Ludemes and Praxemes

In my study of video game literacy, I take a primary interest in the ways in which artistic experience can be achieved through gameplay in ways that are not reducible to linguistic or symbolic semiotics. In order to expand our understanding of what — narratively and aesthetically — can be done with video games, it is necessary to have language and framing to describe the unique things that only games can do, rather than framing our game experiences in the terms of other contemporary mediums.

There are things that only games can do and aesthetic experiences that are only achievable with games, but the language used to discuss these unique aspects is limited. Without proper language to frame and discuss specific artistic moves, game developers may happen upon some of these novel expressive capabilities, but our ability to iterate upon and drive further sophistication in these techniques is limited. In other words, we can build around the edges of an aesthetic tradition based on “vibes”, but having precise language to identify and communicate specifics gives us a greater ability to build, looking directly at the object of our attention. Without proper language, painters may be able to intuitively copy the aesthetic qualities of cubism, but being able to identify the movement’s tenets in terms of lines, shapes, and perspective gives visual artists a greater capacity to identify the qualities being innovated upon and focus their further extrapolation of the ideas, building out and sophisticating the movement.

Naturally, due to the availability of existing language derived from the study of other artistic mediums, we are better able to describe the written narratives, visual art, and audio design of games than specific aesthetics achieved through play itself (player agency, interactivity, projective embodiment within a virtual space, emergent system behaviors, rules/mechanics…). This leads many discussions of games to be grounded in their most static elements — what Hartmut Koenitz calls the elements of protostory (Koenitz, 2023, p. 76-77). These elements are certainly important in the construction of game aesthetics, but understanding a game only in terms of its static, protostory elements (for example, grounding a Metal Gear Solid discussion solely in terms of its written narrative) overlooks the ways in which the experience of play contributes to the game’s artistic scope. The game was produced not as a vehicle for its linear, written story but to construct something new from the interaction between its protostory and embodied play.

One of the research rabbit-holes I found useful in preparation of my book (The Fundamentals of Video Game Literacy) is the atomization of gameplay design elements. What are the “basic units” of gameplay?

Why is this question important? From the design side, iteration upon specific mechanical ideas requires being able to separate those ideas from the systems in which they’re embedded and examine them on their own. How might elements of design transfer to other games with similar (or dissimilar) systems? How might differently tuning these elements result in differing play aesthetics? How may one draw allusions to other games through the evocation of specific design choices? From the player’s perspective, breaking out singular elements of design helps elucidate design lineage and places games in conversation with the games that have originated or iterated upon those ideas before or after.

In order to identify the structure of an artistic work — such that the gestalt can be commented or iterated upon — requires identification of its component parts. One can argue that the achievement of any artistic work is in its structural configuration rather than its specifics (the setting, time period, and even species of characters are regularly successfully rearranged around the story of Hamlet, yet the structural narrative configuration it proposes remains powerful). Jazz compositions are artifacts designed with no singular archetypal form; they are structures only, within which they are designed to be improvised. To identify a work’s structure, we must understand how its component pieces interact and interrelate.

A pun draws forth frivolous correlations between phonemes (basic units of linguistic sound) and morphemes (basic units of meaning). For example, the pun “a bicycle cannot stand on its own because it is two-tired” draws a phonemic link between “two” and “too” as well as two distinct meanings of “tired”, and it hinges a morphemic incongruity on the word “tired”. A bicycle cannot stand on its own because it is difficult to balance it on its two wheels without further support, drawing a humorous parallel to how people may have trouble standing when they are exhausted. The aesthetic pleasure in a pun comes from the feelings of surprise and problem-solving. The statement that something cannot stand because it is exhausted makes sense on its own, but the fact that the subject is a bicycle provokes a slight incongruity that we seek to resolve through the application of alternative meanings. It becomes a logic puzzle; which load-bearing portion of the sentence can be flexibly adapted to resolve the incompatibility without collapsing the structure? If “bicycle” was also the name of an occupation, for instance, we could read the sentence as “[a person who is a bicycle] cannot stand on its own because it is too tired”, that is not a common meaning for that word, nor does it elucidate any humorous morphemic doubling. To recognize “tired” refers not to physical exhaustion but to the bicycle’s tires, and “too” refers not to the extent of tiredness but to the quantity of tires a bicycle has, the ambiguity has been resolved in a satisfying and roundabout way.

As a pun can be understood as the play between its phonemes and morphemes, we can understand a dance as a play between kinemes (the physical movements and positions that constitute a dance, such as hip drops and arm raises). Kinemes do not have meaning in and of themselves, but they become indicative of different dance traditions when brought into sequence with other kinemes (Kaeppler, 2001, p. 51).

Similarly, gameplay is a dynamic interchange of such basic units of design (structure) and player action. I’d like to spend a few paragraphs exploring two of these basic units of gameplay: the ludeme, the basic unit of design, and the praxeme, the basic unit of player agency.

