ewilen: The rules of the game are the meta-rules of the game

Elliot Wilen (

ewilen) wrote,
@ 2006-02-14 09:43:00

Entry tags:

philosophy

The rules of the game are the meta-rules of the game
Jim Henley has a habit of saying stuff that blows my mind. Over on John Kim's LJ, in a post about the controversies over diceless, GM-adjudicated play, several of us got into a side discussion about the fact that all functional gaming is built on trust, and how strange it is to see rules, in a way, as an alternative to trust. This reminded me of a post on the Forge which opined that Polaris is neat because you can use to the rules on conflict resolution to resolve conflicts over the rules themselves. Of course that only displaces the problem by one level: unless you're willing to depend, ultimately, on trust, you risk getting caught up in an infinite regress.

Jim responded, "There's one other wrinkle: you have to enjoy using the rules to resolve rules disputes."

Deep, man.

See, the same thing applies to resolving rules disputes via discussion. I see a connection to Chris Lehrich's ideas about bricolage ("tinkering") as a mode of discourse within games, and the way that traditional gaming has tended to treat its own rules systems as objects for tinkering. (The most developed version of these ideas which I've seen is at Chris's "personal" LJ, here with followup here.

IOW, in much of traditional/classic gaming, both the rules and the in-game action are approached through a tinkering mindset which the participants enjoy, or have trained themselves to enjoy. On the other hand if you enjoy the mode of discourse offered by Polaris, it becomes natural to apply it recursively to the rules themselves.

What I think comes out of this is that the actual practice of playing a game (not the rules text per se, but the procedures and behaviors engaged in by the participants) have the effect of checking each other and building trust--assuming the game is successful. There may be a connection here to signaling (signalling) games, in that certain behaviors can be taken as proxies for the statement of one's honest intentions. (I wouldn't push that connection, though, without a better understanding of signaling games and their applications.)

And taking this a step further into speculation-land, we might look at some forms of dysfunction as a breakdown in signaling: we're playing a game that, to be enjoyed properly, requires oblique expression of our interests. But if either of us is inept at sending/receiving/acting on social signals, what happens? (Cf: a bad date.)

(Post a new comment)

tigerbunny_db
2006-02-14 07:02 pm UTC (link)

I've long argued that gameplay can be understood as a signaling process.

You write: we're playing a game that, to be enjoyed properly, requires oblique expression of our interests.

If you're experiencing signaling troubles, you can work with
(a) the obliqueness of signalling - moving toward abstract author/director stance or similar - transmit "in the clear"
(b) the interests component - explicit and constrained setting, situation, etc; heavy front-loading or sideband tuning; basically, mechanisms for limiting the library of in-bounds, allowable symbols - using an agreed codebook
(c) the multiplicity of signalling - limiting who is allowed to say what, and when, so that the complexity of the signalling problem diminishes - moving to a broadcast or half-duplex mode

I am particularly interested in how gameplay functions to teach communication. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I think most of it either ignores the question or teaches bad communication skills that are at best only applicable to a narrow and highly artificial environment.

(Reply to this)(Thread)

tigerbunny_db
2006-02-14 08:33 pm UTC (link)

I'd like to clarify, btw, that I am in fact aware of the kind of "signaling games" Eliot refers to. I think they've got very, very little to do with roleplaying games. A better example for the purposes of roleplaying games are games such as Telephone or Charades, in which the abstraction level is much lower than in economic signaling.

Signaling in the context Eliot refers to is pretty different than any kind of signaling game that might pertain in a small, persistent group of players.

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

ewilen
2006-02-15 12:10 am UTC (link)

I may be incorrrect in my reference to signaling games, but I'm not sure I understand the comparison to telephone or charades. In those games you set up obstacles to communication, then you try to communicate anyway for fun.

What I'm talking about is a form of signaling where the overt message is just the "carrier". The hidden message, at the social level, is "we can get along, we share certain interests, we like to interact in this fashion".

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

tigerbunny_db
2006-02-15 03:37 pm UTC (link)

Whoa. Okay, then you lost me. I get that this happens in functional play, but isn't that really, really overloading these poor sorry little symbols? They have enough to do carrying the fiction-relevant and game-rule-relevant data without also needing to serve as social glue. I'd think that it would be massively preferable to have "we can get along, we share interests, we are enjoying this interaction" as the ground state of any possible rpg play.

I get that in a lot of groups, this isn't in fact the case, and that in those cases the game-symbol-exchange gets drafted into conveying social cohesion messages in addition to its normal fiction-relevant payload, but I can't see that as either a necessary or optimal state.

Indeed, I wonder if it accounts for the kind of fictional-conflict-avoidance play I sometimes see in groups with uncertain or actively negative social cohesion. The group is working so hard to use the fiction to affirm group cohesion, that they don't want to put any fiction-relevant content into their communications. They're using the fiction primarily as cohesion-building.

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

ewilen
2006-02-15 08:58 pm UTC (link)

What I'm suggesting is that it's hard to figure out if we get along, etc., especially for the purposes of this particular activity, until we start doing the activity itself and checking each other along the way. The rules of the game encode a certain mode of discourse; exhibiting that mode tells everyone else you're with it. The feedback loop is so tight that it's easy to miss. A more visible case might be the formation of soldier-group solidarity through drill. Or social bonding through "meaningless" chit chat.

At this point I'm not sure if this particular insight (as opposed to the connection between practices of rules development and rules application) is really very deep or extremely banal. But I think I've seen similar expressions of how game rules function socially, by Vincent and Clinton (and maybe others).

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

tigerbunny_db
2006-02-15 09:14 pm UTC (link)

Yeah, this is "say it yourself" for Vincent's stuff, AFAICT. It does give a spin on it, though. I wonder if for some groups the affirmation of group identity through shared process is a really major motivator for play? That's nearby to the territory I was hunting in my post about Celebration back in December. Procedure eclipses any creative/imaginative motive for play, because procedure affirms belonging.

(Reply to this)(Parent)

ewilen
2006-02-14 08:59 pm UTC (link)

Thanks, a-c are all avenues that have interested me in the past (mainly b & c), but breaking them down this fashion is helpful.

Vincent said something that's a lot like (c), and it's been going through my head for the last few days as I've been pondering my proactive/magnetic concepts as a specific configuration of push/pull in an immersion-supporting manner. But I can't find it over on his blog right now.

(Reply to this)(Parent)

	jimhenley 2006-02-14 08:12 pm UTC (link)
	Thanks for the mindshare, Elliott. I want to state for the record that I've got nothing against Polaris myself. I own the game, have read it and am looking forward to playing it. Ultimately, I think all I'm saying is, "System Does Matter. No, it REALLY DOES matter." I made a pest of myself on Adam Dray's site today in the Amber thread about another aspect of the same business. (Reply to this)

Mini Sitemap:

Username:		Create an Account Forgot your login? Login w/ OpenID
Password:
	Remember Me
	English • Español • Deutsch • Русский…