Despite an explosion of scholarly interest in social media platforms and projects like Wikipedia, YouTube, and Digg, a yawning chasm persists in reconciling existing theories and assumptions about what motivates user contributions with observed behavior. I argue for a shift away from conceptualizing contributions to social media projects as altruistic, reciprocity seeking, or other concatenation of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations towards understanding the participants in these projects as gamers. This paper examines the evolution of Nupedia into Wikipedia to demonstrate how early policy choices affected the ability for the participatory environment to assume ludic properties. The case offers an example of how the misattribution of motivation or failure to anticipate these ludic imperatives can undermine editors’ motivations to contribute as well as the implications of designing environments and communities that engender and reproduce a ludic space.