Paidia & Ludus

In a very synthetic vision, games can be placed on two opposite sides: paidia and ludus. Both expressions used by Roger Caillois in his book "Man, Play and Games".

Paidia means spontaneous play. It's free improvisation, like children creating rules in real time at the backyard, uncontrollable imagination giving life to fantasy worlds using cardboard boxes. Paidia is our childhood essence that arises in some moments of our adult lives.

Ludus means controlled play. Games with rules, manuals, limits and instructions are part of this context. In a game designing process, it's important to identify our audience in order to create a good balance between these two opposite sides (or no balance whatsoever).



The card game Dixit is a good example of balance between paidia and ludus. Let's check the summary of rules from the site Board Game Geek:

"One player is the storyteller for the turn. He looks at the 6 images in his hand. From one of these, he makes up a sentence and says it out loud (without showing the card to the other players). The other players select amongst their 6 images the one that best matches the sentence made up by the storyteller.

Then, each of them gives their selected card to the storyteller, without showing it to the others. The storyteller shuffles his card with all the received cards. All pictures are shown face up, randomly, and every player has to bet upon what picture was the storyteller's.

If nobody or everybody finds the correct picture, the storyteller scores 0, and each of the other players scores 2. Otherwise the storyteller and whoever found the correct answer scores 3. Players score 1 point for every vote for their own picture. The game ends when the deck is empty or if someone reaches 30 points,so he wins.Otherwise the greatest total wins the game".

In Dixit, the ludus components are the scoring, points and turns of the game. The paidia is the free and cathartic storytelling about the cards, every game of Dixit is different and becomes unique with different players.

Sometimes it's even possible to create chaos with rules.

So, what do you think about that?