In the essay Homo Ludens, anthropologist Johan Huizinga analyzes the playful dimension as the generator of human culture.
Play is older than culture because animals did not have to wait for humans to teach them how to play, so it is a pre-human manifestation.
In the earliest forms of human civilization, culture arises in a playful form; culture is first played.
Culture begins not as play and not from play, but in play.
Even those activities that are directed toward the satisfaction of vital needs, such as hunting, in archaic society preferably take a playful form.
In the agonal instinct we are not faced with a will to dominate; essential is the aspiration to surpass others, to be first and to be honored.
With games, social life is clothed in supra-biological forms that give it greater value.
For Huizinga, culture, in its original stages, bears the character of a game.
The two spheres, of play and culture, have been connected since antiquity: for the Greeks, the term “Paideia”-from which pedagogy is derived-expresses childhood play. Games of knowledge are typical of all civilizations, from riddles to puzzles, from philosophical to theological disputes. From remote times the philosopher has presented himself as a typical competitor, challenging his competitors. Early philosophical essays are agonistic polemics. These analyses make it possible to design forms of education that link play to learning, to knowing.
In the digital realm, gaming takes the form of the video game, a media that has reached colossal numbers globally.
The habitual and continuous use of video games, however, is often seen as a problem for a gamer in childhood or adolescence and thus in the learning phase: communication coming from a teacher may in fact not always be comprehensible to a young person accustomed to frequently processing purely visual messages. (The following part could be better related and exposed as a reason that can lead kids to play for hours every day:) From an expressive point of view, the language of gameplay (“game experience,” playability) has distinctive features that make it unique among traditional narrative media: interactivity distinguishes video games from other forms of mass media entertainment such as music, film, and television; this very characteristic allows the video game to exert a potential for immersiveness, involvement, and attraction that other media do not. The use of video games in schools has long been tried and tested. One wonders sa video game can be is useful to exercise the approach to the study of certain disciplines or for example to internalize rules and values.
From an educational point of view, a significant genre is the simulative game, based on simulating the rules of the real world. Those who develop a game geared toward this genre know that the player also wants to invest hours of his or her time playing something unprecedented and very difficult. A driving game with the real representation of physics, or a war game where with one shot the game ends, are significant examples. The cognitive activity that a player performs within a video game has some aspects of the scientific and experimental method.
The use of Artificial Intelligence is rapidly emerging in video games, for example, to simulate conversational and adaptive abilities in virtual characters (Non-Playable Character) interacting with the player.
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