Does it make sense to say that videogames are made of rules? We might say that about boardgames or playground games, but even in these cases it’s not clear ‘rules’ are enough. Ultimately, is there anything that underpins all kinds of games and gives them something like ‘atoms’, or is the whole notion of a some common element lying beneath all games suspect?
Since
Minecraft appeared in 2009, game developers have been becoming far more open to the idea of letting players control their own play experience. One of the distinctive features of Mojang’s all-conquering sandbox is the freedom the player has to determine the
regime that governs their player experience – just building, exploring without monsters, struggle to survive, pursue adventure, and so forth. While options go back to the early strategy videogames, who inherit the flexibility of their tabletop predecessors,
Minecraft's choices go further, changing the fundamental nature of the games being played. This has been a trend far wider than any one game: Bethesda’s
Oblivion in 2006 ruffled some players’ feathers by providing a difficulty slider that could be changed whenever the player wanted, even if this voided all challenge as a result. This concept of player-controlled difficulty (which differs from choosing a difficulty at the start of a game that you must then abide by) has become increasingly widespread, for all that certain games, such as Vlambeer’s
Nuclear Throne, build their player experience upon a static – and wickedly high! – degree of challenge.
As an example of these general trends in game design becoming more pervasive, consider 2012’s co-op pirate RPG Windward. At the start of each game, a screen appears (pictured above) from which the player decides upon the set up of the overarching conditions for what is about to be played. They can select whether other players can bring in already powered-up ships from other worlds, whether items scale-down to the level of the current area to keep the game challenging, choose whether the factions are already at war, determine the degree of the restrictions on capturing towns, and set their own difficulty level by tuning the strength of enemy ships and the pacing of combat. These choices are framed as ‘Options’. But clearly these decisions alter the rules of the game about to be played, and do so to a degree that in the 1980s and 90s would have been inconceivable to the videogame community.
Giving players control of fundamental aspects of how a game plays is a relatively new phenomenon, perhaps little more than a century old. Late Victorian boardgames and early twentieth century tabletop games offered variations in the rulebook that are equivalent to the options in a game like Windward or Minecraft. In tabletop games, what became known around the sixties as ‘house rules’ have always existed: players alter certain rules of a game they’ve been taught to satisfy their own player experience, then teach those rules to others. It is this that has created a great many of the established card games, as well as variations of many other games such as mah jong (the British version, for instance, has a concept of ‘special hands’ wildly alien to the traditional Chinese game). As already mentioned, early strategy videogames inherited some of this flexibility, but they kept the core idea of a tactical or strategic battle challenge and never flirted with, for instance, removing combat and letting the player simply explore. It is that kind of radical shift in the players’ choices that Minecraft pioneers.
Jesper Juul and Miguel Sicart asserted in the 2000s and 2010s that one of the unique qualities of videogames is the inflexibility of their rules. I have argued against that: as a relic of 8-but computer gaming, I’m extremely comfortable with changing the rules of games – I peeked and poked a great many games on the Commodore 64, for instance, usually to make it more plausible to complete them in something less than geological time. It is easier to change the rules of most videogames than, say, a professional sport. Also, I’d like to note that personally I'm thrilled when people hack my own games for their satisfaction, even when it breaks the experience I intended (trainers for Ghost Master, for instance): it shows they care about the game I made.
Of course, multiplayer online games – whether World of Warcraft or Pokémon GO – have tighter security. Players of the former, however, can appeal to Blizzard for desired changes to the rules with at least some possibility of being heard, while players of the latter are out of luck: Niantic have their hands full just keeping the 65 million player infrastructure working. Nonetheless, it cannot be considered a conceptual tenet of videogames that their rules are fixed, as Juul and Sicart suggest. Honestly, I don’t think there is anything ontologically unique about videogames... their apparent uniqueness says more about their players’ aesthetic values than the artefacts in question. If you are unconvinced, try comparing Sega’s electro-mechanical arcade games of the sixties with early arcade videogames in the next decade.
Now it makes a certain kind of logical sense to say a boardgame is ‘made of rules’ and that understanding can be extended to videogames. As I have suggested many time before, the game design practices of early videogames descended directly from those of tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons or the Avalon Hill strategy games. But there is a cost to this description: the material components of those tabletop games are not made of rules... rules may constrain what appears on a D&D character sheet up to a point, but there is much that goes on in that regard which cannot reasonably be considered ‘rules’ – the description of the character for a start. An attempt to make rules the ‘atoms’ of games will come up against these loose ends, as well as the unavoidable fact that a polyhedral die is not a rule, for all that rules can be related to them.
