Lacan Plays Catan: Unconscious Desire in Tabletop Gaming

Board Game Academics, March 2026
Published in Vol 3. Issue I.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.70380/w2c7m5t9xq1v8

Paul Hoard, PhD, LMHC
The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology

INTRODUCTION

The affective power of games has long intrigued scholars and players alike. What begins as a simple act—opening a box, laying out components, and agreeing to a set of rules—can quickly give rise to an intense array of emotional experiences. Within moments, players may find themselves strategizing, arguing, feeling betrayed, euphoric, or ashamed. Despite the often-trivial stakes of the game world, these affective responses are genuine. The familiar refrain, “it’s just a game,” offers little defense against the depth of emotional investment that games regularly elicit.

This phenomenon invites closer examination. What is it about games that so readily mobilizes our affective and relational worlds? Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, this article explores the hypothesis that tabletop games operate as potent symbolic structures in which unconscious desire is both solicited and expressed. Far from being mere diversions, games offer a unique environment in which psychic dynamics are enacted, misrecognized, and occasionally rendered legible. Through their structured rules, explicit goals, and interpersonal constraints, games capture the subject in a symbolic network that parallels the operations of language and the unconscious.

Lacan’s conception of desire as not simply the pursuit of objects, but as the structural effect of the subject’s insertion into the symbolic order, provides a useful framework for understanding the stakes of play (Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts 31). Games offer players clearly articulated goals and recognizable symbolic positions, but desire does not remain confined to the stated objectives. It slips out in the gestures, hesitations, and strategic choices players make—often in ways that conflict with conscious aims. As a form of structured play, the game becomes a space in which unconscious desires surface not through speech, but through action, repetition, and affect.

Winnicott’s account of play helps clarify this dynamic by framing play as a psychic state of liminality, one in which contradiction can be held and unconscious processes explored (Winnicott 51). Within this space, games can function not only as mirrors of psychic structure but as opportunities for interpretive reflection. When approached psychoanalytically, gameplay emerges as a site of spontaneous dramatization in which the subject confronts, misrecognizes, and negotiates their desire.

The Lacanian Unconscious and Structure of Desire

To begin, Jacques Lacan, a prominent French psychoanalyst, added a great deal to our understanding of the nature of desire and its complexity. His work largely centered around a reinterpretation of Freudian theory through the lens of modern linguistics (Bailly 1). Lacanian theory explores the impact of language on the formation of the subject and argues that desire is central to consciousness and human subjectivity (Fink xi). We think, speak, play, and relate because we desire; we desire because we lack; and we lack because we are subjects of language (Boothby 9). 

While a full exploration of Lacanian theory and the nature of subjectivity is beyond the purview of this article, I want to note a few aspects to unpack how it can help us reflect on game experiences. Desire, according to Lacan, is anything but straightforward. He cryptically said “desire is the desire of the Other,” a phrase that is usually interpreted in two ways (Lacan, Écrits 690). First, Lacan is arguing in a Girardian sort of way that we learn what to desire not from something internal to ourselves, but from the outside, from the Other. This Other (with a capital O) is a particular entity in Lacanian thought that is most easily understood as the social authority (McGowan, Enjoying)—the nebulous they of science and politics (they say you should…).  In this way, Lacan is noting how mimetic human desire is. We learn what to desire from the others around us and the broader social and cultural milieu in which we are found. It is external to us (McGowan, Cambridge).

However, Lacan is also pointing to the way desire shapes the formation of identity. He highlights that not only do we learn what to desire from the Other, but that we also desire to be desired by the Other. We want to be wanted. Significantly, this points to the idea that desire is not just about acquiring, but is also about recognition—to occupy a privileged place in the field of meaning. In other words, our identity and sense of self form out of how we seem to the significant others around us and not just our internal selves. Developmentally, this can be traced back to what Lacan calls the mirror stage, when the gaze of the caregiver (taking on the role of the Other) provides coherence, identity, and recognition. This sense of self is formed through a decentered view from the outside of the infant through the (m)Other’s eyes (McGowan, Cambridge 36).  We form our sense of self through the gaze and desire of someone else. The impact of this can be felt throughout one’s life in the intersubjective field—structuring everything from relationships, to roles, and to how we enter and engage in play. We are always caught in the Other’s gaze, responding to how we are seen (Bailly, Zizek). 

