Paidea & Ludus - The 4 Types of Games

These terms are from the book  Les jeux et les hommes by Roger Caillois.

Paidea - Games that are generally have a lot less rules which the player is bound by, and ,as the majority of Paidea games lack a proper ending, the player can set their own goals or objectives.

A good example of a Paidea game is Minecraft, a sandbox construction game. While Minecraft does have a set of rules the player must follow, their is no specific end goal inside the game: the player must set their own goals. For example, the player can choose to collect materials to build a really tall house made of dirt or the player can use these materials to obtain rarer materials and create better tools and armour.

Ludus - Games that have a lot of rules and will generally have one outcome or goal at the end of it. 

A good example of a Paidea game is Supreme Commander, a real time strategy. The end game of each battle of Supreme Commander is the same, destroying your opponent, though there are multiple ways of accomplishing this. As there are way more rules than Minecraft, Supreme Commander is a lot linear, and the player cannot really create their own goals.

On top of these 2 definitions, Caillois came up with 4 other words to describe other parts of games.

Agon - Competitive. An example of a competitive game would be Call of Duty, more specifically its multiplayer, where you are pitted against multiple other players (possibly in teams) and must kill enemy players.

Alea - Chance. A good example of a game with Alea is FTL - Faster Than Light. The game has you control a spaceship through a group of star systems, each filled with random encounters and battles.

Mimicry - Role Playing. An example would be Star Wars - Knights of the Old Republic, where the player takes control as a Jedi fighting a war against an army of Siths.

Ilinx - Altering perspective. An example would be Anti-Chamber, a game set in a Escher-like world, where the player can get extremely lost or stuck in seemingly endless corridors and pathways, as well as solving logic puzzles.