The same problem extends to videogames. Suppose we try to accept the crude analogy that a game’s code is its ‘rules’. We are already on shaky ground when we think of a polygonal texture (which is part of the game’s code) as a ‘rule’. Moreover, just like dice are not rules, a game controller is not a rule, nor is a video display, an audio speaker, text duplicated in EFIGS languages, or the bits and bytes of a save game. There is much more to a game than the parts that lend themselves to being described in rules, however broadly we construe that term.
The unavoidable conclusion is, unless we take a very narrow view of what counts as a ‘game’ (and many do just this...), we must concede that games are not made of rules. Indeed, perhaps a better way of understanding the relationship between rules and games is not that rules are constitutive of games but that the constraints upon play within games can be readily expressed in a verbal translation we call ‘a rule’. In other words, rules can be understood as a translation of the practices that make up a game, and this includes both
player practices (things the players do) and creator practices (such as those that lead to executable code in a videogame).
In tabletop games, this process of translating the play of a game into written rules was precisely how game designers both formalised what happened in the game they were creating, and later communicated that experience to its eventual players. Prototypes, however, rarely required written rules to be played, so these usually came later. Rulebooks were thus both ‘analogue game code’ and a tutorial – usually a very bad one. But the game itself, however that term is understood, consisted of players exercising player practices with the material components of the game (up to and including physical spaces, written descriptions, air modulated into words etc.).
Importantly, the actual player practices of the pre-videogame era differed from group to group, not just because of intentional ‘house rules’ but because the rulebook was already an imprecise translation of the creators’ player practices, and this brought in all the problems of translation. As the Italians say, “all translation is betrayal.” So the ‘game’ of
Dungeons & Dragons from this perspective was not equivalent to the rulebook but rather the set of all player practices from
all the groups that played it, which is why the same rulebook could inspire such radically different videogame lineages as the
rule-play focussed
Rogue-likes on the one hand or the
role-play focussed
The Elder Scrolls series on the other.
When we come to videogames, the most significant change is that
one of the players is a computer or, perhaps more convincingly, the creators of the game artefact are surrogate players in every game played with it. I speak of ‘the game artefact’ here to preserve the idea that the games played are those conducted by the players engaging with the game artefact, which constrains that play in certain ways, but which can never entirely be in control of the games that happen when those artefacts are put into the hands of actual players (hence the concept of
metagames). The game artefact is what links creators of any game artefact with their eventual players, and in videogames the computer device (console, PC, smartphone etc.) serves as a local proxy for those creators, echoing their intentions in so much as they are not modified by the players, hardware problems, porting coders etc. Because computers are such reliable mediators in this regard, rulebooks (manuals) have fallen by the wayside, along with the very need to express the player practices through translation into verbal rules.
Except, then we come to
Minecraft’s
regimes of play,
Oblivion’s difficulty slider, or
Windward’s ‘options’ – and these are rules once more, because there is a necessary translation without which the player could not understand what they were selecting. Go back to the wordings in the screenshot of
Windward above: these precisely-termed ‘options’ patiently explain what checking a box will cause to happen. And these ‘options’ are rules, just like those in a tabletop rulebook. What they are not, of course, is atomic to the play of any of these games, since what makes possible any game (however that term is understood) is not so much the rules as it is the kind of being that has the capacity to play in the first place. A kind of being like humans, dogs, and birds that imagines itself in a world.
Games are not made of rules at all: games are made of players and the things they play with. Rules are simply one especially significant manner that players – including those particularly special players, the creator of any given game artefact – use to communicate their player practices to one another. But there is no atomic element at the base of all play and all games, neither rules, nor ‘ludemes’, nor mechanics, nor code... Play is the interrelation of beings who have the
capacity to imagine with a world that permits them to exercise that faculty. If games are anything in relation to rules, they are the forms of play that are best suited to having the practices of their players translated into words.
Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome!
Can you clarify your conclusion? It sounds like you are proposing player practices as the fundamental building block of games, but then you conclude that there are no atomic elements of games.
Posted by: Paul Gestwicki | Thursday, 21 September 2017 at 16:05
So much right and so much to quarrel with! But I am in a phone which limits the amount of typing I will do.
