Normally, I would call this role the “Game Theorist,” since in the 21st century, play and games are two sides of the same coin. We can play in many forms, but we often choose games—whether field games, board games, or my favorite: video games.

Game theorists, in the classical sense, dwell in the realm of mathematics and economics. Game theory offers a powerful lens for structuring decisions—payoffs, strategies, win/lose conditions. It’s an essential toolkit for game designers. But there’s something deeper and more primal than games: Play.

We’ve already touched on Play through Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens and Roger Caillois’ Man, Play and Games, both of which explore the philosophical, sociological, and anthropological nature of play—along with key typologies like Agôn and Paida.

I grew curious: Is there a theory dedicated purely to Play itself? That’s when I stumbled into the concept of the Play Theorist—one who investigates the nature of play, both inside and outside of games.

Play Theory is the interdisciplinary study of play as a phenomenon: what it is, what it does, why it exists, and how it shapes (or reflects) human life.

It provides a mental model for examining play—what counts as play, why animals and humans engage in it, how play contributes to learning, culture, and creativity, and how it coexists or diverges from work, art, ritual, and storytelling. It even helps us explore the emotional, ideological, and symbolic value of play.

Play Theory spans a wide range of disciplines:

• Psychology – How play interacts with cognition, emotion, and development
• Anthropology – From Roman festivals to MMOs, how play shapes tradition and identity
• Sociology – How play influences social dynamics and group behavior
• Philosophy – What play reveals about freedom, aesthetics, and being
• Education – Why play scaffolds learning, motivation, and growth
• Game Design / Ludology – Where systems, rules, and player feedback form experiences within “magic circles”

So far, I’ve explored thinkers like Sutton-Smith, Huizinga, and Caillois, but there’s a much wider circle of Play Theorists—each offering tools and models that help us understand, design, and elevate our games.

Matrix of Notable Play Theorists

When designing games, we often start with a goal: a rich narrative, elegant mechanics, or systems that teach or transform. Play Theory helps us choose the right lens.

Play Theory is not just about making fun systems—it’s about designing experiences that teach, transform, reflect, and resonate. The best game designers are, in many ways, play theorists. They understand not only games, but the essence of play itself—its ties to humanity, culture, emotion, and meaning.

Now, lets make it real. Here are some examples of games that embody play theory in their core—games that aren’t just fun, but are designed with purpose, reflecting specific human drives or cultural ideas.

• Journey – This game operates inside a sacred space. It uses Huizinga’s magic circle and Turner’s theory of liminality to create an experience of ritual and transformation. There’s no dialogue, no fail state—just a movement toward the sublime. The experience is spiritual, poetic. Players undergo a pilgrimage, not just a platforming challenge.
• Papers, Please – Built through procedural rhetoric (Bogost), this game uses systems to convey messages about bureaucracy, power, and survival. The gameplay is intentionally repetitive and cold, immersing you in the emotional contradiction of a job that demands both obedience and moral compromise. This is critical play (Flanagan) at work—play that makes you reflect on real-life systems.
• Celeste – Through its punishing yet fair platforming mechanics, this game channels Flow (Csikszentmihalyi) and Winnicott’s transitional space. It becomes a metaphor for mental health: every leap and retry becomes a moment of growth. The friction is not just challenge—it’s emotional resonance.
• Minecraft – The game is nearly pure Paidia (Caillois)—a sandbox of freedom and creativity. It supports mimicry through roleplay, agon through PVP, and ludus through Redstone logic. It is a stage where countless forms of play emerge, evolve, and hybridize. Players are not just participants—they are co-creators.
• Animal Crossing – This is a game of ritual and identity. Each player’s island becomes a mirror of selfhood. Daily play patterns form cozy loops, blending mimicry and flow. It’s not about goals—it’s about lifestyle and expression. A perfect example of Winnicott’s safe space for imaginative play.

