This index documents the vocabulary used in the ludics discipline. These terms come from the theoretical traditions that study play — Huizinga’s cultural analysis, Caillois’s structural classification, Sutton-Smith’s rhetorical critique, Geertz’s anthropological method, and Csikszentmihalyi’s psychology of engagement. They describe features of play as a general phenomenon, not features of any particular game tradition.
The distinction matters. A trick belongs to card games. A session belongs to role-playing games. But concepts like agon, magic circle, and deep play describe structural and cultural features that appear wherever humans play, regardless of the specific game. That is what this directory provides.