Let me suggest to you that play, as a process, occurs within systems, almost inevitably -- constructed or naturally occurring ones. And systems most certainly can be described by rules, though often they are complex enough that we can't actually do so. (We play in the system of physics, but we certainly cannot describe all of physics, only parts of it. In fact, I think that sports, as likely the earliest games, are a better starting point for thinking of the nature of rules than tabletop is).
Further, let me suggest that there is a lot of evidence that there are characteristics of specific systems that encourage play, and characteristics of others that seem to discourage it, as a practice. Which suggests that perhaps there is something structural there, something that perhaps can be described atomically.
None of this is incompatible with the Suits-like approach of describing play as a process or the DeKoven-like idea of it residing between players. Rather, what happens is a turf war over terms such as "game." I've given up on the turf war at this point; it's been won, or lost, depending on your preference. (Lost, in my case!)
I use the term "ludic artifact" now, which means the constructed system within which play occurs. And in thinking about those, rules are certainly a useful term and concept. In fact, your Minecraft example is entirely about the presence and absence of externally imposed *goals*, not rules. And we have had that approach since, well, forever, on playgrounds.
A better statement of Juul and Sicart's argument might be that software encodes the constituative rules (in the Salen and Zimmerman sense) more rigidly than table top does (though less so than physics does for physical sports); the other types of rules (they define three) remain negotiable.
Posted by: Raphkoster | Thursday, 21 September 2017 at 16:15
"The unavoidable conclusion is, unless we take a very narrow view of what counts as a ‘game’ (and many do just this...), we must concede that games are not made of rules."
Agreed 100%, I obsessed over this problem during grad school, it leading first to a blog entry about it in 2011 (http://www.hobbygamedev.com/spx/games-are-artificial-videogames-are-not-games-have-rules-videogames-do-not/), a DiGRA 2013 paper and presentation (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5n-apftKNVk), and then last year was one of the 2 main topics I presented on as an outside speaker visiting USC's Interactive Media and Games program (https://youtu.be/8KZm8j_QsOI?t=3138 - first half was pinball, related research but skipped in the time of the link since not quite as directly on topic).
One of the ways I found framing it helped some people to get the message in a way that felt less to them like arguing semantics (which at first was their main defense as "this is irrelevant, because who cares how we use words") was that rules in non-digital games work more like laws of government (must be known to be followed, is enforced within fuzzy limitations of human observer's judgment, can be violated by accident or intention), whereas what people sometimes call rules in digital games work more like laws of nature (don't need to be explicitly known to the player to be kept within, can apply at precision and quantity well beyond human observer's limitations, cannot be violated* by accident or intention).
The * after note of whether a rule can be violated is since of course there are various things we can do with or to videogames which we casually refer to as cheating, but only those are the "rules" of digital games that share the properties of rules of non-digital games. They are essentially the same rules for virtually all digital games, and are the type of thing we would consider when evaluating whether to allow a high score in the record books or for someone to receive acknowledgement in a live tournament: only use standard input devices, do not physically alter the hardware, someone else isn't playing on someone else's behalf, players are not physically interrupting one another outside of the game, software is used in its official and unmodified released condition or if modded then in the same known and approved way by all involved, etc.
Posted by: ChrisDeLeon | Thursday, 21 September 2017 at 17:30
Hi Chris,
I gave myself a couple days to properly cogitate and ruminate on this one and I want to preface my comment saying that I neither agree nor disagree with you entirely.
When I was in high school oh so many years ago, we had a substitute teacher cover one music class. She started by asking us all “What is music?”
Being suitably wise to such chicanery I kept my hands firmly down while my classmates blurted out her hoped-for wrong answers.
“Harmony!” “No.”
“Organized modulated tones!” “No”
(Okay, that last one was probably me making that up now, but I’m pretty sure there was something along those lines.)
In the the end she told us music is “rising and falling tension.” Now, the fact that I remember this 20+ years later (god, in getting old...) is testament to the fact that as an aesthetically appealing description of music, hers was pretty damn impressive. It’s suitably vague that it can be applied to any genre, including pop, excepting perhaps Bieber, and is the kind of deep comment that pointy-bearded music critics with stroke the aforementioned beard gingerly with their forefingers in appreciation.
All this is great, until you get to the business of actually making the music. All of a sudden all the aesthetics in the world are largely meaningless when trying to explain to an orchestra of professionals how to play the marvelous crescendos and whatnot that at the moment only exist in your head. St this point you need sheet music, chords, clefs and all the other tools that musical crafts people use to craft their works.