Musical Chairs – The Hidden Depth in Simple Play

It might feel ridiculous—almost satirical—to examine a playground game like Musical Chairs with the weight of Huizinga and Sutton-Smith behind us. But that’s precisely the beauty of Play Theory: it reveals that even the most casual, chaotic, and fleeting games contain hidden architecture. Musical Chairs, at first glance, is silly: players circle a shrinking number of chairs while music plays, and when the music stops, someone is left standing. But beneath this simplicity is a tightly composed drama of survival. At its core, the game is pure Agôn—a contest of physical reflexes, alertness, and spatial positioning, governed by equal opportunity and a clear win condition. Yet randomness lurks in the turn of fate—the music stops at unknown times, and chance heavily influences who gets a seat. That’s Alea, injecting unpredictability into the otherwise competitive system. Then there’s Ilinx—the dizziness, the chaotic circling, the thrill of suddenly lunging for a chair. Even Mimicry has a faint presence: players temporarily perform as cheerful dancers in a musical ritual, masking the cutthroat elimination beneath playful movement. Structurally, it leans toward Ludus—rules are clear, stakes are defined—but the emotional volatility and improvisation often veer into Paidia. From a Huizingan perspective, the game constructs a "magic circle" defined by ritual—enter the circle, follow the rules, and when you’re out, you’re out. From Turner’s lens, this elimination sequence becomes a kind of social liminality—players move from inclusion to exclusion, from identity to observer. Winnicott might ask what children are exploring through the joy and cruelty of being cast out of the system. Vygotsky and Piaget might frame it as developmental rehearsal: testing awareness, rules, reaction, and spatial dominance. Sutton-Smith would note that this game embodies the rhetoric of power—one winner, many losers. Even Flanagan might see an opportunity here: what if we redesigned Musical Chairs to not humiliate the last player, but reflect on inclusion and empathy? As absurd as it sounds, the game could be restructured: what if each round a new chair was added, rather than removed? What if the goal was cooperation—sharing seats, finding balance, rather than scrambling to exclude? And then there’s Jesper Juul’s Half-Real perspective: where the game exists between real rules and fictional worlds. In Musical Chairs, the rules are unambiguous—walk when the music plays, scramble when it stops—but the fiction is social, performative. Joy, tension, and the thrill of sudden competition under the setting of a random party happening in a backyard of a house that has been transformed into a game space. Suddenly, this trivial game becomes a stage for culture, philosophy, and pedagogy. That’s what it means to be a Play Theorist: to find meaning in the ordinary, to see design in chaos, and to reveal that even the silliest game of chairs is, in fact, a model of our deeper human dramas. Every game, no matter how small, is a simulation of something greater. Play is never just play.

So how might a Play Theorist improve Musical Chairs? First, we reframe the game’s core goal: instead of eliminating players, the aim becomes evolving the experience with each round. From a Winnicottian lens, we could preserve the thrill of musical pacing while allowing for creative re-entry—perhaps eliminated players now form a “music council,” deciding how and when the music stops, reinforcing their role in shaping the play space. Or from a Turner-inspired ritual lens, we could introduce rotating roles—one round a player dances, another round they narrate, another they act as judge or rhythm-keeper—allowing each child to step through phases of agency, creativity, and reflection. A Flanagan lens might redesign the chairs themselves—what if each chair came with a unique symbol or phrase, prompting players to act out a scene before sitting, turning competition into performance and identity play? We might even invert the structure: Agôn remains, but the “winner” is the player who invents the most inventive way to share a chair with someone else. Now you’ve turned a game of exclusion into a game of co-creative mimicry and empathy. This system allow us to transform what the game teaches, how it feels, and what kind of world it invites players to imagine. Because when we play like designers—and design like theorists—we open up new ways of being human through play.

The goal is reveal what your game is should be doing at a deeper level. To name the feelings, behaviors, and transformations you’re trying to cultivate—and then structure your mechanics, pacing, and systems around then. By doing so, you can create games that resonate on multiple levels, engaging players not just cognitively, but emotionally and culturally, emerging a game that is more than just a pastime, but an experience that can enlighten, transform, and resonate with the players on a deeper level - a game that is truly playful in the fullest sense of the word.

