Five millennia of player practices

What can we learn about play by examining it from a historical perspective? Using Foucault’s archaeological methods to examine the history of player practices in terms of their artefacts, a series of cross-sections through five millennia of play are developed around the key props (in Walton’s representational sense of this term) that have been deployed in games. The specific patterns considered are the contract, the die, the board, the pawn, the set, and the coin. In each case except the first, a material object serves a prescribed role in play, requiring players to imagine specific things that make certain kinds of games possible. The changes in the representational aspects of these props demonstrate both the continuity of player practices over time, and the significant changes that have emerged over the last few centuries.