Huizinga: "play" is a demarcated "sphere", in terms of boundaries in space/time, which one can enter and within which one experiences a "sacred seriousness", which affectively elevates the events therein. There is no distinction, for Huizinga, between "the sacred" and "play". He claims that play is the origin of culture, in the sense where religion etc was originally play, and also that play tends to recede from culture, sacred games becoming secularized, sacred seriousness becoming profane seriousness, and thus losing the heightened intensity of play.

Pfaller notes that this poses a problem: if play has the potential to recede from any specific space, becoming profane, then how can we define play in terms of the formal qualities of a space? His solution is to psychologize play: the play-sphere is not a property of the space, but a mode of being for a person within some space.

Huizinga counters the common sense claim that "play requires participants forget that they're only playing a game." Instead, Huizinga believed precisely the opposite: that participants can only play when they know they're playing a game. Pfaller calls this a "suspended illusion". So we have this paradoxical state: how can a player in the grips of a sacred seriousness, feeling things more intense than they would in everyday life, also simultaneously know that it's "just a game"?

Pfaller resolves this by overturning another piece of common sense: we tend to think of our affects as constrained by our knowledge. But this is not so. As anyone having a panic attack knows, the mere knowledge of the trigger's irrelevance does not prevent the panic attack itself. We may think "this is stupid" and yet feel intensely anyway. So, what's going on, and how does this justify the stronger claim, that play ultimately requires us to "know better"?

Pulling from Spinoza, Pfaller claims that we mustn't think of affect and knowledge as in a dependent relationship ("reason is the slave of the passions" or otherwise), but rather as separate modes of relating to the object, which can exist in paradoxical combinations. First a mundane fact: behind knowledge, there is often an affect, such as with moral ideas. For example: when we know some action is "bad", we feel bad for doing the thing. And yet we often do it anyway. Thus this same paradox arises in other areas of life, where our knowledge and affects seem to oppose each other. Spinoza called this "ambivalence". How does this work?

As an example, consider the case of an abusive relationship. Why do people stay in them? They know the relationship is bad, and yet they enjoy it anyway. Freud explained this via Spinoza, claiming that the intensity of a situation is additive, regardless of the affective direction (good / bad). So, an abusive relationship, or a BDSM scenario involving pain, is inherently more intense than a regular relationship, because the pain and pleasure "add together". But when it comes to affect, we tend to vascillate: now the relationship is all good, later it is all bad, both with a greater intensity than if it were only good or only bad. Hence the "cycle of abuse".

Pfaller sees this emotional situation as the core of "play". Our "knowing it's just a game" is a sort of contempt for the game: it's silly, it doesn't mean anything, etc. This negative affect creates ambivalence with the imminently positive aspects of playing, the enjoyment of movement, speech, winning, etc, which elevates the mental space of the game, the play-sphere, into an intensity above that of "profane" life, where we have no such sense of contempt. Hence it is precisely the fact that "it's only a game" which heightens the play, for better or for worse (as in the "rage-quit").

This theory has applications outside of mere "games", because the same dynamic holds in cults, religious practices, etc. Most people are not naive about what they're partaking in: the fact that they "know" the religion or cult is "not really real" actually serves to elevate the experiences therein, so long as they are not overwhelmed by the feeling and refuse to partake in the practices. Is not the zeal of the convert, the LARPer, greater than those for whom the religion is merely "regular life"? But we cannot forget that play still requires boundaries: the notion that "life is a game" merely serves to eliminate the possibility of play itself, because no space is distinguished from any other, nothing is "sacred", all that remains is the asceticism of the profane.

In terms of "theory of games", we might claim that the key feature of a game has nothing to do with the formal qualities of decision-making etc., but with the agent's knowledge: a game is a bounded space where participants know it's "just a game", and yet they choose to play anyway. This explains the absurdity of thought experiments like the trolley problem: the boundedness of the situation produced by the contextlessness of the thought experiment is illusory; we know it's just a game and thus we can obviously pick the "correct" answer. But for a real person in the real situation of the trolley problem, it is not a game, it is not a sacred, bounded situation, but a real decision within the profane world, in which the emotional impact of their choice cannot be deemed irrelevant, like it can within the bounded, illusory yet heightened sphere of play.

Finally, this theory explains why "gamification" works: it's not that we're somehow "tricked" into playing, now that the goal is defined in terms of "winning". Rather, our knowledge that we're "just playing a game" works emotionally to intensify our feelings about the goal: exercise, sex, labor, etc. takes on an element of sacred seriousness through gamification, which separates it from the profane and thus increases its intensity via ambivalence. The trouble is that, without the "high" of achieving the goal through the game, the goal becomes devalued in its profane context: the "thrill of the chase" in dating enhances the excitement, but also makes a smooth long-term relationship seem "boring" by comparison. Hence why we might choose to continue playing, rather than to stop and leave the casino. It goes without saying that this dynamic is intentional and works in the favor of those who stand to profit. It follows that "escaping the game" requires something different than "winning": the player must somehow change their relationship to the game itself, whether in terms of knowledge or in terms of affect. But this is a topic for another post.