So, this is the crux of my comment: I am in no way arguing against the presence of art in Games, or the nature of Games as art. When viewing and considering the artefact on its own and when experience as a play movement, these considerations are important. I’d posit that there’s a whole other price to be written on this considering the works from a media perspective: ie games as played vs games watched and how that change in media experience affects the game experience.
But the reason we consider Games as constructed, or as I prefer to say “crafted” from some elements is so that we can communicate the howtos of that crafting. It’s not more important that the aesthetics perspective, and a game as experienced by its craft person is going to be a different piece than that experienced by the audience, but it is important is determining what will be ultimately experienced.
I think part of the genius of ale Blanc et al’s work is the multi vector approach to experience of the MDA framework: that Mechanics inform Dynamics that are in turn modulated by the Aesthetics for the crafters, and in the act of play the Aesthetics reveal the Dynamics that are constructed from Mechanics. Where things start to get thorny is when we try to decide actually *what* the Mechanics are. Le Blanc tells us it’s what the player can do, and also includes “equipment” in that sphere, so a golf club is equivalent to a Hadouken, apparently. Even Adams and Dormans carefully side-stepped the issue (in a book titled “Mechanics”, no less...) by referring us to MDA and also Zimmerman and Salen’s treatise on Rules that dispenses entirely with the term “Mechanics”. Adams and Dormans basically come back with “Mechanics are rules and vice versa” and that’s how we define Games. Sicart later chimed in and actually came up with one of the better definitions of Mechanics, I feel, only doing so from more the player’s perspective than the creator’s.
So this is wher I partially agree and disagree with you. Dismissing the aesthetics as the gloss on an entirely rules-based artifice is a narrow view and one that does great disservice to the unique properties of Games. But I strongly feel that any rejection of an attempt to determine game’s elemental units takes away a powerful tool from creators, not least when trying to educate new disciples in the craft. After all, as Koster pointed out in his talk on Game Grammar in 2004, even ballet has its own language. If we want to talk about these things with each other, it’d probably be a lot easier if we had a common vernacular that we all agreed on.
As always, it’s a pleasure to hear you thoughts.
Best regards,
Patrick S. Davis
Posted by: PatrionDigital | Friday, 22 September 2017 at 13:41
Fascinating comments by eminent individuals - considering I wasn't convinced this piece was of interest to anyone, I'm truly honoured by the response you have given it!
Paul,
Your challenge here is a good one! Player practices are what I am saying are essential to games, in the sense of played activities, but they are not atomic because they do not decompose into neat building blocks. So I am claiming that nothing is atomic to play (although once translated into rules, rules are atomic to descriptions of play...) but player practices are what cannot be removed from games. I should try and write more about this.
Many thanks for pressing me into clarifying this point!
Raph,
Firstly, I am extremely curious as to why you think you lost the war over 'game', or indeed why you think the war is over, and whether you think this piece a strategem within that war. (I myself 'disavowed' the term 'game' in a paper logically entitled A Disavowal of Games, in order to better understand how we use the term, and no longer have a definition of 'game'). I suppose the broad position I am taking here does not seem to me a boundary claim as it is a distinction between two applications of game - the game that is played, which has an extremely strong claim to being 'the game', and what I call the 'game artefact', and you call the 'ludic artefact', which has a clear parallel claim to being 'the game' in certain cases like tabletop, pinball, videogames etc. Both things are games... but not in the same sense of the word 'game', of course. ;)
Your claim that 'play occurs within systems' seems unproblematic to me. This piece rests on the recognition that those systems can be described or translated in different ways. Rules are one translation of those systems. Player practices, however, are what players actually do and are not a translation of the system as such. On the contrary, I might claim: any description of the system is a translation of the player practices.
The crucial point, that this piece doesn't engage with, is that as game designers manipulating the system (as rules or otherwise) is a powerful way to work. My challenge to all game designers is: understand the player practices and your job becomes easier, since the toughest part of getting those systems to form enjoyable games with their players is getting them to be able to play in the first place, which is made easier by recognising which player practices are already there to be drawn against.
In fact, what your comment really suggests to me is that I ought to explain how design on that basis can function, since that might truly throw this topic into a different light and (with luck!) provide another tool for canny game designers to wield with skill and artifice.
