Word of the Week: Ludology

Ludology: The science of games. From Latin ludus, "game," which is also the source of ludicrous, delude (to mock, deceive), allude (Latin alludere: to joke, jest), prelude (something that is played beforehand), and other English words.

Writer and ludologist Clive Thompson spoke about his science in an April 19 "On the Media" segment about do-it-yourself XBox game development. (Transcript available Monday afternoon.) Thompson, who has been called "the Lester Bangs of ludology,"¹ writes about games on his blog, Collision Detection, and in publications such as Wired and the New York Times Magazine. Back in 2006 Thompson wrote:

In video game circles, the big debate these days is about whether video games are driven by narrative or by play-style — narrativology vs. ludology. I think both approaches are useful to understanding games, though I lean towards ludology as more germanely important. While narrative applies to novels, plays, TV, movies, and games, play — working within a set of rules that impose an arbitrary goal and make it tricky to achieve — applies only to games. It is what makes games most game-like.

I've had the privilege to work with a ludologist right here in the Bay Area. Nicole Lazzaro, founder of XEO Design, has been named one of Gamasutra's top 20 women in games. She's identified four "fun keys": easy fun, hard fun, people fun, and serious fun.

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¹ Lester Bangs (1949-1982) was a gonzo rock 'n' roll critic. "The Lester Bangs of ludology" seems eminently qualified for enshrinement in The Rosa Parks of Blogs, a a ludicrously addictive blog by Mark Peters that collects examples of the snowclone "X is the Y of Z."

Comments

[Z. D. Smiith]

I find it interesting that the contemporary blogosphere has led to a real blossom of ludogogical writing—anyway, of many bloggers who take games very seriously—but that video games have such a stranglehold over the genre. Out of the hundreds of video game writers or reviews there are a handful of board game enthusiasts; their star, too, is rising, but not as quickly or as high, of course. Nobody talks about card games, though. I find myself continuously fascinated by the zillions of games people play with one species or another of generic playing cards; there is a symmetry also between the flow of information and value within any given card game, and the fluid interplay and historical lineage of the games themselves, their classifications, their mechanisms and rules. I would like to hear more people talk about them.

[Nancy Friedman]

@Z.D.: True enough, with the exception of poker and its variants.

[Z. D. Smith]

That's quite true. That's actually a very interesting point, because these days I find it hard to imagine poker as a game. It seems like more of a sport. The word 'game' seems to imply something necessarily collaborative, or at least a kind of agreed-upon honor system. And poker, as any lucrative, highly popular pursuit, has institutionalized itself, and become a single structure, or series of large related structures, that individuals enter and try to excel at for personal profit.