Enchanting the World
(This is the original English version of an essay published in the first edition of Dubala magazine, edited by Nis Tuğba Çelik. The essay appears under the title “Dünyayı Büyülemek,” and is translated by Nehir Evin.)
A game is a little piece of reality that’s set apart from everyday life. Games unfold in a time outside ordinary time, so that players have to call a “time out” if they want to pause play and step outside the world of the game for a while. And, at least in most games, play has a specially designated playing space—a playing field, a ball court, a game board.
In his landmark study of play, Homo Ludens (1938), Johan Huizinga remarks on the similarities between games and ritual. Both temporarily suspend the rules of everyday life and replace them with a set of procedures that call for heightened attention and committed participation. Both do this in specially designated timeframes and spaces. Noting the connection, Huizinga calls the playing space a “magic circle.”
And indeed, something magical happens within the magic circle. On a football pitch, all the players’ everyday plans and worries are temporarily set aside in favour of a single goal of overriding importance: get that ball into the opponents’ net. And while the game is in play, the players (apart from the goalkeeper) must avoid touching the ball with their hands. When play stops, it’s fine to pick up the ball and it makes no difference whether the ball is in the net or anywhere else. But the game has the seemingly magical power to transform the ball into an object of almost sacred fascination, to which special rules apply.
What is the world’s oldest game? Early board games found in Egypt and Mesopotamia date back five thousand years and dice are at least that old. Archaeologists have found gaming pieces in the ancient burial mound of Başur Höyük.
But archaeology can only tell us about games that leave a material trace. Hide-and-seek doesn’t use playing boards or playing pieces that archeologists can find. Instead, the game borrows its props from the real world. A closet, the underside of a bed, a nook beneath a staircase take on special significance in a game of hide-and-seek. To play hide-and-seek, you don’t need to go to a specially designated playing space like a football pitch. You turn home, and its ordinary furnishings, into its own magic circle.
We have reason to think that hide-and-seek is very ancient. Variations on the game are found in cultures around the world. And, if we follow Huizinga in tracing a connection between games and ritual, we find the magic circle of the game has parallels with ancient ways of relating to the divine. Modern religion is primarily architectural in its orientation toward worship. The mosque, the church, the shrine, and the temple are manmade structures. An older animistic form of worship identifies sacred places throughout the found world. A river, a tree, a spring, or a rock can be a site of contact between the human and spiritual realms.
Hide-and-seek inherits this animistic spirit. The magic in a game of hide-and-seek can happen anywhere. It transfigures familiar places, layering over their ordinary practical functions with the possibilities of concealment and discovery.
Hide-and-seek is the rare game that gives an advantage to children. Playing with nieces and nephews, I find I’m a more thorough seeker, but I’m a much clumsier hider. A five-year-old can fit into all sorts of places that a full-grown adult can’t. Playing hide-and-seek becomes a way that children can make the adult world their own. They can find uses for a laundry basket or a kitchen cupboard that adults can’t. These places hold possibilities and significance to which only children have access.
A game of hide-and-seek gives new meaning to the spaces in which it’s played. These spaces also become a stage in which children enact a drama. In fact, there are at least two different stories you can tell, depending on your role.
The first drama—the drama enacted by the child doing the seeking—is a story about a lonely child. All his friends have abandoned him and he finds himself alone. He goes looking for his friends and, one by one, he finds them. The story ends with the lonely child no longer lonely, satisfied and triumphant.
The other drama—the one enacted by the children doing the hiding—touches on primordial fears. Why, after all, is it ever necessary to hide? Humans have an instinctive understanding of hiding places because hiding from a predator or an enemy can be a matter of life and death.
In enacting dramas like these, games rise to the level of art. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz, writing about the Balinese cockfight, says that it “renders ordinary, everyday experience comprehensible by presenting it in terms of acts and objects which have had their practical consequences removed and been reduced (or, if you prefer, raised) to the level of sheer appearances, where their meaning can be more powerfully articulated and more easily perceived.” In short, games become vehicles for making sense of experience. Just as a horror film allows the audience to encounter and reflect on primal fears through the safe frame of fiction, a game of hide-and-seek confronts children with some of their deepest fears—of social exclusion and mortal danger—under the guise of fun.
What is possibly the first recorded instance of hiding and seeking wasn’t a game. Adam and Eve have just eaten from the tree of knowledge when they hear God walking through the Garden of Eden. They hide themselves and God goes looking for them, calling out, “Where are you?” When God finds them, they are “out”: expelled from the garden and forced, with all their descendants, to live in a world of shame and fear. In this story, the fear of social exclusion and the fear of being found converge.
The story of Adam and Eve has a tragic structure and eternal consequences. The story enacted in hide-and-seek has a comic structure in which the two dramas—of the abandoned child and the hunted child—converge in a happier way. In a game of hide-and-seek, there’s only one thing worse than being found, and that’s not being found (a particularly cruel way to tease a child is to abandon the game, leaving her still hidden and no longer sought). The buildup of tension—the teeth-gritted wish of “please don’t find me, please don’t find me”—is released in a giggle of delight when the child is in fact found, and the finding is free of mortal consequence. And in that giggle, the lonely child discovers that his friends wanted him to find them after all.
In the moments of seeking before the finding, tension escalates. The anxieties—Will I find anyone? Will I be found?—are real but transposed out of the contexts where they could have dire consequences. By placing these anxieties within the frame of play, that tension can be savoured rather feared.
Part of the charm of many children’s games—and something they have in common with drinking games and party games like Twister—is that you want to be successful but not too successful. If your hiding spot is too good, the game never reaches its promised conclusion and reconciliation. The game has to end, and the playing space has to return to its mundane uses. But, in temporarily turning home into a sacred space in which a primal drama unfolds, the game allows children to inhabit that home with a richer sense of its possibilities—and of their own.