From Pong to 18 quintillion planets: The evolution of video game play spaces (opens in new tab)

Play is a kind of magic. I don’t mean the special-effects-laden spells of wizards, genies, Jedi, and the like, though that can be part of it. I mean a kind of cognitive magic, one that allows us to escape the real world, if only momentarily, and inhabit an imaginative place of our own creation. At least, that’s Dutch historian Johan Huizinga’s theory. In his book Homo Luden “Inside the circle of the game the laws and customs of ordinary life no longer count,” Huizinga writes. Unbound by the “...