Homo Ludens by Johan Huizinga

First and foremost, then, all play is a voluntary activity. Play to order is no longer play: it could at best be but forcible imitation (trad. imitazione forzata) of it. By this quality of freedom alone, play marks itself off from the course of the natural process. It is something added there-to and spread out over it like a flowering, an ornament, a garment. p.7 Play is superfluous .The need for it is only urgent to the extent that the enjoyment of it makes it a need. Play can de deferred or suspended at any time. It is never imposed by physical necessity or moral duty. It is never a task []. Only when play is a recognized cultural function a ceremony, a rite it is bound up with notions of obligation and duty. p.8 Here, then, we have the first characteristic of play: that is free, is in fact freedom. A second characteristic is closely connected with this, namely, that play is not ordinary or real life. It is rather a stepping out of real life into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all of its own p.8 As regards its formal characteristics, all students lay stress on the disinterestedness o play. Not being ordinary life it stands outside the immediate satisfaction of wants and appetites, indeed it interrupts the appetite process p.9 Play is distinct from ordinary life both as to locality and duration. This is the third characteristic of play: its secludedness, its limitedness. It is played out within certain limits of time and place. It contains its own course and meaning. p.9

Report on the Construction of Situations by Guy Debord

The situationist game is distinguished from the classic conception of the game by its radical negation of the element of competition and of separation from everyday life. The situationist game is not distinct from a moral choice, the taking of ones stand in favour of what will ensure the future reign of freedom and play. This perspective is obviously linked to the inevitable continual and rapid increase of leisure time resulting from the level of productive forces our era has attained. p.702

WHY the game? The game as RECUPERATION of human capacity of developing TOOLS. The game as a TOOL able to oppose resistance to the ALIENATION of EVERYDAY LIFE. AGAINST REPRESENTATION: playing as a mean of PARTICIPATION that brings back together IDEA and ACTION, MANUAL and INTELLECTUAL LABOUR, THEORY and PRACTICE. The game as a tool of EMBODIMENT of Critique. Debords Kriegspiel. The game as strategy ART becomes a game to explain society: between structure and sovra-structure. SURPASSING THE OBJECT THE IDEA AND THE ACTION Has ART/THEORY finished to reproduce the same mechanism of THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE? From the object of art to the subject of art. What about the artist? The game as a way to come back to the ROOT of the term critique as for MARX. From representing critique, to understanding (or having) critique, to being critical. From revolution as tool, to the revolution of the tools. the ART OF THE GAME or the GAME AS ART?

BIBLIOGRAPHY
KARL MARX Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 GUY DEBORD Panegyric STEWART HOME What is situationism? : a reader Mc KENZIE WARK Gamer theory KEN KNABB Situationist International Anthology IRIT ROGOFF From Criticism to Critique to Criticality

 THEODOR ADORNO Aesthetic Theory + The culture industry GILLES DELEUZE The Logic of Sense ANDREW HUSSEY The Game of War: The Life and Death of Guy Debord MICHEL FOUCAULT Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collge de France GIORGIO AGAMBEN Difference and Repetition: on Guy Debords Films