The core of your argument here is that given that different systems can encourage or discourage play, it is plausible those systems can be described atomically. But those descriptions are translations, and given that language (whether human or machine) can and is atomic in its construction, your claim is practically tautological. That is not a dismissal: as Wittgenstein makes clear, it is the tautological nature of logic that is precisely what gives it its usefulness. In at least this sense, I can agree with you! :)
You also make a couple of other interesting claims. Firstly, that sports are a better place to start thinking about the nature of rules than tabletop... if by rules we mean those translations of player practices that establish what constitutes cheating, absolutely - sports are hugely more normative than tabletop games. This is my point about the difficulty of changing the rules of those games. Secondly, that Minecraft's regimes of play are about goals not rules. Here, I must put the onus on you to explain why goals are not rules, and why the conditions of build mode or exploration mode can possibility constitute goals when they entail no end state. I suspect you have an interesting distinction here that you need to disclose! :) For me, I have used 'rule' in this piece in a very broad sense, as the text elements of a translation of the play of a game (or, equivalently, of the written description of a system for play). In this sense, a goal is just a particular kind of rule - the kind that sets an end state.
As ever, it is always a pleasure to have had the opportunity to engage you with an argument! I would be interested in taking this further... although it may have to wait until Spring 2018.
Many thanks for sharing your thoughts!
Chris,
Thanks for the endorsement of these ideas, and for this interesting exposition on the term 'rules'... I was not especially invested in distinguishing different usages of that term when I wrote that, since I was mostly thinking about design documentation (including tabletop rulebooks)... I really like your distinction between 'rules as laws of government' and 'rules as laws of nature', which benefits from the rather misleading way we describe the physical universe as having 'laws' - the power of metaphor! :)
I think there's a truly fascinating discussion to be had here in terms of your claim that the 'laws of government' for digital games are essentially the same in all cases. And this for me is not an accidental claim, it is the recognition that the player practices are what is actual (in Deleuze's sense) rather than merely virtual (again, in Deleuze's sense)... and because these are sited in the players, they are not directly dependent upon the game artefact.
Do you have a link to the paper rather than the video for DiGRA 2013? I don't watch many videos, but I read a lot of papers. ;)
Thanks for your stimulating commentary!
And last but not least...
Patrick,
A really interesting challenge to my overall argument here, and one that ties into some of the points I have already made above.
Yes, absolutely, in terms of the game designer's craft, the ability to translate into systems and discuss these in terms of rules, or MDA, or other methods (I have never used MDA myself because it doesn't quite match how I think about my game design process) is part of the craft. And the onus is on me to show whether or not thinking in terms of player practices also provides a game design method or whether it is just a philosophical or pragmatic way of describing play.
Significantly, my own game design methods have changed so much in the last twenty five years, I feel like I now have the benefit of applying a 'rules' or a 'systems' methodology to design, but I also have the benefits of prop analysis and player practices, which supplement and enhance my ability to apply other methods. I have done my best to describe the philosophical dimensions of these perspectives over the last ten years, but I have not yet managed to get these ways of thinking into a 'how to' text. I fear an attempt to do so will butcher the subtleties... such is my excuse, at least! :) But I ought to give it a go, all the same.
I utterly concede the merits of the rules-based and systems-based translations that you make here. It never occurred to me that my text would seem to dismiss this aspect, since for me I was trying to make a more philosophical (strictly, ontological) point, albeit one that does have practical applications. However, I find that Sicart's paper on 'mechanics' to be an attempt to solve a problem that is not the problem he thought he was solving. He aims to pin down 'mechanics' as a term... but that term works precisely because of its imprecision. It is a metaphor that compares games to machines - the system-perspective, that Raph is so good at wielding. In nailing down 'what mechanics means' he ends up with a constructed definition of mechanics which does not match how the term 'mechanics' is used. I question whether that was the best way of responding to the problem. But I welcome arguments that it was, provided they do not rest on any expectation that Sicart's approach is going to take off, since clearly, it hasn't. :p
Another truly thoughtful comment - many thanks for writing it!
Honestly, truly honoured by the thought that went into these comments. I hope my responses have repaid your time in writing them.
All the very best to you all,
Chris.
Posted by: Chris | Monday, 25 September 2017 at 07:16
Firstly, I am extremely curious as to why you think you lost the war over 'game', or indeed why you think the war is over, and whether you think this piece a strategem within that war.
No, I don’t think that this is really part of that war… I do think the war is largely over in that it’s not particularly getting discussed. It wasn’t really a valid war to begin with; “game” was never going to fit inside solely one definition, and what happened, I think, is that those of us who were trying to use it in any formal sense all retreated to nonce terms despite the virtues of using the word “game.” None of us wanted to associated with the idea of gatekeeping, as that was never the intent, so nonce words served our purposes for discussion.
