The Tyranny of "Rule"

Or: Kill The Designer/Cop In Your Heart

There’s honestly no real reason for me to write this, as Miguel Sicart’s Against Procedurality says everything I’m about to, and better, and in 2011. But also I’m a messy bitch and this is a blatant subtweet of Liberal game designers weaponizing the academic social justice language to push their corpoclone trad books, so to hell with it.

The game designer in your heart is a cop. Kill them.

This is only half hyperbole for effect. Game design is creation, and cops don’t create things (aside from dead bodies). That said, it is all too easy for the game designer to tread the path of an extremely cop mindset - rigidity, conformity, and dehumanization - and that is all too sadly not hyperbole. In fact I would say that the dominant academic narrative of how one should design games is entirely rooted in this mindset of proceduralism, in the mercenary laying claim to the act of play, and indeed to the very concept of improvisation and creativity at the table.

Sicart’s essay (which again, you really should read) focuses specifically on ludologist’ hyperfixation on conveying political messages. I have little to add to that; my focus is on the very simple litmus test of how a game designer reacts to the phrase “rulings over rules” and how that betrays conscious or unconscious bias against play.

In typical fashion, I largely blame rejection of “rulings over rules” on the Forge, and Ron Edwards in particular (he of “bad games give you literal brain damage/is the same as statutory rape” fame). I start with Ron because Ron gives us the clearest example of what I call Designer-brain (with a capital D) in his “System Does Matter” essay. A brief summary: “A game is only as good as the people who play it, and any system can work given the right GM and players” is incorrect, because adapting a given game to a given group/table is wasting their time, and wouldn’t they be having more fun with something they didn’t have to adapt?

This theory, supported by Ron’s GNS theory (itself an adaptation of Mary Kuhner’s Threedfold Model) posits three game “phenotypes” - Gamist, Narrativist, and Simulationist, and hypothesizes that all players and all games neatly fit into one of those three categories. A “good game,” then, exclusively embodies its assigned phenotype - Ron was very explicit in that they do not mix and those that do do so at the risk of becoming “incoherent” - and is designed in such a matter that players’ experiences are curated within the confines of that specific phenotype. The purpose of the game and by extension the game designer is to create an experience for the players to, well, experience.

In the same way, the games cop, the proceduralist, the rules tyrant, adheres to the dogma of “rules, not rulings” because rules represent scaffolding, structure, and order, while rulings - ephemeral spur-of-the-moment decisions made outside the sheltering womb of Designer and not standardized across all experiences - represent incoherence and chaos. The rules, as I’ve been repeatedly told, are what make a game a game - otherwise, it’s collaborative storytelling, freeform, or worse: “just play” (both derogatory toward the actual act of engagement with a game/book etc and a completely unnecessary and arbitrary taxonomy). The rule exists to create a specific, curated play experience catered to a specific genre emulation or designer intent. A game designer’s role is to create this “curated experience” or “walled garden” or “fruitful void” for the game’s players to experience according to the intent of that designer.

In both cases, the Forge academic and proceduralist games cop have, as Brian Gleichman puts it so succinctly, “mistaken components of an activity for the goals of the activity… [and] assumed (without reason) that those are the only possible goals.” It should be patently obvious that there would be more than three goals/motivations for play, and equally ludicrous that such goals and motivations that there are would be interchangeable and indeed incredibly fluid. Ron, like his ideological descendants, simply did and does not care to actually understand why people play games, merely to assign a hierarchy of values to the way other people play compared to himself.

But what I would argue is even worse than misguided taxonomy and categorization of game is the frankly egregious misconception of what the role of game designer is and, by extension, what the role of the player is. According to both the Forgian pseudoscholar and the proceduralist games cop, the role of game designer is to create play and, by extension, a specific experience and behavior, through the rules of the game. The “meaning” of play, then, is “… predicted, even contained, by the rules, and therefore the meaning of the game, and of play, evolves from the way the game has been created and not how it is played; not to mention when and where it is played, and by whom.”

