Making Sense of Play in Video Games: Ludus, Paidia, and Possibility Spaces

Graham H Jensen

doi:10.7557/23.6148

Abstract

This article synthesizes the work of video game theorists such as Gonzalo Frasca (2003), Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman (2003), Ian Bogost (2008), and Steven E. Jones (2008) in order to build on academic and interdisciplinary discussions of play and its effect on PC- or console-based video games. Examples are used to elucidate the potentially problematic categories of “paidic” and “ludic” games, as well as to explore further the ways in which uninhibited play, “metagaming,” and the inevitable influence of socio-cultural factors gradually transform—and become codified within—the landscape of digital games. Finally, the article offers Mikhail Bakhtin’s notions of opposing “centripetal” and “centrifugal” forces as analytical tools according to which the connections between in-game activities and out-of-game social and cultural contexts can be usefully examined by future critics.

Highlights

Play constitutes a significant part of all human activity, it is an exceptionally difficult phenomenon to define
It is interesting to note that Frasca’s definition makes no mention of similar forms of play present in adolescents or adults, children are obviously not the only demographic who play the kinds of games which he designates as paidia
Frasca (2003, p.230) continues to expand his definition, arguing that paidia incorporate rules, but not ones that “define a winner and a loser”: “It is common to think that paidia has no rules,” he writes, “but this is not the case: a child who pretends to be a soldier is following the rule of behaving like a soldier and not as a doctor.”