A look at "Videogames" by James Newman.

During our lecture last week we looked at an extract from Newman's Videogames. It touched on the different aspects of videogames and how they can be categorised, whilst looking at ideas that Caillois had.

He defines paidea as the playing of games without structure or rules, in freeform. Spontaneous play. Ludus is described as the play of games with set rules and a clear outcome, e.g. winning.

Caillois makes an interesting point regarding his paidea and ludus theory, although I think in almost all cases there are rules to a game. Generally, the point of a game is do as the game has either told you to do or allowed you to do, therefore creating a set of rules so to speak. For example, although dungeons and dragons can be categorised under paidea, it also comes under ludus as the dungeon master will create the environment for which these players play in, and the outcome/events within this environment are more often than not determined by the roll of a dice. Although it's a game played for pleasure there are rules and story set both before the game and during, with possibilities of an endgame, e.g. everyone dying or disbanding from adventure.

Dungeons and Dragons actually combines elements of both paidea and ludus really well. The ludus elements are taking turns, creating characters on set character sheets, playing in a world set by the dungeon master. The paidea elements are being able to use your imagination to create exactly the character you want, allow the story to take any turn you want, acting however you want in a situation. Each game/story of D&D is unique with different players.

Another example of a game coming under both categories would be World of Warcraft. Players don't have to follow the story line, quest line, or even participate in any kind of dungeon or battleground event. They can play it purely for exploration, however that exploration would eventually come to an end, as the player would have explored everything and gained an achievement. However, players can (and more often than not do) follow the questing line of WoW set out by Blizzard and eventually reach the end goal of question: reaching the maximum level. 

Newman notes that SimCity is an example of a paidia videogame, and this is possibly the one game that I can't argue about. There is no end-game within it. You don't finish once you've built your city, you have to maintain it. Not all sandbox games are paidea, though. For example, Minecraft comes under both. You can choose to kill the end-game boss, thus "completing" the game, or just build whatever you want. 

Newman discusses the four terms Caillois adapted from Huizinga, agon (competition), alea (chance/randomness), ilinx (movement), and mimicry(simulation, make-believe, role-play). I want to touch on World of Warcraft again here, because I think it covers all aspects really well. There are competitive elements to it, where you're competing against other groups to beat bosses the fastest (at least at the highest level of competition you are) or competing in a player vs player arena. Alea is obviously in WoW due to things such as rolling for items, crit chance/dodge chance etc. Movement due to you being able to ride mounts (both flying or ground), travel from continent to continent, and obviously run/swim wherever. Without a doubt there is mimicry in WoW. You are playing as a character and there are even dedicated servers where players can role-play as their character and pretend to live as them. 

To look away from videogames for a second and to use those four terms to break things down, we can see that other games are more exact with what they are broken down to. For example, Chess is a purely agonistic game. It is a competition between yourself and the other player to take out the king. An example of an alea game would be almost anything from a casino. Roulette, blackjack, and slots machines, for example. They are all by chance. Children playing ring-a-roses or something similar falls under ilinx, due to spinning around until falling down. Again, children playing any kind of imaginary game would fall under mimicry. 

League of Legends, a game I play an ungodly amount of, falls under only two of the four. It has elements of both agon and alea. The competition being obviously you are competing against the other team to destroy their "base" first, and the alea being there are stats such as critical chance in LoL, too. 

I much prefer these terms to dissect which of them a videogame might fall under rather than looking at paidea or ludus videogames, as I feel like paidea and ludus are too simple and don't break it down enough. However categorising a game into being competitive, being chance-based, or even including all of them is much easier.