Abstract

The Ludicrous Culture: Homo Ludens 2.1 develops a sustained philosophical argument about the transformation of play from a marginal cultural practice into an infrastructural condition of contemporary life. The book introduces panludism as a descriptive concept: not the claim that everything is playful in a trivial sense, but that modern societies increasingly organise meaning, participation, and control through game-like systems. The opening chapters establish the theoretical foundation by revisiting the figure of Homo Ludens and tracing its mutation across technological and cultural phases. What began as play embedded within ritual, law, and art (Homo Ludens 1.0) evolves into continuous, quantified, and monetised play under digital capitalism (Homo Ludens 2.0), and finally into Homo Ludens 2.1, where predictive systems, immersive environments, and algorithmic persuasion dissolve the boundary between games and ordinary life. The classical “magic circle” no longer encloses play as a voluntary, temporary space; it becomes the default architecture of social existence. Across its chapters, the book advances and tests four core hypotheses. First, that modern technology functions less as a survival system than as a toy system, redesigning even health, productivity, and education as engagement machines. Second, that gamification expands participation but hollows out ethical seriousness, replacing responsibility with metrics and truth with performative visibility. Third, that strategic play—game theory, simulation, optimisation—has become the dominant grammar of warfare, propaganda, and corporate power, flattening moral life into calculable outcomes. Fourth, that play contains a paradox: it only functions as play when it is not instrumentalised. Once winning becomes mandatory, play collapses into labour or coercion. Subsequent chapters explore how these dynamics manifest in culture, politics, sport, madness, neoliberal governance, and interactive media. The book shows how contemporary institutions invite people to play while quietly removing the possibility of refusal, how exhaustion becomes a structural feature of perpetual engagement, and how seriousness without irony turns play into a tool of domination. At the same time, it resists moral panic. Play is not the enemy. The loss of playfulness is. The concluding sections argue that panludism cannot be overcome through optimisation, regulation, or new ideologies. Any attempt to “fix” play by managing it more efficiently reproduces the problem. What remains possible is an ethical stance rather than a program: the recovery of distance, lightness, and the ability to exit. In a world saturated with games, freedom no longer consists in winning, but in refusing compulsory games and remembering that rules are human, provisional, and revocable. The book ends with a stark but hopeful claim: civilisation may be serious by necessity, but culture remains ludicrous by nature—and survival depends on not confusing the two.