The domain of play is immense. So varied are its forms that there is no part of our behaviour, speech or thinking that does not belong to it in some measure; forms so incompatible that it is surprising to see them designated under the same name. The origin of the infinitely diverse manifestations belonging to this domain, and which make play appear more as a modality of all human activity rather than one activity in particular, has been sought after above all in some biopsychological tendency supposed to exercise and satisfy itself in it. I shall not be following this path here: I am concerned with play, not with the player. Working in the opposite direction, I shall regard play, qua form, as a fact, so as to try to uncover the elements that furnish its structure and to attempt a definition of the function it fulfils.

To begin with, a minimal definition of play can be proposed that highlights its basic characteristics, those without which it does not exist. I shall call play all regulated activity that has its end in itself and does not aim to usefully modify reality.

From this definition, the principal traits that distinguish play can already be seen: the fact that it is an activity that takes place in the world, but is heedles of the conditions of “reality”, since it deliberately abstracts these; the fact that it “serves no purpose” and appears as a series of forms whose intentionality cannot be oriented towards the useful and which find their end in their own accomplishment; finally, the formal and regulated nature of play, which must take place within a rigorous set of limits and conditions and constitutes a closed totality. It must be said that all these features set play apart from the “reality” in which human will, in thrall to utility, everywhere runs up against events, incoherencies, arbitrariness, where nothing turns out as planned nor according to the accepted rules, where the only certitude man possesses – that of his final end – appears to him both iniquitous and absurd. Play escapes all these limitations, in that it is first and foremost form.

To say that play and the rule-bound games that are a part of it are a “form” is to contrast them with a “content” that would be reality itself. But from this it does not follow that play is an empty form, the production of meaningless acts. On the contrary, the coherence of its structure and its internal purpose imply a meaning that is as if inherent to its form and always extraneous to any practical aim. This meaning is produced by the very arbitrariness of the conditions that limit play and through which, passing from one to the next, this is carried out; the being of play is entirely bound up in the convention governing it. If a single one of the rules maintaining a given game outside of “reality” is violated, the game ceases and the player reverts to reality. The condition of the participants is thus also necessarily arbitrary; they strip themselves of their ordinary personality in order to take on only that assigned to them by the requirements of the game. Their only function is to allow the game to realise itself. And it must be realised as action, being the transcription of a scheme given in advance that exists for itself up until its conclusion. Hence it is the game that determines the players, not the other way around. It creates its actors, it gives them place, rank and figure; it regulates their bearing, their physical appearance, it even renders them, as the case may be, alive or dead. Everything is conditioned by the way the game unfolds, internal to those conditions that constitute the game.

It is not enough to say that this second reality into which play inducts us and in which we are held for as long as the game lasts is different from “true” reality. With the help of the expressions that we apply to it, we can characterise it more precisely. The extension given to the word jeu sheds light on the representation that we make of it. We talk of a jeu de cartes, of the jeu de paume, as well as the jeu of a piston, the jeu of state institutions, and the jeu of a musician or an actor. We say that an actor joue and that a door joue. We employ expressions as wide-ranging as entrer en jeu, mettre en jeu, donner du jeu, se faire un jeu de, etc.2 The same term seems to signify at once movement and constraint and artifice and ease and exercise. All this apparent dissimilarity, even contradictoriness, is full of instruction, though first and foremost about ourselves; the testimony of words elucidates our conception of play. There is no fixed notion in such a matter as this: where we see only varieties of a single species – a children’s game and an athletic game – the Greeks distinguished two independent realities (παίγνιον and ἆθλος) that it would never have crossed their minds to conflate. Many languages make the same distinction. With this proviso, the consistent features of a definition are discernible in the multiple uses to which we put the word. The fact that has brought about this semantic proliferation is that all collective activities, all “representations”, all figurations are now seen as “play”, as “non-serious” imitations of reality. It is their fictive side that is thus emphasised. The soldier being drilled, the wrestler in the ring, the actor on the stage make none but the gestures pertaining to their role, and they do so until they have exhausted them. All behaviour that reproduces the outer appearance of a concerted action, that imitates its motions and development, is characterised as play. By extension, an operation considered from the outside, in its regular movement, without regard for the result obtained, is designated accordingly: hence we speak of the movement [jeu] of the muscles, a formal mechanism, the way the parts link together in the whole that commands them, but whose function we do not keep in view. Our representation of play is thus unified in the terms that convey it. This representation was formed once, in Latin, jocus (which has given us our word jeu) supplanted ludus. Jocus is wordplay, frivolous remarks, jokes; ludus is properly “training” in all of its forms: training for study (whence ludus “class, school”) and training for combat, military exercise (whence ludus “competition; game for the arena”). The replacement of ludus with jocus, which alone survived, sanctioned a change in attitude towards these exercises and demarcations, now demoted to the rank of simple “games”.