Thus, desire is not simply directed toward objects, but toward the gaze of the Other and the recognition it confers. In games, this is evident when players seek not only to win but to be seen as intelligent, skillful, or clever by those watching and playing alongside them. Games promise a symbolic visibility in which one’s actions can signify something about who one is. This helps explain why mastery of a game like chess is often read as evidence of intelligence itself: the satisfaction lies less in victory as possession than in being recognized by the Other through it. Desire, therefore, exceeds acquisition and is fundamentally bound to recognition (McGowan, Psychoanalytic Film Theory).

This sets the stage for exploring Jacques Lacan’s notion of the split subject: the claim that our very sense of self is structured around a fundamental lack, and that this lack gives rise to desire itself. Lacan represents the subject as split (symbolized as $) between what can be spoken and symbolized and a remainder that resists symbolization—namely, the unconscious. This split emerges with the subject’s entry into language, since no symbolic system can ever fully capture the totality of one’s being or experience. There is always an excess that escapes articulation (Fink; Žižek).

Games provide a concrete way of encountering this split, particularly through the relationship between player and avatar. In most games, the avatar is the player’s point of entry into the symbolic space of the game: it is how one acts, is recognized, and is constrained by the rules. Yet the avatar never fully captures the player. It is a necessary representation, but also an incomplete one.

This becomes especially clear in games with strong faction identities, such as Root (Leder Games). When playing as the Marquis de Cat faction, the small orange cat tokens function as the player’s official presence in the game. They represent the player’s position within the symbolic order of Root: an empire-building power defined by expansion, control, and production. The cats give the player a coherent identity within the game world and make action possible at all.

At the same time, this identity never exhausts the player’s desire. While the Marquis de Cat faction channels play toward domination and infrastructure, the human player may be animated by concerns that exceed the avatar’s goals. For example, when I play Root with my children, I do want to win, but I am also attentive to their enjoyment, frustration, and learning. I may intentionally soften a move, try an unfamiliar strategy, or prolong the game for relational reasons. None of these motivations is legible at the level of the cat tokens themselves. The avatar enables play, but it cannot express the fullness of the subject who plays it.

This is what Lacan means by the split subject (Fink 45). On one side of the split lies the ego: the image of oneself that functions within language and is recognized by the Other. In Root, this corresponds to the visible cats and their scripted aims—the image of mastery and control that the game assigns to the player. The ego is always relational and externally constituted; it is shaped by rules, expectations, and how one is seen.

On the other side of the split lies the Lacanian unconscious: the dimension of the subject that is excluded in the process of assuming an image or identity. This is the part of the player that grows bored with a familiar strategy, feels conflicted about crushing a child’s faction, or desires something other than what the game explicitly rewards. This remainder cannot be fully represented within the symbolic grammar of the game, yet it continues to animate play from the outside.

Because all identities are formed through language—and because language is structurally incapable of fully articulating the subject—we are always lacking (Fink 91). We can never feel fully whole or complete. This lack is not a defect but a structural condition of subjectivity. To speak, to take on a role, to assume an avatar, involves losing something. Desire emerges from this loss.

Games make this visible through their win conditions. Each new game begins by marking a lack: no one has yet won. This lack propels play and organizes desire. Players act because something is missing, and because the game promises—without ever fully delivering—satisfaction through victory. If a player did not care about winning in the way the game defines it, they would no longer be playing the same game, even if they continued to move pieces on the board.

It is no accident that Lacan repeatedly turned to games, like the card game bridge, as metaphors for how subjects navigate desire within the symbolic order. Amanda Holmes shows how Lacan used games to clarify intersubjective knowledge, rules, and transference in the analytic situation (Holmes 185). These references are not incidental. Games provide a structured symbolic space in which the split subject becomes visible, not through introspection, but through action constrained by rules and recognition.

