Beyond Huizinga and Caillois: French play studies before game studies

Traditionally, the works of Johan Huizinga and Roger Caillois are recognized as the foundational texts of English-language game studies. This article, however, aims to demonstrate that French-speaking scholars Jean Château and Jacques Henriot, though overshadowed by the aforementioned authors, made equally significant contributions to the discipline’s development. Through an examination of their works, the author identifies key commonalities and distinctions between pre-1997 French play studies and English-language game studies, with the latter experiencing rapid growth since the 1990s. These differences encompass contrasting approaches to the ontology of play/games (predominant in English-language game studies) versus the social dimensions and applications of play (the central focus of French-language studies by Henriot and Château). The author advocates for the inclusion of Château and Henriot in the historiography of theoretical reflections on games, thus broadening our understanding of the field’s intellectual foundations.