"It is meritorious and fruitful to have grasped the affinity which exists between play and the secret or mysterious, but this relationship cannot be part of the definition of play, which is nearly always spectacular or ostentatious. Without doubt, secrecy, mystery, and even travesty can be transformed into play activity, but it must be immediately pointed out that this transformation is necessarily to the detriment of the secret and mysterious, which play exposes, publishes, and somehow expends. In a word, play tends to remove the very nature of the mysterious. On the other hand, when the secret, the mask, or the costume fulfills a sacramental function one can be sure that not play, but an institution is involved. All that is mysterious or make-believe by nature approaches play: moreover, it must be that the function of fiction or diversion is to remove the mystery" (4)
Caillois insists that the simulation/vertigo pairing doesn't encourage play but expresses an institutional function. It is the institution in oral societies, the founding and unifying ceremony that the culture works toward, unified in its move toward symbolic exchange.
But we're playing to reinstate the mystery, to reinscribe the sacred by way of the accident.
The difference is that we're attempting to pose alternative modes of thinking to a failing system based on utility.
The secret's indeed at play, and we're indeed expressing something of an institution.
But the institution's changed. Through our tools, we can play at reinstating mystery, not at dissipating it.
We'll pick up what play expends and refashion play through its own waste.