The Three Registers

To understand more fully how games capture and structure desire, we can now turn to Lacan’s three registers of experience: the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real (Fink 143). These interlocking dimensions do not merely shape psychic life; they constitute reality as such. The imaginary register is like the theme of a board game. It is comprised of the images that we see and experience. It is also the closest to our consciousness, what we think we see when we look at ourselves and the world. The symbolic, then, can be compared to the mechanics or rules of a game. It is the part of a game that is less visible, but which provides the structure and relationships between the pieces and players. For the game of chess, the theme of medieval combat is mixed with the rules of how pieces are set up and moved to give us the game in its current form. Importantly, the images and pieces only have meaning in the symbolic. A pawn is either almost irrelevant to a game state or the focal point of it, depending on where the pawn is located on the board and in relation to the other pieces (i.e., on its starting rank or about to be promoted). The real, then, is all that can’t be captured by these two registers; what’s left out of the picture. To continue the metaphor of chess, the real could be the experience of the players and the context of the game. Is it being played at a tournament by grandmasters or in a living room by kids? The game has no way of symbolizing or expressing the context in which it is played, but those factors are constantly pressing in and impacting it (Zizek 8-9). 

As the example of chess highlights, games create a nested imaginary-symbolic world or a “microcosm of reality,” carved out of the actual world of the players (Hall; Hoard & Steinke). In this way, they create their own language that captures the players, giving them an identity and recognition within the game world (i.e., their avatar/character). Games also have a real that presses into them—just like our experiences of material reality. By creating a nested reality and language, games also capture our desire in powerful ways. Just as all desire is born of lack and our position within language, so too our desire within a game is caught up in the imaginary-symbolic structures of the game. Games offer particular goals (usually winning) as conscious aims for players to orient their moves around. However, because these aims are conscious and rule-bound, they represent only one side of desire. Other, less formalized desires arise alongside them. For example, when playing Root with my children, I want to win according to the game’s victory conditions, but I simultaneously want to slow the pace of play, sustain their enjoyment, and ensure they feel they have a meaningful chance to win.

In this way, Lacan argues that desire, like the subject, is also split (Fink 50). While we are consciously oriented around objects of desire (winning, success, money, fame…), unconsciously, we are invested in maintaining desire and thus oriented towards the obstacles to those objects. In other words, our unconscious desire is always at odds with our conscious desire. We experience pleasure when we attain our objects of desire, but enjoyment (jouissance) comes from our failure to attain them. Enjoyment, conceptualized this way, is at odds with pleasure. Instead of being the sigh of relief, it is the life-giving energy that comes from the build-up, the anticipation. Importantly, enjoyment is far more motivationally significant to behavior than pleasure. Lacan builds on Freud’s later work in Beyond the Pleasure Principle to argue that while we consciously tell ourselves a story—what Lacan terms fantasy—about why we are doing something (for example, “I’m playing to win”), our actual motivation lies in the enjoyment of the struggle itself. The obstacle matters more than the prize (McGowan, Enjoying). Most players begin a game with the stated goal of victory, yet games are deliberately structured as systems of constraint, delay, and frustration. In competitive board games, this means that most players will lose. Only one player can win, but many players willingly return to the table. What animates play, then, is not attainment but pursuit.

Returning to Root for a moment, a player pursuing victory points as the Marquis de Cat must constantly navigate bottlenecks: limited actions, contested clearings, vulnerable supply lines, and the looming threat of revolt or disruption. The enjoyment of the game does not come from the moment victory points finally reach the required threshold—at that moment, the game ends and the excitement subsides. Rather, enjoyment emerges in the tense turns before that point: calculating risk, responding to setbacks, narrowly preserving an engine, or recovering from a near collapse. Winning terminates play; struggling sustains it.

This reflects what Bernard Suits famously described when he defined games as “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles” (43). From a Lacanian perspective, we might say that players willingly submit to these obstacles because they generate unconscious enjoyment. We tell ourselves we are trying to win in order to justify remaining inside a system that continually frustrates us. The conscious aim of victory thus provides the cover or excuse for the deeper satisfaction found in navigating constraint, delay, and partial failure.

As Robert Pfaller argues, play relies on a form of “belief without believers” (93). Players knowingly invest in symbolic stakes they do not fully endorse, maintaining a strategic distance that allows enjoyment to emerge. In Root, I know that controlling a clearing or attacking an opponent has no real-world consequence, yet I am emotionally invested in the outcome. I “know better,” and yet I care. This paradoxical stance allows unconscious desire to circulate freely under the guise of voluntary performance.

Herein lies the paradox of enjoyment. Once this unconscious satisfaction becomes fully conscious—once we explicitly recognize that we are not playing to win but to struggle—the enjoyment dissipates. If I sit down at the table already telling myself, “I’m only here for the tension, not the outcome,” the magic is gone. Enjoyment, in this Lacanian sense, depends on misrecognition. It vanishes when fully seen. The ego’s fantasy of mastery, that I am “playing to win,” is the price we pay in order to sustain the pleasure of pursuit.

Play

Moving away from Lacan for a moment, we can turn to the thinking of psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, who placed a high priority on the idea of play. According to Winnicott, play is instrumental in both development and psychotherapy, emerging within a transitional space between the self and the external world. In a play space, the “true self” can express itself creatively and safely, exploring the boundaries between inner and outer reality (Winnicott). Play is not merely recreational; it is growth-inducing, therapeutic, and potentially transformative. Through play, the individual may come into contact with authentic experience, emotional integration, and the capacity for symbolization.

For Winnicott, psychotherapy is only transformational when it becomes a form of play. He famously wrote that “psychotherapy has to do with two people playing together. The corollary of this is that where playing is not possible, then the work done by the therapist is directed towards bringing the patient from a state of not being able to play into a state of being able to play” (Winnicott 51). In other words, the aim of therapy is not just insight or behavioral change but cultivating the capacity to play, to explore one’s experience without dread, to symbolize without collapsing into fragmentation, and to relate without defensive rigidity. 

While Lacan and Winnicott diverge significantly in their theoretical and clinical approaches, bringing them into dialogue reveals the deep potential of play and games. Lacan draws our attention to the nested reality of games—how they structure desire by staging scenarios that engage both our conscious aims and unconscious formations. Winnicott, by contrast, emphasizes the transitional space of play as a creative, intermediate zone between self and other, fantasy and reality. Taken together, these perspectives suggest that play opens a space where unconscious desire (Lacan’s real) may irrupt in unexpected ways, offering opportunities for reflection, connection, and transformation (Winnicott; Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts; Hoard). 

Discussion

Psychoanalytic theory and practice center on the functions and dynamics of the unconscious. While other psychological models provide valuable tools for understanding conscious thought, behavior, and emotion, psychoanalysis is unique in its commitment to exploring the unconscious—the aspects of subjectivity that elude awareness and resist direct access. Across analytic schools, there is broad agreement that the unconscious must be distinguished from more popular notions of the “subconscious” or implicit self—aspects of consciousness that are more akin to the Freudian preconscious (McGowan, Lust for Power 215). The preconscious is unthought but thinkable; potentially available to awareness despite being currently out of reach, whereas the unconscious is not just below awareness, it is actively structured to remain outside it: unthinkable. 

In Lacanian theory, the unconscious is “structured like a language,” operating through slips, jokes, dreams, and repetitions (McGowan, Psychoanalytic Film Theory 7). Yet there is also a dimension of the unconscious that resists all symbolization: the real. It is not merely unthought but unthinkable and sits outside the realm of language, logic, and representation. Crucially, we cannot access this unconscious dimension alone. Because it is constituted in and through language, it requires an(other)—a listening subject—to encounter it. The unconscious speaks, but not to the self; it speaks through the cracks, gaps, and symptoms that arise in relation to others. Psychoanalysis, then, is not about introspection, but about entering a discourse where the unspeakable may begin to be heard (Verhaeghe). 

In the Lacanian tradition, the analyst listens for these slips (parapraxis) through the word plays, the holes in the analysand’s speech where the unconscious makes itself known (Fink 5). For when we speak, our egos are not the only ones talking. The other within us speaks through our mouth, irrupting into our sentences and conversations in ways we can’t control, don’t expect, and, crucially, can’t hear. This is what makes talking with a therapist terrifying, exciting, and revealing. They are hearing more than we intend. Words are slippery in this way; they somehow communicate both more and less than we think. A good therapist helps us hear what we have been trying to say but are unable to hear.

In the magic circle of games, we are also speaking, but in a very different language. When playing games, we are using the grammar of the mechanics and the vocabulary of the pieces to symbolize our desire and interact with one another. Wittgenstein famously showed how language operates like a game (Wittgenstein). He argued that words gain meaning through their use in specific social contexts, much like how moves in a game gain meaning by virtue of the rules and goals of that game. In the same way, games are their own language, and the moves we make in a game are a form of speech. This means that if we are open to listening and reflecting, we may well hear more in the moves that we make than we would otherwise want or intend (Hoard and Steinke). These moments, where the player’s actions diverge from conscious intent, may reveal a rupture in the symbolic coherence of one’s play language. Rather than dismissing these as simple mistakes, they can be read as sites where unconscious formations irrupt into the game space. As such, gameplay offers a privileged scene for psychoanalytic reflection.

