What if, more than knowledge or work, it was play that best defined our species? In the very original Homo ludens, Alexandre Cadain shows how humans, from childhood to adulthood, never stop playing games whose goal and rules they invent. The author, a multi-entrepreneur, himself has an atypical profile. A graduate of both ENS and HEC, he has invested in AI, biometism and gaming (the World Game studio). At L’Express, he explains what games, Monopoly has Minecraft, say about our society, and why it would be good to evolve towards more cooperative and sustainable games. Interview.
L’Express: According to you, we are Homo ludens. Why is gaming so important in our lives?
Alexandre Cadain: Play is the nature of man. We are Homo ludens before being Homo sapiens, as explained by the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, who coined this concept in 1938. Before speaking, before walking, the child enters the world through play. But my conviction is that we don’t only play when we’re young. On the contrary, we play even more in adulthood, because social life is organized like a game. The goals and rules that govern most of our lives today are, in reality, imaginary. We choose to work in a certain company or we comply, for example, with the capitalist model more based on beliefs than deep reasons.
Monopoly was the first continuous circuit board game. What does it tell us about capitalism?
It is the best-selling board game in the world, with 250 million copies sold and over a billion players since it was released under that name in 1935. A Parker ad in the 1980s even promised that it was a way to learn how to “make money from 8 years old”! Monopoly is a preparation for the great capitalist game of adults, with a search for maximum profit from private ownership of the means of production. But the irony of history is that Monopoly was thought up well before 1935 by a feminist, Elizabeth Magie, who in 1902 designed the “Landowner’s Game”. Except that for her it was about highlighting the injustices of land-based capitalism of the time. Elizabeth Magie had caricatured the fact that it was enough to buy land as quickly as possible to ruin the tenants. This Landlord’s Gameat the origin of Monopoly, was therefore a social criticism. Above all, Elizabeth Magie had, from the same board, imagined a variation, another way of playing that she called the “Game of Prosperity”, in which the goal is not individual wealth, but collective prosperity. . It’s a demonstration that from the same board, we can change the rules and objectives…
Today the most popular video game is Minecraft…
It is the digital extension of Monopoly, with even more hubris, since Minecraft is based on the idea that we can exploit resources infinitely, where Monopoly offered a closed real estate circuit to collect. Minecraft has two game modes: survival mode with limited resources, and creative mode with unlimited resources, in which the player, a true demiurge, can create what he wants instantly, fly and escape all responsibility, never being able to suffer no damage on his world. It’s a good metaphor for limitless exploitation of our planet…
“During the Covid period, we saw reality catch up with the Pandemic game”
The metaverse, even if it has been disappointing so far, invites us, according to you, to leave our real world to better reproduce it…
It’s a paradox: at a time when the planet is burning, we are creating fantasized variations of virtual worlds in which we can evolve. A logic well described by the film Ready Player One. We hide from collapse to immerse ourselves in a sweet dream. Like any technology, there can of course be positive applications to “virtual reality”. But I fear that most uses tend to distance us from “real reality”, namely the finiteness of the planet, without forgetting that these digital technologies are not disconnected from the physical world, on the contrary they are based on a new exploitation of its resources. In the same way, the Martian conquest, promoted by Elon Musk, is also based on this idea of creating new playing fields outside our already consumed world.
Why do you praise the merits of video games? Everythingcreated in 2017?
It’s a game that shocked me, because it offers a real alternative. Everything does not aim to accumulate resources to move to the next level. On the contrary, it values interactions. Being before having. In Everything, you are on Earth and you will have to embody different living species, animal, plant and mineral. You can be a bear, a drop of water or even the planet. You will set off in search of the diversity of the world to create an encyclopedia of life. It is not the accumulation of land capital, but that of knowledge and knowledge, which invites us to multiply encounters. It is a fascinating exploration game which in turn sheds light on our first, living reality.
When it comes to board games, the fashion today is for cooperative games, like Pandemic…
The goal of a finished game was to win alone, by elimination. This is the promise of the Monopoly manual in 1935: “the last player in the game wins”. Conversely, with cooperative games, there is no more head-on competition, the goal is to win with each other, or lose together. In a game like Pandemic, players unite around the table against a common enemy, the virus. There is also the wonderful book Cooperative games for peace by Mildred Masheder, which teaches children to work together towards a common goal and to form team intelligence. Together, they must tell a story or collectively imitate a single animal. It is a wonderful educational tool to help people understand harmony within living things.
During the Covid period, we also saw reality catch up. As in Pandemic, it is the strength of cooperation between laboratories and States around the world which made it possible to quickly find the first avenues for vaccines. Faced with the great challenges of our time, epidemics or global warming, our only choice, recalled by the UN Secretary General, is to “cooperate or perish”.
You are the co-founder of World game, a studio which aims to create “impactful video games”. That’s to say ?
The very simple idea is that games are social and interactive spaces that convey imagination and stories. Our goal is to create games that no longer shy away from reality but seek to have a positive impact on it. This can be done in different ways. There are awareness games, like our game Legacy on planetary boundaries, which reverses the principle of Mario. It’s a game in which you first play as a prehistoric man who runs through a forest where he eats apples to survive. But unlike a classic platform game, you do not then access another world, but you return to the same Earth twenty years later, now playing as the daughter of the prehistoric man, to whom only the apples remain that his father left. The goal is to achieve as many generations as possible by saving and pooling natural resources.
More recently, with the National Center for Space Studies (Cnes), we launched Orbital Dance, a game about the little-known challenge of space pollution. In the game, we play a satellite that dances among the ever-increasing debris. We also design games that mobilize the collective intelligence of players and their direct and indirect actions in the real world. In any case, I am convinced that gaming, as the deepest source of our humanity and as the first cultural industry of our century, is an essential tool for changing consciousness and collective actions.
Homo Ludens, by Alexandre Cadain. The Observatory, 214 p., €20.
.