As to why it was lost… well, we are in what I would term a moment of strong reader-response, subjective perspective, experiential thinking, and have been for quite some time. I have no quarrel with that as a lens, as long as it is a lens people are able to put down sometimes in order to look at things in other ways. The weaknesses of solely addressing things on that basis seem quite self-evident to me: where they force a focus on player experience, for example, they also tend to reduce focus on the game-as-object. It’s a lens that tends to push people away from seeing sports, or tabletop, as being games in the same sense, while instead pushes a sort of digital interactivity primacy, which often leans strongly towards narrative. As William Huber put it to me recently, “most videogames aren’t games,” which I think is exactly right in one sense of game (he was not making the statement in an exclusionary fashion either, I hasten to add, but rather making a humorous comment).
So: virtually no one in formalist games analysis wants to be exclusionary, it was clear that some players were seizing on formalist arguments to be exclusionary, culture wars exploded, and the prevailing current is around non-ludic digital experiences… it just made sense to use other words instead.
I suppose the broad position I am taking here does not seem to me a boundary claim as it is a distinction between two applications of game - the game that is played, which has an extremely strong claim to being 'the game', and what I call the 'game artefact', and you call the 'ludic artefact', which has a clear parallel claim to being 'the game' in certain cases like tabletop, pinball, videogames etc. Both things are games... but not in the same sense of the word 'game', of course. ;)
Right; I might term those a ludic *process* and a ludic artifact. But I would go further and say that when players engage in a ludic process, they effectively construct a ludic artifact in their heads.
Your claim that 'play occurs within systems' seems unproblematic to me. This piece rests on the recognition that those systems can be described or translated in different ways. Rules are one translation of those systems. Player practices, however, are what players actually do and are not a translation of the system as such. On the contrary, I might claim: any description of the system is a translation of the player practices.
I’d disagree. I regard, for example, physics as part of the “rules” of typical physical sports. Real world physics is not a translation of the player practices; it exists a priori, and instead, players reach accommodation with it, construct their practices around it.
That’s why I said that looking at sports, and really, at early forms of physical contests and practice, is maybe a better way of looking at what rules do. Sports basically impose goals on physics (and tokens), and additional rules that bound the physics problem.
The crucial point, that this piece doesn't engage with, is that as game designers manipulating the system (as rules or otherwise) is a powerful way to work. My challenge to all game designers is: understand the player practices and your job becomes easier, since the toughest part of getting those systems to form enjoyable games with their players is getting them to be able to play in the first place, which is made easier by recognising which player practices are already there to be drawn against.
You won’t get any disagreement whatsoever from me on this point.
In fact, what your comment really suggests to me is that I ought to explain how design on that basis can function, since that might truly throw this topic into a different light and (with luck!) provide another tool for canny game designers to wield with skill and artifice.
I am not sure it’s as different a light as you think; the game grammar style approaches have always been strongly cognizant of player practices, in my opinion, just through particular lenses. In particular, of course, as you have commented on previously, the learning aesthetic that is inherent in Dan Cook’s arcs, the stuff in Theory of Fun, and even the work on various types of emotional responses that we see in very different forms in Bura and in Lazzaro. Lately, I’ve done some work on what I would call rhetorics or semiotics of mechanics and tying them back to specific sorts of player practices and specific sorts of play outcomes.
The core of your argument here is that given that different systems can encourage or discourage play, it is plausible those systems can be described atomically. But those descriptions are translations, and given that language (whether human or machine) can and is atomic in its construction, your claim is practically tautological. That is not a dismissal: as Wittgenstein makes clear, it is the tautological nature of logic that is precisely what gives it its usefulness. In at least this sense, I can agree with you! :)
I think you are a little hung up on “the description” here. What I was getting at is that we know that a given system can encourage or discourage play. We should be able to describe *why* atomically. That’s a different locus of emphasis than focusing on the fact that any description is perforce atomic.
You also make a couple of other interesting claims. Firstly, that sports are a better place to start thinking about the nature of rules than tabletop... if by rules we mean those translations of player practices that establish what constitutes cheating, absolutely - sports are hugely more normative than tabletop games. This is my point about the difficulty of changing the rules of those games.
I meant something different, as mentioned above. Players can’t change physics, but they can change other aspects of the rules system. In tabletop, players can change certain *kinds* of physics. In digital games, it depends on what the software has implemented.