Ludemes

Though not the originator of the term, useful elaboration upon the concept of the ludeme is most often cited back to English card and board game historian David Parlett and his essay, What’s a Ludeme? (2007), in which he describes a ludeme (or “ludic meme”) as “a fundamental unit of play, often equivalent to a ‘rule’ of play; the conceptual equivalent of a material component of a game”. It is “comparable to, but distinct from, a game component or instrument of play”. For example, a knight in chess is a game component but not a ludeme; it is a material component of the board game. Its L-shaped movement pattern is a ludeme; a unique and identifiable expression of the rules that governs a unique form of interaction.

More importantly, we can consider the memetic quality of this kind of rule fragment (in the Dawkins sense): a ludeme can be transposed to another game. One could apply the L-shaped movement pattern of the knight chess piece to the movement systems of other games. In Bejeweled, pieces could be exchanged with those at the distal end of an L configuration rather than immediate neighbors. Halo could be reconfigured so that Master Chief only moves in L-shapes.

Crucially, transposing a ludeme to another game retains source identifiability. As such, recontextualization of ludemes can function in a manner similar to musical sampling; though the sample functions as a self-contained aesthetic quality of the new artifact, meanings and associations of the source artifact are pulled into the aesthetic experience of the new utilization. For example, when a modern hip hop song samples a soul song of decades past, the meanings and original context of the original song are brought into conversation with the meanings and qualities of the new work. This can draw forth parallels, incongruities, and ironies that enhance (or undermine) the meaning of the new song.

As these types of allusive parallels can be meaningfully chosen, they can also evoke unintentional juxtapositions. A song that is meaningful to a producer in one context may be more readily associated with a different context by an audience with a different experiential background. The song “Ride of the Valkyries” by Richard Wagner may be used to draw thematic parallels to the opera Die Walküre, but modern audiences may be more familiar with the piece’s use in Apocalypse Now an associate it with the Vietnam War, or the cruelty of war in general. Or perhaps the beholder first heard the song in the Looney Tunes short What’s Opera, Doc? and thinks of the song as being specifically comedic. Or maybe their first association is with the scene it scored in The Birth of a Nation or to the racist attitudes of the song’s composer. The associations that an audience draws and the meaning that it composites is not fully in the control of the artist.

Going back to the L-shaped movement pattern ludeme drawn form the chess knight, recontextaulization of this movement pattern may point back to chess, but as a pattern of movement, players may interpret it as a reference to dance — the box step or foxtrot. Dance, and in particular partner dance, is another rule-based system that involves the movement through delineated spaces; we can think of some of the structures of dance as ludemes or being roughly synonymous with ludemes.

Rules vs. Mechanics

Ludemes operate at the conceptual level of rules rather than the concrete level of mechanics. This distinction is a bugbear in games writing, so I will briefly elaborate here. There are several valid interpretations of how to define “mechanic” in the context of video games.

Janet Murray defines game mechanics as “rule-based, abstract processes and rituals by which games are structured […] For example, rolling dice to move around a game board” (2012, p. 421). In this interpretation, mechanics are like the intended superstructures guiding the ways in which rules instantiate specific affordances and limitations of play. Steve Swink (2009) boils mechanics down to available player actions; units of interactivity. Essentially, mechanic = verb. Miguel Sicart (2008) defines mechanics as the methods by which game agents (human or computer) can update the game state. The famous MDA (Mechanics, Design, Aesthetics) model defines mechanics as the mechanisms of player control and action-taking in games, as represented in the game’s code (Hunicke et. al, 2004). There is disagreement in usage between abstractness and concreteness, player-centricity or applicability to any game agents, action vs. structure, and hierarchical relationship with that which we may separately term “rules”.

In my writing, I posit a different distinction between rules and mechanics, most useful to the framework by which I examine games. Rules are the abstract social contracts that constrain play, and mechanics are the translation of those abstract rules into concrete, computer-enforceable expression of code. When playing non-digital games with friends, the shape of gameplay is primarily structured by rules, enforced and maintained by social agents within the play activity (or non-playing referees) based on social contract. The responsibility for the maintenance of play structure is on the players. UNO players observe turn order; if turn order was not observed, the structure of the game breaks down. But there is nothing that forces players to abide by these social rules. As such, players can (intentionally or unintentionally) modify the rules of a game and, as long as agreed upon by all participants, produce a functional set of “house rules”.

Rules are abstract elements of design. When conceiving of a game, designer(s) write a rule as an abstract idea and it is interpreted and enacted by players as such. Computers are not social agents, though, and cannot interface with abstract ideas. Rules require translation in order to be computer-enforceable. Rules have to become logical operations that can unambiguously be instantiated through computer code. This translated, codified form is what I call the mechanic.

