About · Ludum
Why games
Ludum is Neta DAO’s game publisher. It makes serious games — about capital, infrastructure and coordination — and builds them in public.
Games are models you can enter.
What Ludum is
“For play and nothing else is the mother of every habit.”
“The opposite of play is not what is serious but what is real.”
Some systems are easier to play than to explain. A market where everyone owns a piece of everyone else; a network that is worth only what it connects; a rule that turns yesterday’s investment into scrap. Read about them and you understand them. Sit at a table and run them for three hours, and you feel them.
Ludum publishes games of that kind: long, social and exact, about money, infrastructure and the ways people coordinate. Its first two are 18xx games — the family of railway-and-stock games that Francis Tresham began.
Ludum and Play
Two addresses, two jobs. You never have to come through Ludum to play.
Ludum
ludum.netadao.org — the publisher’s house.
- Projects
- Why games
Play
play.netadao.org — where the games run.
- The games themselves
- Never behind Ludum
- Every PLAY on this site leads here
How statuses work
- PlayableRuns on play.netadao.org now. PLAY takes you straight there.
- In developmentBeing built, in public. It opens on play.netadao.org first.
- ExperimentalA playable prototype. Rules and balance may change between sessions.
- ResearchStudy and writing about games, not a game itself.
- ArchiveFinished or retired, kept on record.
Neta DAO
Ludum is a Neta DAO project, alongside Neta DAO Academy.
The Academy teaches; Ludum builds games. They share a parent and a habit of working in public, not a look: the Academy is quiet and Ludum is loud.