Today we learnt about Paidea and Ludus, two contrasting game styles. Paidea effectively means the players "play" for pleasure, while Ludus games are more constrained by rules, with a clear outcome. Below are examples of both Paidea and Ludus games that i am familiar with.
Paidea:
An example of a Paidea game that i have played recently and am famililar with is 'Paper Toss'. I have it as an application on my Ipod touch and it's clearly just a game to be played for fun. The player is asked to throw balls of paper into a bin at varying distances. There is no real end goal to the game and the player can continue playing for as long as they want without a positive or negative outcome. The Player can create their own objectives however by setting themselves a high score target. This adds an element of player defined goals.
Ludus
An example of a Ludus game is Sonic the Hedgehog. Although this game has changed forms over the years, the basic goals are still in place. 'Get from one end of the level to the other and you move onto the next world'. There are different options and routes to take within the levels but the end goal is always the same and will produce you with the same outcome.
I'm not so sure about Paper Toss being paidea; isn't the aim of the game to get the paper in the bin? Even though it's a single player game, there is what Caillois calls "implied agon", in that the player seeks to do better than before. Do you know _The Sand Game_? That might be worth a look for an example of paidea.
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