Caillois, 1961 · via Lüneburg / GAPPP (2018)
What it says
Two poles of play. Ludus is rule-governed, structured, competitive — you can win. Paidia is free, exploratory, improvised — there is nothing to win. Most actual play sits somewhere on the line between them rather than at either end.
Does it hold for my work
It gives my own seed a vocabulary that already exists. I had been calling the two ends playfulness and gamefulness, from scratch, in my own words. Caillois named them sixty years ago. The overlap is not exact, but it is close enough that I should use his terms and mark where mine differ.
Where they differ: my interactivity — I act, the system responds — is not on his axis at all. It is the precondition for both. That distinction may be worth keeping, because it is the thing I actually observed missing in Shadowplay.
Positioning the work
Everything I have built sits at the paidia end. Phosphor has no goal, no win condition, no failure. The entire direction of the thesis is a deliberate move toward ludus — and this axis is how I can state that move precisely instead of describing it.
Related
Meaningful play specifies what has to be true for the ludus end to work at all. Zhou et al.’s four axes do the same job for the affective dimension.