The designer of a video game conceives of rules by which the game is to be played — for instance, “I want Link to be able to set a Deku stick on fire and burn through cobweb obstacles”. In order to realize that abstract intent within the game world, it needs to be translated to computer code, denoting object states (stick: on-fire/not-on-fire; cobweb: impassable/passable; stick—>cobweb: touching/not-touching…), interactions, and dependencies. Implemented correctly, the concrete mechanic is experienced as the rule it represents.

Rules and mechanics do not have perfect overlap, though. Something that is possible within the logical structure of the game but unintended by its developers may be thought of as being against the rules but in accordance with the mechanics (the glitches and exploits utilized by speedrunners fall into this category). Because computers are unthinking, non-reasoning, non-social entities, video games are structured primarily by mechanics and not rules. The only instances in which rules do apply are when games are brought into social situations, such as a competitive tournament or community in which specific mechanical affordances are prohibited for the sake of competitive fairness or interestingness, or when players decide, amongst themselves, to play by and socially enforce rules in addition to the mechanics that the game automatically enforces (no screen-peeking, or taking whiskey shots for every lose).

In short, rules are abstract elements of design structure (objectives, affordances, prohibitions…) that are socially-enforced and maintained by players or human referees. Mechanics are concrete expressions of code that represent designed structure that are automatically and impersonally enforced. A third category of invariants was called forces by David Kanaga (2015), referring to the impersonal and automatically-enforced structural elements that are not specifically designed but pre-exist the design exercise altogether. For example, the Earth’s gravity is a vital variable in the sport of golf, but it was not chosen and designed during the game’s development. These are often central to design tasks but are not designed elements, so they are separate from this particular exploration.

Praxemes

Along that scale, ludemes are closer to rules than mechanics. Though video game ludemes are experienced through their code-enacted instantiations, most ludemes “travel” between games as abstract ideas. Someone intending to enact an L-shaped movement pattern in Halo is more likely to re-translate that abstract idea into engine-appropriate mechanics than she is to copy and paste the code of a previous game featuring an L-shaped movement pattern directly (rather, in common examples of code re-use such as the baseline physics and operational code of game engines, directly copied elements tend to be common-use, not allusively identifiable or directly attributable to a single game apart from engine prototypes; many Source engine games feel like Half-Life 2, but they’re not all making specific and intentional ludic allusion to Half-Life 2).

I propose that a separate word is needed to describe concretized allusion/transferability between games; not allusion to rules but allusion to their enactment. If ludemes are memetic transference between games’ structural elements, it is useful to have a paired word that describes memetic transference between games’ enacted play. For this purpose, I propose praxeme (from Greek “praxis”, meaning “doing”, “acting”).

In The Fundamentals of Video Game Literacy, I used the term “ludic” for this purpose, for which I expressed displeasure in the book. Evolved from Frédéric Seraphine’s Ludic Framework (2016a, 2016b) I used ludic to describe a “basic unit of interactivity”, specifically an action of the player. My intention was to pay respect to the lineage of the idea by calling out Seraphine’s work, specifically, but it left me in the uncomfortable position of using ludeme and ludic to describe separate elements. Frankly, the game studies field is already oversaturated with “ludo-”-prefixed terminology, so it seems unhelpful to further contribute to this confusion. Allow me to make my first public retraction and reconfiguration for something published in my book — “ludic” is out, I now prefer the term “praxeme”. It appropriately distinguishes it from “ludeme” while drawing a parallel with the term and making their pairing obvious.

A praxeme is not inscribed into the programming code of a game but it is felt in the experience of play. It may be insisted upon by the code, but the experience of a praxeme is more intuitive than concrete. Consider the physical actions that a player must take in order to play a game, or the methods of thought and strategy that gameplay may require. To the degree that these can be specific enough to be source-identifiable, they may be used as tools for allusion between games.

How do these actually differ? Player actions are typically constrained and directed by rules and mechanics, so would not praxemes be necessarily preceded by matching ludemes? It is possible to arrive at praxemes through separate ludemic means. In MDA terms, ludemes are an expression of mechanics and praxemes are an expression of aesthetics.

Let me use a hypothetical example. Imagine a game called Exact Change about finding the precise combination of coins needed to pass through toll booths on the turnpike. The player is frequently stopped by toll stations requiring differing amounts of money ($1.49, $0.38, $2.33…). The player is given eight coins, arranged around the cardinal and diagonal directions of the controller D-pad. The player must press the D-pad directions that correspond with the desired coins and then press the X button to throw the selected coins into the booth receptacle. The player is encouraged to perform these actions (doing the mental math and entering the correct controller inputs) as quickly as possible, as players are scored on the total amount of time their journey takes (with the lowest score being superior).

