1. Taking up the gauntlet: Thoughts toward a theory of play and games Jeffrey L. Forgeng WPI/Higgins Armory Museum

2. Ajax and Achilles feed their gaming addiction

3. Francis Willughby (1635-1672)

4. “Summing up the formal characteristics of play we might call it a free activity, standing quite consciously outside 'ordinary' life as being 'not serious', but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner. It promotes the formation of social groupings which tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress their difference from the common world by disguise or other means.” Johann Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture, 1938

5. “Play possesses two irreducible senses: it may be conceived as a free, voluntary action, or as random motion.” R. Rawdon Wilson, In Palamedes’ Shadow: Explorations in play, game and narrative theory, 1990

6. “Play is unconstrained action.” Me, here, just now.

8. Rush? Stalk? Hide?

9. “Ludic mentation” and the “ludic trope”

11. “Metaludic mentation” and the “metaludic trope”

13. Game: A system of artificial structures within a play- environment

15. The neotenic ape…

19. Interludic networks?

20. Panem et circenses “Bread and circuses”

21. Implications… Play and games are essential to understanding how humans think. Play and games are powerful tools for understanding human cultures. The concept of play and games is something important to explore in the IMGD program. As a games program, we should be intellectually ambitious—our topic is far from trivial!