Games, when engaged within a play space, can provide the context for just such an encounter with our unconscious. As C. Thi Nguyen argues, games function as the art form of agency, sculpting how players act, choose, and value within a structured space (Nguyen). By channeling decision-making through specific constraints, games construct a symbolic grammar through which unconscious dynamics may be dramatized and encountered. Within the nested reality of the game, we symbolize through our moves, actions, and turns. Most of the time, we play in ways that align close enough with our conscious aims that we don’t notice what else is slipping through. Again, it is not the player who made the move who is best positioned to hear the unconscious content. Within the safe-enough context of a play space, games provide an opportunity to reflect on the meaning and possible readings of the moves we make when we reflect on them in community. 

An important caveat here is the Winnicottian notion of good enough or, for our purposes, a safe-enough play space. Irruptions of the real are disturbing and can be destabilizing, if not fully traumatizing, experiences. Exposing the vulnerabilities of others at the game table without the degree of trust necessary to maintain play space is a quick way to turn a potentially transformative interaction into a painful moment of shame and retreat. Games are powerful tools in eliciting strong affective responses from players. As such, deep care should be taken before more explicitly inviting the real of one another to the table. 

Implications

The Lacanian framework presented here offers a powerful augmentation to existing analytic play therapy by highlighting that unconscious desire is not merely represented in symbolic play but actively structured by the very rules, positions, and limitations of the game itself. Rather than focusing solely on narrative content or affective tone, this approach invites therapists to attend to the moves themselves—the hesitations, breakdowns, cheating, or compulsive repetitions—as signifiers of unconscious formations. The game becomes not just a metaphor for life, but a symbolic system that stages the subject’s encounter with lack, fantasy, and jouissance. By analyzing how a patient relates to the game’s rules and obstacles, therapists can open new avenues for interpreting unconscious material. This shifts the therapeutic stance from storytelling to structural listening, where the game becomes a diagnostic and transformative field of desire, failure, and recognition.

For game groups interested in reflection, a Lacanian perspective can enrich post-play debriefs by moving beyond questions of strategy or outcome and into the structure of desire within the play experience. Rather than asking simply, “Did you have fun?” or “Why did you make that move?”, groups can reflect on how each player engaged the obstacles of the game: What positions did you gravitate toward? What rules frustrated you? When did you stop wanting to win or wanting to win too much? These questions treat the game not just as entertainment, but as a symbolic container for exploring unconscious investments and interpersonal dynamics. The debrief becomes a space to consider not just the game’s result, but its affective impact—what it stirred up, resisted, or repeated. In this way, gaming groups can begin to listen to their own play as a kind of speech and perhaps hear in it something of the desires that animate them.

From a clinical perspective, this framework suggests several concrete ways in which games might be used to elicit unconscious material within therapeutic contexts. Unlike talk-based interventions, which rely on the analysand’s capacity to articulate experience, games externalize agency by requiring action within a structured symbolic system. In doing so, they allow unconscious formations to emerge not through narrative coherence but through choice, repetition, avoidance, and breakdown. The therapist’s task is not to interpret the game’s content directly, but to listen to how the subject inhabits its constraints. Moments of hesitation, rule-bending, excessive competitiveness, disengagement, or insistence on control can be approached as formations of desire rather than merely personality traits or coping strategies.

Games may be particularly useful in working with clients who struggle to access affect verbally, who intellectualize, or who experience shame or defensiveness in direct conversation. Because games displace the focus onto an external structure, they offer a degree of symbolic cover, allowing unconscious dynamics to circulate without immediately confronting the ego. In this sense, gameplay functions analogously to free association, not because it produces verbal material, but because it loosens the subject’s relation to conscious mastery. The clinician listens not for what the client says about the game, but for how the client speaks through their play.

