The First Page: Critical Games

THE FIRST PAGE

Critical Games. On Play and Seriousness in Academia,
Literature and Life

by Tim Beasley-Murray

1 December 2025

The First Page presents the first page of books that are launched as part of the IAS Book Launch Programme. On 2 December 2025, Tim Beasley-Murray will present his book Critical Games, that interrogates the theory of play and gaming, with a particular focus on the games played by literary authors and literary critics. More broadly, Beasley-Murray explores the games we play (whether we know it or not), the ways we play them (for fun, but also to win, and to gain approval from others), and what happens when they get out of hand.

1
‘The most glorious kind of play’

Reality checkpoint
For the inhabitants of Oxford are not in the world and when they do sally
forth into the world (to London for example) that in itself is enough to have
them gasping for air; their ears buzz, they lose their sense of balance, they
stumble and have to come scurrying back to the town that makes their existence possible, that contains them, where they do not even exist in town.
—Javier Marías

First, a digression. A digression: a freedom and license that one allows oneself to go off piste, an indulgence that one requests from one’s interlocutor, an interlude, a sort of holiday, a place where the rules of the game that we have previously been playing up until that point are suspended and another game—a game within a game—commences. A digression: a good place to start.

Parker’s Piece is an open, green common in the city of Cambridge. On its south-west side stands the grand University Arms Hotel, just in front of Regent Street, the long road that runs out of the chocolate-box city centre and up towards the railway station. To the north-west: the University, its ancient and opulent courts and chapels. And to the south-east: the stumbling stretch of Mill Road, which, in the 1990s when I was a student, was notable for its Asian grocers, selling spices that were, at the time, outlandish in an otherwise overwhelmingly white town; for its dampish second-hand clothes shops where bien-pensant students could pick up brightly coloured Peruvian jackets; and for its dingy pubs that seemed a world away from the rugby-club blazers and dinner jackets of the college bar. On one side, then, the University, its architectural elegance, its world of scholarship and social and cultural privilege; on the other side, a very different Cambridge that, beyond the surface colour of Mill Road itself, flows out into a Fenland delta of greyish suburban streets.

Parker’s Piece is crisscrossed by two diagonal paths. At the centre, where the paths meet, has stood, since 1894, a single, ornate, cast-iron lamppost, topped by a candelabra with four globular lamps. Solitary and often…

Critical Games: On Play and Seriousness in Academia, Literature and Life was published by Manchester University Press in June 2025

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TIM BEASLEY-MURRAY is Associate Professor of European Thought and Culture at UCL. Following studies in Cambridge, Paris and Brno, he was appointed to teach the literature of a language that, at interview, he admitted he did not speak. Tim teaches on the BA Creative Arts and Humanities and is writing a new book under the provisional title, Ambient Silences.

On 2 December 2025 Tim Beasley-Murray will launch his book Critical Games at the Institute of Advanced Studies. More information.

Lead Image: Photograph by Riho Kroll via Unsplash.