Student life: seriously exploring the world in a playfull way
Studying is often challenging work to meet credits and a tight deadline. But once upon a time, student life was a life stage between play and seriousness in which the ‘playful’ reigned supreme. Will today’s students still have enough space to explore the world in a playful way, Univers editor Rob Dekkers wonders.

Is college life the happiest time of your life? Probably not if you are in the middle of it. Nevertheless, many graduates look back with pleasure on an enjoyable time when everything still seemed possible. In retrospect, the student days seem like a big playtime before the serious life of working and starting a family.
But playing can also be profoundly serious. And play is certainly not a useless pastime, according to the great Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga (1872-1945). We must take play seriously; he stated in his famous book Homo Ludens from 1938.
Temporary sanctuary
In Homo Ludens, Huizinga coined the Dutch term ‘ludiek’, meaning ‘ playfulness’ or ‘what belongs to play or games’, and he explored the element of play in cultures around the world and the meaning of play in our daily lives. Play is a ’temporary abolition of the existing order’, he wrote in the book that became the source of inspiration for entire generations of game researchers around the world.
‘Play separates itself from ordinary life in place and duration,’ Huizinga writes. In play, people explore their possibilities and push boundaries, without an apparent goal. Play is a temporary sanctuary. It takes place in a ‘magic circle’ in which special rules of their own apply.
Student-like
Student life was also such a sanctuary, especially for students with well-to-do parents. A maximum duration of study did not exist in The Netherlands until 1982, and occasionally stories surfaced about ’the eternal student’ who kept him of herself busy with all kinds of student-like activities, although these were exceptions to the rule. Most of the students eventually found a place in the seriousness of adult existence.
It is no coincidence that the terms student-like (studentikoos) and playful (ludiek) are two of a kind in Dutch language. Is student life also a playful phenomenon in the sense Huizinga puts it I asked Léon Hanssen, an expert on Huizinga’s work, who used to work as a cultural historian at Tilburg University: ‘Huizinga didn’t write much about student life, except as a transition from childhood to adulthood, the ‘initiation rite’, which occurs among many indigenous peoples.
Of course, you can also see typical student practices such as hazing as such a rite-de-passage,’ says Hanssen. In addition, student life is an important stage for the socialization of adolescents, which means that they acquire the values and norms of a society, Hanssen argues.
Hangover head
‘The challenge is to exhibit as many photos of your hangover head (and those of your friends) on your wall as possible without losing the deposit of your room when they have to be removed,’ writes columnist Rosa van der Vleuten in Univers. Recognizable? But why do you hang photos of ‘your hangover head’ on the wall?
‘The fun of play resists any analysis or logical interpretation,’ Huizinga writes. Play withdraws from the rules of logic, so sometimes also from the limits that are set for the sanctuary. This certainly also applies to the playful student pranks. These so-called jokes are of all times and the logic behind them is often hard to find.
Guzzle
Hanssen: ‘I am reminded of a prank that got out of hand in the club house of the Leiden rowing club Njord last year, where members of a rivaling Amsterdam rowing club caused destruction under the motto of a playful student action.’ ‘This isn’t a joke anymore,’ sighed the president of the affected rowing club because the damage was estimated at thousands of euros.
In Huizinga’s time, the authorities sometimes turned a blind eye when it came to ‘student pranks’. Johan Huizinga compares the fraternity’s guzzle and other practices that challenge the order with stained jackets with the game of some non-Western cultures to squander gifts and waste harvests, for no apparent reason or purpose.

Between play and seriousness
‘As soon as young adults are about twenty-five years old, a stronger moral awareness arises, Hanssen continues. ‘During my student days, I was very good at sleeping during part of the day and rise late,’ he draws on his own memory, ‘but once I graduated, I could not do it anymore. Apparently, the sense of responsibility took control and seriousness overcame the game.
Huizinga was highly interested in the boundaries of play; where does play end and seriousness begin? As a student, you can make mistakes without too many consequences, and you can learn from your mistakes. Think of the student associations, fraternity houses and the fraternity: Put on a suit and tie, and you act like you are chair of the board.
Out of control
‘Every game can absorb a player entirely,’ Huizinga writes, so that the game is played with the ‘greatest seriousness’. Huizinga sees, for example, that the boundaries between seriousness and play can become blurred: ‘The gaming community has a general tendency to become permanent, even when the game is over.’
And that sometimes leads to excesses. The fact that hazing gets out of hand is inextricably linked to student culture, Léon Hanssen argued in Univers a few years ago, without justifying the violent behavior. He wrote about hazing as a ‘game scenario with its own rules’.
More serious than ever
Huizinga took play very seriously. Yet in his time, playing was dismissed as ‘child’s play’. But times have changed. Nowadays, play is serious business, even for those who have outgrown childhood, with transfers of millions in the football world, new forms of play such as re-enactment and cosplay for adults and a game industry with an estimated global turnover of billions per year.
Play is taken more seriously than ever in our time. You could argue that play finally has earned a place it deserves in society. In many training situations, too, increased attention is being paid to so-called serious games, such as gaming with the aim of training certain skills.
Straitjacket
While the game is slowly penetrating almost all facets of society, at the same time play is increasingly subject to rules, and play is thus affected in its essence; in the English language there are separate words for this: play becomes game, playful and casual play becomes a serious competition with strict rules.
This is not without consequences. For example, the introduction of the long-term student fine last year threatened to affect the foundations of student life as a sanctuary. The government wanted students to complete their studies faster and make it a race against time. But with that, the straitjacket of student life is being tightened ever more.
Protect
Léon Hanssen: ‘It is important to embrace and protect play in student life. By incorporating the ‘playful’ aspect into education, students make the subject-matter their own in a playful way. Because in a strict top-down approach studying becomes slavish consumption of the lessons offered.’
So, it is good to take play seriously, but not by turning it into a competition or race. Huizinga wrote: ‘Play has meaning in itself.’ If students retain the freedom to experiment themselves, to create their own free space and to push boundaries, without direct use, necessity, or credits, then student life will come to its full potential.