This kind of Designer-brain thinking, by extension, either consciously or unconsciously, views the player not as an independant entity with agency and valuable input and inspiration on the what and how of the game experience. The Designer-brained Forge scholar/games cop views players, either consciously or unconsciously, as activators of their Design Intent. Again quoting Sicart: “The rules constitute the procedural argumentation of the game, and play is just an actualization of that process… Meaningful play is playing following the rules, and the meaning of a game comes from the meaning of following the rules.” This kind of Design-focused mentality obliviates contributions by the player in exercising their creativity and indeed their agency through play - players are merely rules-conditioned rats running through a maze, following the proscribed breadcrumb steps in order to be rewarded by the “cheese” - the game’s meaning/genre emulation/“curated experience.”

The villainy of this mindset should be self-evident and I don’t feel the need to examine it much further than presentation and accompanying scorn. Designer brain views the curation of experience as the act of creation inherent in game, but the simple fact is that the players bring so much individually and collectively to the table that any “curation of experience” is a doomed goal in the first place! It’s an impossibility, a narcissistic attempt at categorizing what cannot be categorized and control what cannot be controlled. Designer brained game designers seek to lay authoritarian claim to play through “intent” but much like authorial intent in fiction or directorial intent in cinema, how a given body audience interprets a piece of art is entirely upon the viewer. The art no longer belongs to the artist in any meaningful way after the moment of creation. It’s gone. Attempting to assert control over how people view art isn’t just profoundly cop behavior in all its fascist impotence, its actually impossible.

I could go into all the manifold reasons why attempting to contain and control player agency is at its heart a fascist undertaking but I don’t actually need to, because as a game designer: unless I am actively at your table I cannot affect how you choose to interpret the words in a game book, and even if I am at that table I have no power over you that you cannot simply deny. Game designers are so high off the self-asserted authority of their own intent they imagine an omnipresent authority over those that choose to engage with their work rather than allowing the planted seeds to bloom as they will. It’s a vain and narcisistic impossibility, an impotent “old man yells at cloud” response to the concept that someone might engage with your work incorrectly, an arrogant and self-obsessed bleating that betrays a profound insecurity. I have nothing but contempt and scorn for these designers, these idea parasites, these creativity landlords who lay claim to all positive outputs of play (“you had fun playing my game because I am a genius”) and outsource all negative outputs (“you didn’t have fun because you are idiots”).

The phrase “rulings over rules” profoundly threatens these adult toddlers because any culture of play that emphasizes adaptability, improvisation and player agency threatens their hegemonic identity as Controllers of Meaning through their narrow-minded and uncreative concept of meaning through rule. If “rulings over rules” or indeed “rule zero” means you can disregard their precious Rule at will, it means you can disregard their precious Meaning at will. “In that case, why would I ever buy your book?” they wail and gnash their teeth. “If I could just imagine things on my own, why would I need to buy into your Product?”

Exactly, I inevitably respond.

A “good” game book provokes ideas, and from those ideas inspiration. The desired output of a game book is play - not a story, not a curated experience, not a narrative or efficiency or any other number of incorrect and generally unflattering motivations for the act of creation. Play is the goal a game designer should aspire to, and because you cannot effectively market or commodify play, that drives Designer-brained game designers up the wall. You cannot lay sole claim to play (though they often try). You cannot sell play. It happens independent of design, of intent, of curation. It might be inspired by but isn’t reliant on rules or books. It isn’t confined by logic or reason.

Game designers sell the value of intent because they can’t sell play. Game designers aren’t selling a book, or a rule; they’re selling themselves, their perceieved ingenuity, their avowed importance. They are selling the notion that you cannot meaningfully play if you haven’t paid their toll and followed their rule. This is why conversations of whether or not a game requires rules (they don’t) fall into circular logic: “games need rules because without rules, it isn’t a game.” Game designers will attempt to create still more categorization and taxonomy, more phenotypes of “it’s play but it isn’t a game” to downplay the importance of play and overstate the importance of design intent, rather than acknowledge that the entire concept of “a game” as we meaningfully know it is derived entirely from the interaction between people at the table and not between people and the Game Designer.

This obsession with taxonomy, with Rule, with control, unmasks such game designers as little more than amateur phrenologists, small-minded petty tyrants who envision all relationships in the sense of hierarchy and who naturally place themselves atop it. I wouldn’t trust anyone so singularly focused with categorization and the placing of people and schools of thought within it with anything, let alone to dictate the terms by which I spend my leisure time. When I play games I’m engaging with my friends, not with a game designer I’ve never met and have no interest in meeting. I don’t need to seek permission from Rule to find meaning in the play experience. And neither should anyone who values their own input and agency.