As the player gets used to these demands, she may slowly calculate the amount, tentatively pressing the corresponding buttons as one would carefully enter digits into a calculator. Once the task becomes more comfortable, she starts to notice patterns; the needed coins are always arranged in a pattern around the D-pad that uses a comfortable motion — a familiar motion. Once she begins to excel at the math and recognize the coins by sight, she flies through the commands, intuitively picking up on their patterned placements before realizing that the commands she is quickly and intuitively entering are Street Fighter commands — quarter-circle forward + X, half-circle backward + X, Z-shaped “Dragon Punch” pattern + X, etc. The game shares no mechanics with Street Fighter (per the definition I outlined above), but the player feels the parallels in inputs in her hands, and it draws forth a non-obvious meaning, hidden in the physical experience of play — a parallel is drawn between tolling and violence.

Consider also the inventory system of resident evil 4; it presents a grid into which held items of differing sizes and shapes must fit. Some of these items and weapons are quite large and awkwardly-shaped, so the player has to be clever in their arrangement of items within their inventories. The more puzzle-like precision the player takes in arranging these items (minimizing “dead” spaces between items), the more she will be able to hold. This is a task of spatial efficiency that players often compare to Tetris. Mechanical overlap between resident evil 4’s inventory and Tetris are minimal — filling rows does not result in said row disappearing, and there is no timing or falling-block elements in the arrangement of Resi items, but players are encouraged to consider the shapes of objects and how they synergize holistically. The act of strategizing around the limited, grid-based space in order to maximize block-usage efficiency is evocative of the mode of strategic thought that Tetris requires, though mechanical overlap is minimal.

Conclusion

Identifying these atomized, singular units of design and experience is useful for building out a “poetics” of gameplay. Complex associations can be drawn from furtive resonances invoking previous works of art. Just as filmmakers can wordlessly intonate thematic resonance with familiar blocking, color-grading, camera movement, etc., we are just beginning to discover the “gestural” ways in which games can point towards and draw upon the legacies of one another.

My current area of study is procedural, gameplay-based humor. In order to conceive of how to formulate a “pun” with gameplay mechanics or how to effectively parody a procedural system, it is important to distinguish between these vectors of memetic resonance.

While ludemic atomization is well-recognized, I hope the field will also find the concept of the praxeme useful. Identifying patterns of player interaction (in both physical and cognitive play behaviors) may be a step toward the elusive goal of successfully designing a taxonomy of metagame types and practices.

As Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux (2017) argue, video games can be considered “equipment for making metagames” (p. 9); “Metagaming undermines the authority of videogames as authored objects, packaged products, intellectual property, and copyrighted code by transforming single-use software into materials for making many metagames” (p. 25). The artistic product of a video game is gameplay; the authored software itself is a set of instructions that computers instantiate in real-time into an interactive environment in which the protostory elements crafted by the developers and the performance of the player work together in order to craft a live experience. The instantiation of gameplay is the artistic product; the packaged good is not.

With that in mind, video game parody, poetics, etc. should derive from the resonance of gameplay rather than being restricted to the semiotic protostory elements. In other words, while past games can be evoked for parody purposes through the evocation of visual theming or writing (such as dressing Astro Bot like Solid Snake in reference to Metal Gear Solid), there are greater opportunities for more medium-specific allusion in gameplay-based resonances.

Works Cited

Boluk, S. & LeMieux, P. (2017). Metagaming: Playing, competing, spectating, cheating, trading, making, and breaking videogames. University of Minnesota Press.

Hunicke, R., LeBlanc, M., & Zubek, R. (2004). MDA: A formal approach to game design and game research. Proceedings of the AAAI Workshop on Challenges in Game AI, 4(1).

Kaeppler, A. L. (2001). Dance and the concept of style. Yearbook for Traditional Music, 33, 49-63. doi:10.2307/1519630

Kanaga, D. (2015). Intro to ludic ecologonomy (pt. 1). /\/\/\/\/\/\. https://wombflashforest.blogspot.com/2015/04/intro-to-ludic-ecologonomy-pt-1.html

Koenitz, H. (2023). Understanding interactive digital narrative. Routledge. doi:19.4324/9781003106425

Murray, J. H. (2012). Inventing the medium: Principles of interaction design as cultural practice. The MIT Press.

Parlett, D. (2007). What’s a ludeme? And who really invented it? Parlett Games. https://www.parlettgames.uk/gamester/whatsaludeme.html

Seraphine, F. (2016a). The ludic framework: A theory of meaningful gameplay. Digital Games Research Association Japan Proceedings of the Annual Conference.

Seraphine, F. (2016b). Ludophrases: Ludics before mechanics. Frédéric Seraphine. doi:10.13140/RG.2.2.34313.85603/2

Sicart, M. (2008). Defining game mechanics. Game Studies, 8(2).

Swink, S. Game feel: A game designer’s guide to virtual sensation. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers.