The Principle of Division in Roger Caillois’s Man, Play and Games

Caillois’s classic text Man, Play and Games leaves open a basic question: Why focus on four specific kinds of play? Subsequent authors have offered their own rationalizations and expanded upon his game categories but have not explained Caillois’s approach. This essay performs a close reading of Man, Play and Games in order to evince his methodology. I argue that Caillois holds to the idea that play reproduces uncertainty in a safe and confined way but that a paradox troubles this vision and pushes him into a baroque formalism. Instead of a simple relation between model and copy, Caillois develops another, stranger concept of mimesis that continues and extends his Surrealist writing about insects and the unconscious. My reading builds on previous analyses of Caillois within game studies, sociology, and media theory to revise the methodological presuppositions built into the categorization of games.