[...] Just yesterday, a co-worker handed me Chris’ book, 21st Century Game Design, and so far it’s quite good, though I haven’t gotten past the initial section on audience modeling yet. I expect to have more quarrels with it once I get to the sections that about actually modeling game structures, since we’ve had some disagreements in the past on his blog. [...]

[...] Patrick on Pondering Caillois [...]

chance is a mechanic

Fair enough, and there is a pattern recognition element to groking probabilities. Its important to note that “alea” always accompanies an economy of soft information, which is more than just a mechanic. A whole social/cultural situation could be implied by its uncertainty.

vertigo is an effect

Its perceived as an effect, but it actually has to do with uncertianty, even if that uncertainty is of a deterministic system. For instance, in a snowboarding game the illinx is derived from the uncertainty of navigation.

competition in my atomic model is less than a mechanic; it’s a subatomic element that all game atoms make use of

Thats what we’ve seen so far, but only half, probably less, of the potentially playing public. My main complaint with your book was that it seemed tied to this assumption. I must dissent.

mimicry is an objective

Sometimes mimicry is the starting point, not the goal. I think theres a huge market for mimicry for its own sake.

I think the holy grail would look something like a dynamic content creation system where paidic mechanics could be implemented in the abstract, and then different levels of each of the four qualities would be possible. The player would tend to gravitate toward a play style which composed the right mixture to them, this would be their particular ludes. The system would have to cue into different possible ludes (ludi?) that player might persue, and these ludes would form along the flow of the experience, the way the flow of a river forms landscapes over time. This isn’t to say such a game would appeal to everyone, the core mechanic might appeal only to a specific audience.

Short version: I agree with your take on ludes and paidia, we need to explore “a process of defining the rules in accordance with cultural assumptions as you go.”

The Anarchy of Paidia

Where do games begin? In the anarchy of paidia, we play without rules and without limits. It is amusing, creative and chaotic, but it is also short lived, as when the natural play of a toy becomes formalised, it becomes

I wonder if the paidia-ludus distinction could be seen as the naïve idea that “no rules”=”freedom” but “rules=”no freedom”. He would have benefitted from a few talks on emergence I think.

My favorite quote is the one where he says that games either have rules _or_ are make-believe:

“[…] chess, prisoner’s base, polo, and baccara are played for real. As if is not necessary. [...] Thus games are not ruled and make-believe. Rather, they are ruled or make-believe.”

Blogroll Joel on SoftwareRaph Koster Sunny Walker Thoughts for Now Sex, Lies and Advertising

paidia. This in part explains why sports can have such esoteric rules. I love American football, but it’s rules are the epitome of arcana, and the Offside rule in football (soccer to some) is famously obscure. Raph Koster expressed his view that paidia activities generally have more rules not less: Paidia generally “imports” rulesets derived from a vast array of cultural assumptions, whereas ludus games are ones that have been tightly defined down (and which nonetheless have an assortment of rules that are implied but not stated that are