In focusing on a narrative form that he terms as ludic, Newman looks at the work of the teasing inside joke and the enigma of the puzzle film. The word ludic was created around 1940 by psychologists as a way of describing the play of children, and applied to film, Newman informs us that this game-like form “… offers its own rewards, its own pleasures.” As a demonstration of these “pleasures,” Newman reads Pulp Fiction (1994) as a puzzle created for spectator entertainment, that uses the form of its “out-of-order storytelling” as a way of playing with spectators, and ultimately pulling them into the pleasure of the game, as opposed to treating the film as an art form that has been created in the shape of a puzzle.
To do this, Newman holds
To do this, Newman holds