Defining Videgames: Caillois's terminology

Banished, of which best suits Paidia is a city-building strategy game in which the player is in control of a small band of exiled people whom need to set-up a new village. The game takes real world ideals in farming and the different seasons to have meaningful effects on the players progress. Its a steep learning curve, and the game can punish you for something you did wrong 30 minutes ago, for example when you choose to build an extra house over another farm. This balance element within the game is crucial to surviving and growing a populace, with the players juggling labours and having to make choices as to whether to add that extra worker into the farms, to get more food before winter, or put that person within a forester hut to ensure you have plenty of wood, preventing people dying from the cold. this produces a really rewarding feeling when you get a good village going, but again it can all go wrong with a placing of an extra house without resource backing, as its occupants will draw allot on the villages food supply.

Fifa games mainly conform to Ludus, in which there are many rules that are placed upon the player, The pitch area for example limits movement, the offside rules prevent players from just having a striker behind the defensive line,etc all of these rules would seem to be weigh the player down, but this is what adds pleasure to playing, as it takes more skill to be really good at the game.There of course has a clear outcome to the game as you either win,lose or draw a match.

Dayz is really a mix of all of Caillois's terminology, as a little background to the game Dayz is a After-apocalypse survival game, in which the player has to survive by looting abandoned houses looking for food,water and clothing. Agon comes into play as the game is an online game, this can cause really fierce competitive play in which this survival element means that if you die you lose everything, this makes people less friendly in random encounters with other players with normally everything culminating in a quick gun battle and a player dead. Alea is not massive within the game as something like the map is fixed and not randomly generated, but the one thing that is random/chance is the spawning of objects in houses and farm buildings, some of the more sort after gear can be found in military establishments, this however is where most players lurk, Movement is a key element in the game also and players can spend up to a few hours traversing the map in order to get to different towns and cities, this is very much a factor of Ilinx. finally Mimicry as Dayz is in part a simulation game in basic surviving, the players can also become involved enough/ invested within their personal character that role-playing can take effect, with people forming teams or local police forces in order to protect some of the newer players.

Surgeon Simulator is a game which sits within the Mimicry category, as you see your self role-playing a surgeon, the interesting thing is the player only controls the fingers/arms of the surgeon via keyboard and mouse controls, this produces really interesting and funny game-play as you struggle to pick up the bone saws and other equipment in preparation for the operation, of which generally gets messy quickly as you swing a saw wildly around. A form of Alea creeps into the game also, not in the form of online competition but against yourself in trying to beat your previous and most likely really bad operation.