Paidea and Ludus games

There are many ways that you can define gameplay, one of these ways are Paidea and Ludus, I will also be talking about the 4 categories agon, alea, ilinx and mimicry games. Paidea are games which are more open and free, which means that they are games that allows you to do what you like. Whereas Ludus are games which are constricted by rules with a clear objective, for example beating the final boss.

Taken from wired.com

A good example of a Paidea game would be Minecraft. This a perfect example of a Paidea game as there are no goals within this game meaning that you will be able to do what you feel like doing in the game. You are given nothing from the start apart from the ability to break blocks with your hands and from there you can decide what you would like to do in the game world, because this game is a sandbox game which allows you to build building to just killing the mobs. I believe that the game creators 'Mojang' has tried to turn this game into a ludus game by adding a ending to the game where you would kill the Ender dragon, however I believe that they have failed in turning this game into a Ludus game as the ending is something which is just as there isn't anything which makes you kill the dragon. Even if you do kill the dragon, you just spawn back where your spawn point is set.

There are many games which are Ludus as Ludus games are easy to control the flow because they can choose where and what feelings by creating situations with the game rules. An example of a ludus video-game would be Shogun 2 as there's a goal right from the start telling you to become the Shogun of the country, however this game does give a little freedom as you are able to move anywhere within the spaces allowed for that unit or stack of units, other than that they don't give you much freedom to do as you please.

Agon which has a few meanings in ancient Greek however for the game design terminology will be using the meaning of struggle, contest and competition. A good example of agon type games would be the counter-strike series. In this first person shooter which had a massive player base back in it's day. The reason why I would include this game as a competitive game is that there's competitions where there's cash prizes, as well as people playing for ranks in the newer version of the game (counterstrike: global offensive) this leads to people competing to get higher ranks so that it will show that they are better players than the rest of the players. This game is also a mimicry as this simulates war and weaponry, for example the weapons in the game will look and sound similar to the real thing.

Alea- this terminology means chance or randomness. A game which is a good example of this would be audio surf as each level is generated by the audio which you put in, this means that with each song or audio piece the track will be different, this means that there's a chance for the track (game level) being either very easy or extremely hard. This game is also a ilinx as this game has movement and depending on the speed of the audio clip or song is the speed of the character goes, so for example if you used a fast paced song then the track itself will slope which means that your character will go faster.