homo ludens
See also: Homo ludens
English
editAlternative forms
editEtymology
editCoined by Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga in Homo Ludens (1938), which introduces the concept, from Latin homō lūdēns (“playful man”).
Noun
edithomo ludens
- 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[1], 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.
- 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[2], →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.