Ludemes are the affordances games offer to become playable—organized in semantic sequences and of memetic nature.

Dissection

• “Ludemes are the affordances”
  • interface elements and other features that afford player interaction and agency (a ludeme consists of a audiovisual representation and a méchanique) [Hurel; Hansen]
  • affordances are the possibilities for action that an object offers to an individual, based on the relationship between the object’s properties and the user’s abilities, intentions, and needs [Gibson; Norman]
  • phenomenological approach to ludemes as affordances for player experience (instead of a building block framework to design and analyse games) [Feige]
• “games offers to become playable”
  • fundamental elements/units that make a game recognizable as such and functional as a playable system [Parlett; Browne; Hurel; Hansen]
• “organized in semantic sequences”
  • forming networks of meaning within game structures [Hurel; Hansen]
  • logical patterns to create coherent gameplay systems and/or structured hierarchies that have semantic relationships [Parlett; Browne]
• “of memetic nature”
  • game mechanisms and ideas propagate across different games and traditions [Parlett; Browne; Hurel; Hansen]

Notes

• The definition of ludemes should illuminate the semiotic transfer between developers and players. By defining them from the player’s perspective (as in Feige’s approach to games), we emphasize that developers must create mental models of player experience, which they then manifest in code. This player-centric approach better captures how game meaning is transmitted and interpreted.
• I’ve avoided framing ludemes as ‘smallest units’ of games, as this creates unnecessary confusion by inviting comparisons to linguistics and morphemes. Such comparisons distract from understanding ludemes as functional affordances within the player’s phenomenological experience.
• The memetic nature of ludemes enables them to propagate between games as recognizable play patterns or affordances that players intuitively understand, while allowing developers to implement these concepts through entirely different programming approaches and technical solutions. For example, how the concept of “jumping” can transfer between games with identical player meaning despite being coded with different physics models, control schemes, or visual representations in each implementation.
• The terms meaning or meaningful in this encompasses first and foremost player comprehension and functional significance, referring to intelligible patterns of interaction that players can recognize, understand, and engage with to make sense of the game as a playable system. They can also roam into other aspects, such as semantic relationships and semiotic transfers, cultural contexts and phenomenological experiences.
• Is the game loop a ludeme? Maybe, but a fundamental, infrastructural ludeme that operates at a different level than more concrete affordances like “jumping” or “pushable block”. It’s the affordance that allows the game to exist as a dynamic, responsive system over time.
• What’s the ludeme when my controls move the background while the avatar stays fixed in the centre and not the other way around? This case represents a specific affordance in how spatial navigation is presented to the player.