Error is usually seen as a failure. It looks like a deviation that must be corrected. The Latin root, errare, gives us another meaning: to wander, to stray. The paper proposed here argues that this wandering isn’t a flaw in the system but rather, it’s the very foundation of playfulness and creativity. As play theorists like Johan Huizinga noted, play is defined by tension and uncertainty. If the outcome is known, the 'play-character' vanishes. The tension between rule and freedom is what Roger Caillois described as the struggle between ‘Paidia’ (what we may call play) spontaneous, unruly fantasy, and Ludus (game), the 'tedious conventions' of rules. Pure rules without the possibility of error collapse into mechanical execution. Conversely, pure freedom without structure collapses into chaos. Playfulness exists precisely in the 'swerve', the moment a player navigates a rule-bound system but retains the freedom to stray from the known way. One can easily see the relevance of human agency through creative errancy in the era of AI. Before we can be homo ludens, the playing man, we must be homo errans: the erring/wandering man. We must distinguish between a 'mistake' (a failure within rules) and 'error' (the productive wandering that opens new possibilities). Error is the crack in the logic that lets the light of uncertainty in. It is only when we are free to stray that we are truly free to play.

Authors:
Yaniv Hagbi, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands

About the Presenter(s)
Dr. Yaniv Hagbi teaches at the University of Amsterdam at the Department for Language-, Culture- and Region-studies. He is a researcher at the Amsterdam School for Regional and Transnational and European Studies (ARTES).

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