THOUGHTS: Caillois's Terminology

Paidea - Play for pleasure

'Paidea' is to play a game for the sole purpose of enjoyment or pleasure. When looking at games played purely for pleasure you need to look at games with no goal and no end. To properly understand this term we would need to think about games which have no specific in game goals such as Sims, Gary's Mod and other creation based games. Players can set their own goals within these games of course but you can very easily play with no goal and just have fun without trying to achieve anything.

As a naturally competitive gamer who gets the majority of their gaming thrills from winning I can't say I experience this sort of feeling too often although when I played a lot of Halo I remember using forge mode a lot and messing around. We would experiment with the physics in the game by quickly rotating a large grid with collision and driving tanks off a cliff and into the spinning grid to launch them miles across the map.

Ludus - Playing with rules and/or an outcome

The majority of the games I enjoy playing are games with a decisive outcome where the winners and losers are all very clear. Many people will play games with a story to watch the unfold and experience that but personally I drift far more towards multiplayer. A ludus game is a game with a definite outcome a player will aim to manipulate into their own favour.

As a Ludus game I will use Starcraft as an example. There are tie games extremely rarely in Starcraft due to the nature of the RTS title being similar to chess in the sense that it's very rare that there are no more options left for the player to make decisions which may lead them closer to the outcome which a very high percentage of the time is either winning or losing.

Starcraft is a game you can't really play with a paidea mindset. There is so much to constantly think about within the game when playing that even if you do play the game 'just for fun' you will always have the goal of winning. Players will often try outlandish strategies to 'mess around' while playing but their goal is still always to win. They are only adapting the goal, not taking it away.

Opinions on Paidea and Ludus and how they contrast

Paidea and Ludus are complete polar opposites. Roger Caillois sought to systematically classify games although I feel that it's difficult to seperate a lot of games so strictly into these categories. Modern computer games often give players a lot of freedom to do what they want and gain the experience they're looking for within the games they play.

I feel like Paidea and Ludus would be better to describe the state of mind a player is in when they sit down to play a game because a lot of games now are versatile and although many games with a goal will be played to their goal, if a player isn't engaged in the game the way the designer envisions them to be, they may find players taking on a more Paidea way of playing the game.

Agon, Alea, Ilinx and Mimicry

Agon - meaning Competition.
Alea - meaning Chance or Randomness.
Ilinx - meaning Movement
Mimicry - meaning Situational, Make-Belief or Role-Play

Examples of Paidea Games:

Agon - Sims
Alea - Snap
Ilinx - Playing catch or other physical games with no goal.
Mimicry - Dungeons and Dragons (Live acting version where people act out the story)

Examples of Ludus Games:

Agon - Chess
Alea - Poker
Ilinx - Football, Tennis and other physical sports
Minicry - World of Warcraft