We are thus able to measure the area of this representation. But we are no better informed as to its nature. We learn only this: that play is increasingly clearly specified as being distinct from reality, as “non-serious”. And yet play is also, in its own way, a reality. Since it is separated by its conventions from reality and everyday life, play must have its own reality. Indeed there is an equally specific reality proper to play, with its laws, its necessity, its logic, its code, and even its language. What is the nature of this distinctive reality, and what is its relationship to the other reality, which it excludes?

The form of play found in a game realises, through the intermediary of the participants, a sort of complete drama, generally agonistic in form, consisting in the struggle for the possession of an object, instrument, or symbol of victory. It is played in a closed group – a team, circle, club, troupe, class, etc. – which only exists for the sake of the game and is entirely dedicated to carrying it out. A game can forge a tie between the members of such a group that is stronger than that of blood. It creates the very keen feeling of a community that draws its mission, its honour, its symbols from it. The players each have an identity that belongs to the game, often a disguise. All this helps to define the type of reality that the game inhabits: it is a mystical reality that borrows from the realm of the sacred some of its most salient characteristics.

This conclusion agrees with those deduced by sociologists from contemporary forms of play. Numerous studies on the origin and signification of most of our games point to more or less clear remainders of ancient dances, combats, masquerades and sacred ceremonies. Ball games dramatise ancient tribal myths. Wedding rites find a continuation in children’s games and dances. Games of chance are meant for interrogating or influencing fate. There are competitive games in which the memory of agrarian cults is still recognisable. The spinning top is an ancient divinatory teetotum, etc. There thus appears everywhere a deep relationship between play and the sacred.3 And it is all the more tempting to identify the two essences given the way the player’s passion, which removes him from the real world, often resembles the ecstasy of the worshipper when he is in contact with the sacred. It is the same exaltation, the same pathos, a frenzy that can lead to murder or suicide.

And yet underneath this undeniable lineage, certain fundamental differences can be discerned, the principal instances of which must be brought to light. The sacred supposes a reality, that of the divine; through ritual, the worshipper is brought into a separate world, more real than the real world. Play, on the contrary, deliberately separates itself from reality. It can be said that the sacred is super-real [sur-réel], while play is extra-real. Moreover, the sacred operation has a practical aim, which is to render the terrestrial world inhabitable, to repel hostile forces, to organise society, to procure subsistence or victory. Play has in itself no practical purpose; its essence lies in its very gratuitousness. For the aim of play can’t be said to be to provoke the emotions it arouses; these emotions are merely consequences and do not concern the nature of the phenomenon. Finally, in the realm of the sacred, each of the very strict rules of the ceremony has its own efficacy in and of itself; it must provoke the intervention of the divinity through direct appeal and at the same time make it possible for men to safely endure the terrible and malefic contact of the sacred. In games, the rules are nothing in isolation and everything when combined with each other, which clearly exhibits their structuralising property; they serve to delimit the spatial and temporal frame, the “conventions”, and at the same time they themselves constitute the entire game. This is why ultimately the sacred is all tension and anxiety, while play is all exaltation and deliverance.

Play and the sacred are, then, opposed in every way. And yet in every way they are also akin to one another. Doubtless their true connection lies in this dialectical relationship. Indeed, they share a symmetrical but opposed structure. This homology defines play and the sacred by way of certain common characteristics together with a contrary orientation. Whereas the sacred raises man up to the divine, which is a “given” and is the source of all reality, play safely brings the divine down to the level of man, and through a set of conventions, makes it immediately accessible to him. Play is thus fundamentally nothing but a desacralising operation. Play is so much inverted sacredness and the rules of the game serve solely to secure this inversion. This will appear in a clearer light if we see what this transmutation consists in and how it comes about.

The sacred is the seat of supreme efficacy, the primordial condition of human efficacy. Our acts attain nothing and remain forever futile if their power has not first been guaranteed by the ceremony in which the officiant performed them in the prescribed forms, and evoked their divine prototype. Now, the power of this sacred “act” lies precisely in the conjunction of the myth that utters the story and the ritual that reproduces it. If we compare this schema with that of a game, the difference appears essential: in a game, only the “ritual” survives, all that is preserved is the form of the sacred drama in which all things are posited anew each time. But the “myth”, the pregnantly worded tale that confers meaning and power on the acts, has been forgotten or abolished. Cut off from its myth, the ritual is reduced to a regulated set of now inefficacious acts, a harmless reproduction of the ceremony, a pure “game”. Of the divine struggle for the possession of the sun there remains a ball game in which the player may with impunity (did any god ever enjoy such a privilege?) take possession of the solar disc at will. Such is ludus.

