Looking at the history of video games through the prism of ludicisation processes

Résumé

Serious games, news games and persuasive games show that games today permeate numerous other spheres of activity previously considered as separate from the gaming sphere, thus reciprocally blurring the definition of what a game actually is. It seems clear that the characteristics and dichotomies which are habitually used to defined games now need to be put into some perspective. For example, a game is no longer necessarily part of an activity which is carefully separated from the rest of a player’s existence as argued by Caillois (1958) while omnipresent incitements to play games bombard users of all digital devices. The emergence of these new game forms has led to the break-up of the “canonical model” of games defined by Johan Huizinga (1951) and taken up by Caillois, a model which had however provided a robust structure for a large number of theoretical frameworks used in games studies (Schmoll, 2010) and within which games were defined according to a set of intrinsic criteria (unproductivity, freedom, separation from everyday life etc.). Conversely this emergence of previously unseen ludic phenomena has breathed new life into other approaches to games which had perhaps received less coverage in studies of the subject and particularly the ideas developed by Henriot (1989).