Postmodern play: Evaluating Huizinga's challenge

            In his classic work Homo Ludens, John Huizinga decried the transformation of play and leisure in industrial societies.  In his view, activities that once featured relatively free and open public discourse had become “managed” by large social and political organizations.  The result was a narrowing of personal and public expression and a diminution of social vitality.  The current paper reviews Huziinga’s account of the historical transformation of play and then extends it to the new patterns of organization and activity that have arisen in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.  A special focus of the paper is what the author terms “pleasure domes,” commercially-sponsored settings that construct “enjoyment” for their patrons.  The author analyzes these in terms of the degrees and kinds of freedom that they represent.