Secondly, that Minecraft's regimes of play are about goals not rules. Here, I must put the onus on you to explain why goals are not rules, and why the conditions of build mode or exploration mode can possibility constitute goals when they entail no end state. I suspect you have an interesting distinction here that you need to disclose! :)
Simply put, because they originate in the player not the system.
You have a system which enables play – this means, it is a system that actually *has* play to it, that has fluctuations and variability. It may be anywhere from fixed ranges or easily mapped decision trees up to chaotic or emergent and highly variable. People tend to call the lower end of that “puzzle.”
The system may then suggest a goal to a player and even provide metrics and an end state. If it does, people tend to call it a “game.” If it doesn’t, and simply provides a play space with no goals, terms vary; sometimes game, sometimes not.
If there is a token of some sort within the system, it tends to get called a “toy.”
But nearly universally, when presented with a “toy” or a “play space,” players begin to take that ludic system and design ludic artifacts out of it: how many times you can throw the tennis ball against the wall and catch it. Even the most freeform of play is built out of goals: constantly shifting ones. And even the most directed of games is premised on the idea that the player voluntarily takes up the suggested goal.
So goals, for me, are in the player’s head, which I suspect aligns well with what you are saying about player practices. Goals, in fact, are also what Meier calls interesting choices – because games are made out of games, and they nest. So interim goals are goals just as much as win conditions are.
For me, I have used 'rule' in this piece in a very broad sense, as the text elements of a translation of the play of a game (or, equivalently, of the written description of a system for play). In this sense, a goal is just a particular kind of rule - the kind that sets an end state.
I tend to like Salen & Zimmerman’s three types:
• Constituative rules are the ones that are mathematical. Fall and die. Make contact with an enemy whilst at a higher screen-space position, enemy dies.
• Operational rules are what is printed in the instructions.
• Implicit rules are unstated rules of behavior (no smashing the console when you die).
I wrote a post years ago about how I saw their applicability to rules vs mechanics, at Ian Schreiber’s request: https://www.raphkoster.com/2011/12/13/rules-versus-mechanics/
As ever, it is always a pleasure to have had the opportunity to engage you with an argument! I would be interested in taking this further... although it may have to wait until Spring 2018.
Always fun :)
Posted by: Raphkoster | Monday, 25 September 2017 at 08:28
Chris, you've already gotten the good answers, so allow me to suggest a naive response.
It's this: it feels as though you might be playing a bit of a game with the phrasing of your question itself, in two ways, and these combine with how you're making your argument to produce an unnecessary conclusion. Specifically:
1. You're answering your question as though it was being stated as "Are games made entirely of rules?"
2. You discuss "games" as though this is synonymous with examples of individual games, but "games" and "a game" are significantly different in the context of your question.
3. There's an elision of important differences going on in your argument between the nature of a game meant to be played by people sitting in a room together with the human rulesmaster and a game meant to be played by strangers separated in time and space from each other and from a potentially non-human rulesmaster.
(Please note that while the wording of these objections may sound like I'm accusing you of deliberately using some rhetorical tricks to try to make your conclusion look stronger, I am not saying or implying any such thing. It's just a little easier to summarize my objections this way.)
1. To the first objection: it seems to me that once you see the two phrasings of your question, one with the word "entirely" and one without, the reasonable answers break down into two trivial cases. "No, games are not made 'entirely' of rules because humans supply the random element required for play to exist. But games (as generally understood) do include rules of play as a required feature for comprehensible interaction with a product intended to entertain, so in that sense, games are made of rules."
In other words, if the assertion "games are made of rules" is said to mean that games include rules, that games are composed of multiple components of which one is a set of rules of play, then yes, that's a reasonable assertion. But if "games are made of rules" is meant to imply "games are made entirely of rules," then no, they aren't. There's no contradiction between these statements, and in particular no need to treat the first statement as inaccurate.
2. To the second objection (which is going to blend into the third in a moment), your question refers to "games" in the plural, and your argument points out (correctly, I think) that games as an ecosystem for playing certainly do seem to include components that aren't just about dictating how to play. But an ecosystem for play is certainly not the same thing as a game, which is the direct experience that will be had by most persons engaging in structured play.
