Paidea and Ludus in Videogames

Paidea and Ludus

Before I begin writing about Paidea and Ludus I thought I would firstly just explain what they mean so that I myself know but also you reading know.

Paidea: effectively "play" for pleasure

Ludus: more constrained by rules, with a clear outcome (eg "winning")

I'm now going to talk about games which I am familiar with which use both Paidea and Ludus,
A game which I played fairly recently so it is still fresh in my mind is Mafia 2 so I will cover this first.
At a glance Mafia 2 is a similar game to the grand theft auto series, you run (or drive) around a city, completing missions, progressing through the story and by doing so, causing mayhem with guns and explosives.
One of the great appeals of these games is you can really choose how you play it, if you want to you can explore the city, go on rampages slaughtering everyone, collect money and buy new clothes. This is a more Paidea approach to playing the game
On the other hand you can follow the story which will take you towards the end of the game, it will unlock new areas, new cars and new weapons, you'll still have the occasional rampage but it will apparently be part of the story, this is a Ludus approach in that the game is saying, here is your mission, you must get here, find some way of getting there.
The above approach is fairly interesting in that you have the Rules of the mission (which in my example is going to be get from A to B) which provides the Ludus approach, however since you are free to get there how you wish you can have a more Paidea approach to it, you can choose to walk or drive, to kill people on the way or not, the choice of how you do it is up to you.

My second game which is 100% Paidea is Minecraft
Minecraft is difficult to describe, in essence it is a block world sandbox where you collect rocks, sand, trees or water and you can build just about anything you want with it, there are no objectives, goals or set tasks, Since it has single and multi player it can provide some interesting results, when playing with your friends you make up your own rules, ("if you break my stuff I'll break yours") but apart from that you are completely free to do whatever you like.
However thinking about it a bit more Minecraft does have some Ludic elements, they aren't exactly rules but more an agreement (going by the "if you break my stuff, I'll break yours") if the rules are broken chaos would ensue just like in other games.

Agon, Alea, Ilinx, Mimicry

Agon: competition
Alea: chance/randomness
Ilinx: movement
Mimicry: simulation, make-believe, role-play.

I'm trying to think of a game which would cover all of these elements and I'm not sure if it will but I'm going to talk about Quake, Quake Live to make it easier for me.

One of the large elements of Quake Live is the ability to duel people, a 1 on 1 competition to see who can kill who the most, this is very competitive as it is a test of skill between you and your opponent, This is the Agon element of Quake, The Alea element is slightly difficult to cover but I guess it is in where players spawn, each spawn point is decided on where players are at a set time and then a random one in the appropriate section of the map is chosen (usually the other side of the map to where combat just happened). Ilinx, movement is key in Quake, it means you can survive and dodge and also beat your opponent to weapons and armor, Mimicry is slightly difficult to place into Quake however I believe it is there because you buy into the role of killing your opponent, you believe that is your goal and you play the role of your character in achieving that goal.

And thus ends another boring blog post :)