Ludic Itineraries: from Medieval Play to Digital Ludocapitalism

The form that explains and makes conceivable today, among other phenomena, subjectivity, economics, politics, love, war and work, is the game. In this regard, it has replaced previous mediations such as poetry, theater, photography, the novel and cinema. However, we lack a genealogy. Just as there are stories of particular games and other artistic forms, the history of the game-form or the history of play is usually reduced to the summary of Johan Huizinga's book, Homo Ludens, and its epigones. To this is added that under the name Game Studies a discipline that metonymizes game and videogame has developed, obliterating the historicist hermeneutical potential of the ludic register. Thus, in this text I intend two things: to argue in favor of the need to broaden the formalistic spectrum of Game Studies and to offer a distinction among the denotative dimensions of the play notion to understand its premodern, modern and postmodern conceptions. In addition, I propose Immanuel Kant's "free play" as a precursor to Huizinga's apodictic notion of play and the consideration of the pre-capitalist period in relation to the discussion around the emergence of a "Leisure culture" to understand the ludocapitalist overcoming of the leisure-work dichotomy.