https://doi.org/10.67147/literariness.v1i4.025
Infinite Play and the Virtual Wonderland: From Homo Ludens to Counter-Effectuation
AMELIA MORIARTY
Sorbonne Université
Faculté des Lettres, UFR de Littérature française et comparée
Abstract: Contemporary discourse has largely abandoned the charge of video gaming as a degraded compulsion, yet valorisation extends no further than the game as an elevated cultural artifact. This essay recovers a third term: play itself, older than civilization and, in the play-theory tradition, generative of culture. Across three models, gameplay performs cultural, psychological, and ontological work essential to a meaningful life. The analytic model, drawn from Huizinga and Caillois and extended by Bataille on expenditure and Benjamin on innervation, frames the game as voluntary, anti-utilitarian, and bounded by the magic circle. Caillois’s ilinx, agon, alea, and mimicry extend socialization and self-actualization even as they risk pathological immersion, as in hikikomori. The psychoanalytic model, drawn from Freud and Winnicott, reframes the game as potential space, the avatar a transitional object, where respawning and reset let the player metabolize trauma and rehearse identities, extending the creative living from which art, religion, and literature derive. The ontological model, drawn from Deleuze by way of Carroll, posits the ideal game, in which rules emerge in the throwing of the dice, and each move affirms chance. Sandbox and emergent games gesture toward this pure play but remain bounded by finality. Artificial intelligence extends virtual play towards the ideal game, without arriving. AI produces an incorporeal surface effect but cannot counter-effectuate, generating chance divided and dominated, a counterfeit of the impersonal. Pure ontological play remains the province of thought and art. Yet the computer persists as the corporeal machine that might yet counter-effectuate the incorporeal game-event: the hardware that dreams.
Keywords: Play Theory, Video Games, Deleuze, Winnicott, Psychoanalysis, Artificial Intelligence, Game Studies
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