This moves the first objection, which is about about essential quality (entirely vs not-entirely), into the realm of quantity: whether the percentage comprised by rules of "games" is, by some amount, relatively less than the percentage by which "a game" consists of rules. So now I'm arguing that maybe a sufficient difference in quantity -- how much "a game" is made of rules versus how much "games" are made of rules -- achieves a real difference in quality. "Games" may not be "made of rules" (meaning that the amount of rules comprising the ecosystem supporting play is perhaps 50% or less), but "a game," for most individual games, can perhaps fairly be said to be "made of rules" in that formal rules comprise a good majority of the stuff that defines that particular game.
You may not consider this a strong argument against your conclusion. But I wonder whether considering this argument -- being clear about whether your assertion refers to "games" or "a game" -- might help to strengthen your argument. If your goal is to argue that any randomly-selected individual game is mostly not made of rules, I think that's going to be much the harder (and more interesting) sell.
3. The third objection puts us fully into the realm of quantity: how much rule-ness is required to be able to reasonably say that an individual game is "made of" rules?
Your arguments use D&D (more generally, pre-video tabletop games) as an example, and that's fair; it's a game, but it has a large quantity of input supplied on the spot from human players. But you then use D&D as a template for judging other games, and because they also have human input you conclude that all games are like D&D (because all games have human input) and thus all games, like D&D, are mostly not "made of" rules.
The problem with this is that all games are not like D&D. And I think it's unobjectionable to opine that the vast majority of computer games, including CRPGs, are more unlike D&D than like it. As I suggested at the top, there's a big difference between a game played with other players and the rulesmaster right there in the room with you and a game played with computer-mediated avatars of strangers in other places and times with a distant computer program managing application of the rules of play. Humans in a room together can make up a lot of things as they go. But to deliver the required perception of fairness (which I know is a whole other subject of interest to you), a game must be defined as composed mostly of rules that are stable, that are enforced equitably for all players, and that can be applied automatically by a computer program. (See "code is law.") The farther you go from humans-in-a-room to MMORPG, the more that individual game is indeed "made of rules," because it has to be in order to achieve its intended function. The more that players are separated and unable to agree on rules ad hoc, the more the rules must be codified and enforced as written... and thus the greater percentage of "the game" is constituted by the rules.
So what I wind up with from all this is that while no game is made entirely of rules, some games are necessarily so strongly composed of well-defined rules, versus on-the-spot random inputs, that a reasonable person can be considered correct in asserting that such games are "made of rules." I further suspect that it's acceptable to think that most games are made mostly of rules as a requirement for recognizability.
I love Minecraft's emergent outcomes probably more than most gamers. But I can still think it's made mostly of rules or else it wouldn't be recognizable as Minecraft.
I don't know if you'll find any of this persuasive, but I hope it was at least entertaining. ;)
Posted by: Bart Stewart | Tuesday, 26 September 2017 at 08:36
So many wonderful things to discuss in these two comments, Raph and Bart! I've hit a nasty pinch in my workload, but I am working on replies.
Raph, I will be sending you a blog-letter in December that explores the topics you raised here, which move beyond my original piece and into another topic very dear to me.
Bart, I will draft a reply and either run it as a blog-letter or include it here in the comments according to whether it makes sense on its own or not.
But I will reply! I just need some time to clear other obligations... Many thanks for engaging with this topic! I am truly grateful.
Posted by: Chris | Wednesday, 27 September 2017 at 09:24
Hi Chris,
I believe you have teased out a continuum of how humans interface with each other or solitarily with play. There is little doubt in my mind that Rules are required, but the fidelity they hold depends on what people want to get out of their play experience! Which is exactly your point.
I believe that Rules are just one part of what I call the Imnersion Accords. I think you will find the following blog post validates your perspective:
https://journals.billo.ws/the-immersion-accords/
As many have said in the comments, Rules are more tightly bound to when competition is a focus of play. What I would argue is that Rules exist to track measurement, which is what is unique to Games.
You roll two dice, not three, or one when you play Monopoly. Forcing one player to roll a different amount of dice is unfair. But why is it unfair? Because the measurement of movement is so critical to the game space of a board game and all participants should be treated the same. If you were playing Monopoly by yourself (why would you?) you can go ahead and roll as many dice or not as you wanted.
It is the presence of solitary play that makes Video Games special and so varied. Rules exist to formalize player practices, and the fewer the players (and spectators) the less formal rules can be. In contrast Hi-FI rules are a must with eSports and Sports. It all depends on what is your player practice preference, informal and toy-like or absolute and sport-like. Thankfully the rule on that is you get to choose!
Thanks for the post.
Chris Billows
Posted by: Doc_Surge | Wednesday, 27 September 2017 at 12:19