So, game design is more than thinking about interactions, its thinking about is composition. When you design a game, you are orchestrating drives. Just as a composer layers melodies, harmonies, and rhythms to move an audience, a game designer layers mechanics, systems, and feedback loops to activate the deepest parts of what it means to be human.

Designing experiences that enables desire, struggle, flow, identity, transformation within us. You are shaping experiences across cognitive, emotional, and cultural dimensions. Whether you’re crafting a platformer or a social sim, you are tuning the very nature of human impulses.

To know play is to know people. And to design from that understanding is to make something truly timeless.

Exercises

1. [🟢 Easy] Identify the Dominant Drive
Pick a game you’ve played recently. Which of Caillois’ four play types best describes its core experience: Agôn (competition), Alea (chance), Mimicry (roleplay), or Ilinx (disruption)? How is that drive expressed through its mechanics, UI, or player behavior?

2. [🟢 Easy] Spot the Paidia or Ludus
Think of a favorite game and place it on Caillois’ spectrum: is it more Paidia (freeform, improvisational) or Ludus (structured, rule-bound)? How does that affect the way you engage with the game?

3. [🔵 Medium] Analyze a Hybrid Game
Choose a game that blends multiple play types (e.g. Fortnite, Poker, D&D). Break down how different mechanics serve different drives (Agôn, Alea, Mimicry, Ilinx). How do these layers interact? Do they enhance or compete with each other?

4. [🔵 Medium] Design from a Play Type
Pick one of Caillois’ four types and design a small game concept that centers that drive.
– Alea: A dice-based oracle game about destiny
– Ilinx: A kinetic arcade game about momentum and loss of control
How do you support that play style through visuals, controls, pacing, or risk?

5. [🔴 Hard] Shift the Structure
Take a linear Ludus-style game and imagine redesigning it as a Paidia sandbox—or vice versa. What systems need to change? What does that shift do to the player’s experience of freedom, mastery, or transformation?

6. [🔴 Hard] Craft a Cultural Ritual
Design a multiplayer or social game that functions like a modern ritual using Caillois’ forms. What symbolic roles do players enact? What emotions are evoked? Is it competitive, immersive, or ecstatic? What cultural meaning might players take away from the experience?

7. [🔴 Hard] Define Your Ludic Composition
Think about your current or future game project. Write a short “ludic composition”—which of Caillois’ types are you including, how are they balanced, and what kind of psychological or cultural experiences do they generate together? Just as a composer uses instruments, you are scoring human drives.

8. [🔵 Medium] Diagnose the Magic Circle
Choose a game or social experience you’ve participated in. Where does the “magic circle” begin and end? What boundaries (rules, time limits, social norms, roles) signal to the player: “You are now in a different space”? What happens when those boundaries are blurred or broken?

9. [🔵 Medium] Reframe a Mechanic with Theory
Pick a mechanic from a game you’re designing (or one you love). Try to explain its function through at least three play theories. What’s its psychological role (Flow)? Its cultural meaning (Rhetoric)? Its player drive (Agôn, Alea, etc)? What does this reframing reveal?

10. [🔴 Hard] Design with a Theorist's Intent
Choose a specific play theorist—like Huizinga, Sutton-Smith, or Winnicott—and create a game concept that brings their core ideas to life. How would a Huizinga game feel sacred? How would a Winnicott game express identity and emotional safety? Let the theory guide tone, systems, and player emotion.

11. [🔴 Hard] Reverse Engineer a Moment of Meaning
Think back to a game that left a lasting impact on you—not just as entertainment, but as something profound. Use play theory to reverse engineer that moment. What kind of play was happening? What symbolic, emotional, or cultural structures were in play? Could you recreate that structure in your own design?

12. [🔴 Hard] Articulate Your Theory of Play
Write a short paragraph that answers: What is play to you? Is it sacred? Is it escape? Is it learning? Is it survival, freedom, identity, rebellion? Try to root your answer in one or more theories. This is your manifesto—a design philosophy that can shape your future work.