What's A Ludeme
What's A Ludeme
by David Parlett
The word "ludeme" does not (yet) appear in any dictionary and therefore
has not established claim to any agreed definition. The purpose of this
article is to explain my personal interest in it, to justify my use of it, and to
offer some thoughts towards its definition.
My interest in it arises from the fact that, if you enter it into a search engine
such as Google, one of its earliest mentions occurs in a page called The
Ludemic Game Generator, which is introduced as follows:
Interesting that they use the term ludeme, which I had only seen in
two places before - in David Pritchard's book, and on my domain
name!
Two comments. First, I don't recollect using the term in my Penguin Book of
Word Games (1982), but I certainly did use it, I think for the first time, in
my Oxford Guide to Card Games (1990), where I (rather disparagingly)
reported an ascription of its coinage to Pierre Berloquin, of whom more
anon. Second, I don't think the late David Pritchard ever used it, but he and
I were often amused by examples of confusion between our two names, and
invariably corresponded with each other in terms of "To David P. from
David P." So it's possible that Sumo was referring to me rather than David
Pritchard.
"This talk owes a lot to the concept of 'ludemes'. Ben renamed them
'primary elements'. They are similar to 'choice molecules', but Ben
likes empiricism, not theory."
"Is there skill and risk involved in using an ability? If not, is this an
atomic unit of gameplay?
Card games are not solid objects like rocks and stones and trees,
but patterns of human behaviour, ranging somewhere in complexity
between, say, languages at one extreme and limericks at the other.
The similarities we are looking for therefore resolve themselves into
the gaming elements of which each game is comprised. Just as
atoms are not indivisible units but bundles of elementary particles