This approach also reframes the role of interpretation in game-based therapy. Rather than treating games as metaphors to be decoded or as tools for skill-building alone, a Lacanian perspective treats the game as a symbolic system that stages the subject’s relation to lack, law, and enjoyment. Interpretation, then, need not be immediate or explicit. Often, it is enough to mark a moment of surprise, frustration, or repetition and allow it to resonate. In this way, games can function as transitional objects in the Winnicottian sense: shared spaces that hold tension without demanding resolution, where meaning emerges through use rather than explanation.

Beyond individual therapy, this framework also has implications for how games are designed for therapeutic, educational, or reflective purposes. If games are understood as systems that shape agency and desire, then their design choices carry ethical and clinical weight. Rules, victory conditions, asymmetries, and modes of failure all structure how players encounter limitation and recognition. A Lacanian-informed approach to therapeutic game design would therefore attend not only to representational content or therapeutic goals, but to how the game stages frustration, delay, impossibility, and loss. Games that prematurely resolve tension, eliminate meaningful failure, or overemphasize optimization risk foreclose the very lack that animates desire. By contrast, games that sustain ambiguity, asymmetry, and incomplete mastery may better support reflective engagement with unconscious dynamics.

While this paper has not foregrounded empirical research, the framework proposed here may also offer a conceptual lens for future research on games in therapeutic contexts. Rather than measuring outcomes solely in terms of symptom reduction or skill acquisition, research informed by this approach might attend to how players relate to rules, how they narrate their experience of constraint, or how patterns of play shift over time. Such studies would not aim to render the unconscious fully legible or measurable, but to examine how different game structures afford or inhibit encounters with desire, frustration, and recognition. In this sense, psychoanalytic theory does not compete with empirical approaches, but supplements them by offering a richer account of what may be taking place beneath observable behavior.

Taken together, this Lacanian account positions games not merely as tools for engagement or expression, but as symbolic spaces in which unconscious desire becomes playable. When held within a safe-enough relational context, games can invite subjects to encounter themselves obliquely, through the very constraints that frustrate them. For clinicians, educators, and designers alike, this suggests that the power of games lies less in what they represent than in how they structure agency, delay satisfaction, and sustain desire. To play, in this sense, is not to escape the unconscious, but to give it a place to speak.

WORKS CITED

Bailly, Lionel. Lacan: A Beginner’s Guide. Oneworld Publications, 2009.

Boothby, Richard. Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan. Routledge, 2001.

Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton University Press, 1995.

Hall, Stephen. “Board Games as a Framework for Computer Science Education.” Board Game Academics, Issue II, 1 Mar. 2025.

Hoard, Paul and Steinke, Paul. “Board Games as Liturgy: The Thin Space of Play.” Christ & Cascadia, 28 Sept. 2023, www.christandcascadia.com/2023/09/28/board-games-as-liturgy/.

Hoard, Paul R. “On Pleasure and Games.” The Other Journal, Issue 37: Church, Spring 2024, theotherjournal.com/2024/07/on-pleasure-and-games/. 

Holmes, Amanda. “The Awful Truth: Games and Their Relation to the Unconscious.” Objective Fictions: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Marxism, edited by Adrian Johnston, Edinburgh University Press, 2022, pp. 183–197. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781474489348-013.

Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Translated by Bruce Fink, W. W. Norton & Company, 2006.

Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Alan Sheridan, W. W. Norton & Company, 1998.

McGowan, Todd. A Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan. Cambridge University Press, 2025.

McGowan, Todd. Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. University of Nebraska Press, 2013.

McGowan, Todd. Psychoanalytic Film Theory and The Rules of the Game. Film Theory in Practice, Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. 

McGowan, Todd. “The Lust for Power and the Logic of Enjoyment.” Crisis & Critique, vol. 6, no. 1, 2019, pp. 205–224. 

Nguyen, C. Thi. Games: Agency as Art. Oxford University Press, 2020.

Pfaller, Robert. On the Pleasure Principle in Culture: Illusions without Owners. Translated by Lisa Rosenblatt, Verso, 2014.

Suits, Bernard. The Grasshopper – Third Edition: Games, Life and Utopia. Broadview Press, 2014.

Verhaeghe, Paul. Beyond Gender: From Subject to Drive. Other Press, 2001.

Winnicott, D. W. Playing and Reality. Tavistock Publications, 1971.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte, 4th ed., Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

Žižek, Slavoj. How to Read Lacan. W. W. Norton & Company, 2006.