls from square 41, which is disobedience; 44, vanity; 49, vulgarity; 52, theft; 58, lying; 62, drunkenness; 69, debt; 73, murder; 84, anger; 92, greed; 95, pride; and 99, lust.”

Games encode knowledge of the real world by simulating a cognitive microcosm.

“In some versions of Moksha-Patamu there are 100 squares, and either ascent or descent is from specific squares, whose numbers relate symbolically to vice or virtue. In the 100 square version, ascent is gained from square 12, signifying faith; 51, reliability; 57, generosity; 76, knowledge;

Games are descended from divinatory and ritual practices.

″[...] during the siege of Syracuse, the great geometer Archimedes (278-212 BCE) created figures in the sand to foresee or afect the outcome of the battle. This may have been a sort of psammomancy, a divination by geometry, or a forerunner of the classical divinatory geomancy described here.”

There is an Egyptian wall painting showing Ramses III, a pharaoh of the Twentieth Dynasty, engaged in a board game with Isis, wife of Osiris, Lord of the Dead.

Boethian arithmetic, the Latinized Nicomachus, the last great effort in the Pythagorean philosophy of numbers.”

“For here was a tournament worthy of intellectual foes, a play that outranked chess as much as chess surpasses mere dicing, and a game that was by its very nature closed to all save selected minds that had been trained in the

We see that hopscotch, for example, is related to ancient myths of labyrinths and mazes, and was later adapted to represent the soul’s journey from earth to heaven.

and the Aboriginal tracker.”

At every moment of every day games are being played in all four corners of the globe; games which reflect the history, folklore, and traditions of peoples as diverse as the Icelandic fisherman and the Mali herdsman, the Peruvian copper miner and the Nepali hill farmer, the European factory worker

parallel or laternative tensions within the proscribed setting. This mixture of lowered tension in external relations and induced arousal within the novel constraints is probably the euphoric state we call fun.”

source of all voluntary behavior on the levels of action and thought. The player substitutes his own conventions and his own urgencies for those of society and nature. Affectively speaking, being in control engenders a relaxed freedom from customary tension, as well as the possibility of creating

“And indeed, the paying of games is one of the few of our regular activities that has managed to transcend the enormous social, cultural, political, linguistic and geographical barriers between people in this world of ours.

“For me play is what a person does when he can choose the arbitrariness of the constraints within which he will act or imagine. In its most primordial form, it is an attempt to control the circumstances of habitual action by reversing the direction of control. It may be, therefore, the ultimate

like doll’s houses, and I am sure that the best thing that can be said for many large theatres, is that they remind us of small theatres.′ ”

“Mrs. Graham Greene, possessor of a unique collection of English doll’s houses, has written wistfully: ’It is an old story and for some a sad one, that in a sense these childish toys are more to us than they ever can be to children. I sometimes think that houses are interesting because they are so

“A boy who has use of his limbs and whose mind is untainted with prejudice would in all probability prefer a substantial cart in which he oculd carry weeds, earth and stones up and down hill, to the finest frail coach and six that ever came out of a toyshop.”

spontaneously among different groups to be virtually identical?”

come from India or Arabia, has come from Europe... even mothers who formerly attended to the care of children and households, now spend all their time playing yo-yo.′ ”

“Does the existence of an identical or similar game in multiple societies thousands of miles apart demonstrate that those peoples had contact with one another? Does it show that those peoples descended from common ancestors in the relatively recent past? Or is it possible for games developed

“Over a hundred years later it swept England and America in the 1920s, to the extent that a Persian newspaper wrote an angry leader denouncing this dangerous toy imported from the United States as an example of a time-wasting and immoral novelty: ’This game, like the deadly plagues which used to

become more complex with less time for strictly leisure activities.”

“At one time scientists assumed that modern people would have more leisure, and therefore more play, as they spent less time securing food and shelter. The truth seems to be that as people spend less time filling their basic needs, their lives

Quotations or commetaries.