Role-Play Games According to Caillous?

So I have been working on a paper for some time on table-top rpgs and it was suggested by the professor that I pick up and use Roger Caillous' "Man, Play, and Games." I am reading through it and I have reached a bit of a pickle.

Caillous divides games into 4 categories: Agon, Alea, Mimicry, and Ilinx and he goes on to explain what they mean.

Agon is always a question of rivalry which hinges on a single quality such as speed, endurance, strength, memory, skill, ingenuity, and so on. This is exercised within defined limits and without outside assistance. There is a winner and a loser in which the winner is better than the loser (go figure). These types of games can be found in sports and board games such as checkers or chess, and can also be found in acts of courtly war such as a duel or tournament (yay jousting!). These presuppose sustained attention, appropriate training, assiduous application, and of course a desire to win.

Alea is a latin word for a game of dice. This is up to chance. This negates work, patience, experience, and qualifications. You either have total disgrace or absolute favor. Some games combine both agon and alea such as dominoes, backgammon, or cards.

Next is Mimicry in which you become an illusory character yourself. You make believe or make others believe that you are someone other than yourself. But then he goes on to say that this has hardly any relationship to alea and that a competitive mimicry is born in the public at a sporting even or such (agon).

Finally, is Ilinx, and it is based on the pursuit of vertigo and consists of an attempt to momentarily destroy the stability of perception and inflicts a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind. This can be found with rollercoasters and the like.

Now obviously ilinx has nothing to do with table-top role-playing games, but I believe that the other three do. You are pretending to be another person, a character of your own or someone's creation, it is agon in that you compete with others (a lot of the time non-player characters) using the skills of your character on your character sheet. The results of those actions are alea in that it is up to the rolling of dice.

There I think I've got that figured out for the paper, but I keep second guessing myself on this based on one thing Caillous said. "Mimicry has hardly any relationship to alea." Does mimicry play a part in the classification of role-playing games?

The book was first published in 1913, so there was no way that he could have known about role-playing games seeing as it wasn't until 61 years later that Dungeons and Dragons first came out. Lord of the Rings, arguably the inspiration for Dungeons and Dragons hadn't even been thought of, let alone the Hobbit. So it is dated, yet it is still highly regarded within the community of those who study games.

Many things have happened since 1913, many reprints of this book moving from publisher to publisher. While many things that I have read in this book hold true today, there is one small hiccup when it comes to role-playing games. It isn't the first time these games have been looked over by sociologists and anthropologists alike, most of the studies I have been able to find on the topic skip over the table and go straight for the computer. I have found many World of Warcraft studies, a few on role-playing games that I have had to adapt to work with my paper, and very few on the table games. I knew this paper was going to be a challenge, but I wasn't expecting it quite like this.