From: Stephen Lauf
To: design-l@lists.psu.edu
Subject: Re: manifesto (replay)
Date: 1999.11.09
Allow me to REPLAY an excerpt comes from Johan Huizinga's Home Ludens: a study of the play element in culture.
"The player who trespasses against the rules or ignores them is a "spoil-sport". The spoil-sport is not the same as the false player, the cheat; for the latter pretends to be playing the game and, on the face of it, still acknowledges the magic circle. It is curious to note how much more lenient society is to the cheat than to the spoil-sport. This is because the spoil-sport shatters [pisses upon?] the play-world itself. By withdrawing from the game he reveals the relativity and fragility of the play-world in which he had temporarily shut himself with others. He robs play of its illusion -- a pregnant word which means literally "in-play" (from inlusio, illudere or inludere). THEREFORE HE MUST BE CAST OUT, FOR HE THREATENS THE EXISTENCE OF THE PLAY-COMMUNITY. . . . In the world of high seriousness, too, the cheat and the hypocrite have always had an easier time of it than the spoil-sport, here called apostates, heretics, innovators, prophets, conscientious objectors, etc. It sometimes happens, however, that the spoil-sports in their turn make a new community with rules of its own. The outlaw, the revolutionary, the cabbalist or member of a secret society, indeed heretics of all kinds are of a highly associative if not sociable disposition, and a certain element of play is prominent in all their doings."
ps
It is worth noting that anabolism, the creative half of metabolism is purely creative, while catabolism, the destructive half of metabolism is not purely destructive, for it also contains tiny bits of creative operation.
[Oh, how I love good designs.]
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