Paidea and Ludus

 Paidea and ludus are concepts that describe two forms of playing, which can be applied when defining videogames beyond genre or gameplay, which can be difficult to pin down. James Newman refers to these ideas in his book Videogames (2004).

 Paidea is effectively defined as "playing" purely for pleasure; an example would be a child spinning in circles or skipping instead of walking. The enjoyment and pleasure is endogenous and self-derived.
 Ludus describes an experience as being more constrained by rules, which as clear definable outcome state e.g. winning or losing.
 Though you would think most games are likely to be ludus, many games - including videogames - are paidea in nature. James Newman cites the Will Wright games The Sims and SimCity as an example of paidea videogames.

 Though these are good ideas, on their own they are very limiting. Newman supplements then with four terms Callois (2001) adapted from Huizinga (se Newman, 2004, pp. 22-26):

• agon: competition
• alea: chance/randomness
• ilinx: movement
• mimicry: sims, make-believe, role-play

In class we drew up a table incorporating sll four of these against a paidea/ludus scale. This gave me an idea for a more advanced Venn diagram, which I've included below.

I don't know how easy that is to see, but I think its pretty good. I know it doesn't quite work (opposite circles can't be selected without a third) but I arranged the circles specifically to counter that flaw; I couldn't think of many chance/movement games, competitive sims.

Hope you like, thoughts?