Jocus presents the same structure but reversed. It is words and no longer acts that constitute this form of play, but words that dispose of their own power only; they are spoken “as if” they expressed a reality, but according to the convention – accepted by all the participants – that they have in fact no true content. Jocus is characterised by the deliberately fictive character of the reality it alludes to, but this is not a forged reality, one that would simply be a lie; lies suppose or create the same kind of reality as truthfulness, whereas wordplay and jokes refer to a different reality, one that is admitted as such. It appears then that, contrary to ludus, and in a symmetrical way, jocus consists in a pure “myth”, without a corresponding “ritual” giving it purchase on reality.

In summary, we possess the elements of a definition of play as structure. It originates in the sacred, of which it offers up an inverted, broken image. If the sacred can be defined by the consubstantial unity of myth and ritual, we can say that there is play when only half of the sacred operation is performed, either by conveying the myth alone in words or the ritual alone in acts. We are thus outside of the divine and human sphere of efficacy. Play understood in this way comprises two varieties: jocular when the myth is reduced to its own content and separated from its ritual, and ludic when the ritual is practised for its own sake and separated from its myth. Under this double guise, play embodies each of the two halves into which the sacred ceremony has been split. Moreover, it is in the nature of play to fictitiously recompose in each of its two forms the missing half: in wordplay, we speak as if a factual reality were to follow; in physical games, we act as if they were motivated by a reasoned reality. This fiction makes it possible for these acts and words to be coherent with themselves, in an autonomous world removed by a set of conventions from the inevitabilities of reality.

Pursuing this definition further, for the purposes of verification, it can be argued that it furnishes the necessary and sufficient conditions for the production of play of any sort, for converting any regulated activity into a game. Indeed, for such an activity to switch over into play, it is necessary and sufficient for it to be viewed according to its organised structure without taking into account the “real” end that it sets itself: law courts with their immutable rituals and ceremonies become play when we overlook the case under judgement; politics, which is engaged in amidst so many forms and rules, becomes play if we are not concerned with the government of men; poetry, an arrangement of tightly regulated, arbitrary forms, becomes play if we disregard the feeling that is being expressed; religion, the most regulated of things, becomes play if we separate it from the myths it actualises; war becomes play … etc. Every coherent and regulated manifestation of collective and individual life can be transposed into play once we subtract the reasoned or factual motivation that lends it efficacy.

Perhaps we are now in a position to discern what in ourselves invites play and finds satisfaction there. Play as structure undoubtably relates to a human structure that, having fashioned it, adapts itself to it. Viewing play from a very general standpoint in respect to man, it is first of all noticeable that it is bound up with the predominance of subconscious life, of which it is a vital manifestation from the earliest age. Precisely in that it frees up spontaneous activity, it corresponds to a deep instinct. When the child acquires his first notion of reality, when he understands that the “useful” world is made up of dangers, illogicalities and prohibitions, he finds refuge in play and in so doing compensates the tiring effort that his apprenticeship in reality imposes on his mind. And at any age, whether we let ourselves get caught up in it or whether we seek it out, play signifies a forgetting of the useful, a beneficial surrender to forces that real life reins in and injures. In group play, there is, beyond the individual unconscious, a strong collective unconscious that finds satisfaction. For children’s playful activity corresponds to their native representation of things, which is essentially magical. This magical understanding, which the real world disappoints at every turn and ever more inflexibly, is the same that play allows the child to experience: he may identify with anyone, create whatever he wants, shatter the reign of the possible and the impossible. From one age to the next, the charm of play is the same: suspension. The rigour of the fictive subverts reality. It is enough to become the figure required by the game and to embrace the prescribed risks for a satisfying and intelligible world to emerge from out of its own rules.

This antinomy of the mind and the “real” world must be posited in order for the authenticity of the life of play and its function to come to the fore. Play makes it possible to resolve or abolish the conflict in which the relationship of consciousness to the world is encapsulated. Consciousness is condemned to painfully grope about in a reality that it can neither experience immediately nor completely embrace, for while it often manages to modify it, it is never capable of understanding it. Such is its fate. In order to realise itself according to its deepest tendency, consciousness must unrealise itself according to the universe. This is where play comes in: it represents one of the most revealing modalities of this unrealising to which the subconscious aspires. This is why play means free expansion. It is not the only expression of this impulse – the imagination, dreams and art are others. But play and play alone allows consciousness to experience its unrealising in a world adapted to it and in which unrealising is law.

We thus find ourselves at the point where a need issuing from consciousness meets with a form proposed by play. The need to unrealise ourselves flourishes in this pre-given, complete structure. It will not find the same satisfaction anywhere else – not in the sacred, for instance; for all its separateness, the sacred is nonetheless aligned with real life, which it commands. The sacred alone gives reality and consistency to what is real, and the power of shaping and governing this to men. The distinction between the sacred and the profane thus in no way overlaps with that between play and reality, it is merely parallel. In preserving only the form of the sacred and projecting this outside of reality, play secures for itself at once the magic of the unreal and the consistency of the human, the joy of free expansion and the writ of safety. We may each of us then, in proportion with our own imaginations and passions, valorise it anew and even re-sacralise it according to a personal myth.