ダニエルの冒険

We had a very interesting class about rules in games last week. It was interesting to see how people understood the concept, as I came at it from a physics point of view but others approached from a legal/social authority point of view. Surely both will give very different understandings.

Physics

From my point of view, rules define the world, and they’re unbreakable. My understanding doesn’t allow you to imagine a world with no rules, because it doesn’t exist: it can’t be defined. A world where the rules of physics don’t exist cannot support life… and neither matter nor energy.

When you explain any gameplay, you’re basically describing a set of rules. In Tetris, blocks of different shapes, falling down and gathering on the bottom of the screen, must be arranged in rows for the blocks in those rows to disappear. That description is nothing but a collection of rules: blocks exists, blocks have different shapes, blocks fall, falling things go down, things stop falling when they hit the bottom, a full row disappears.

In more advanced computer games, it’s the very same except with more complex systems. At the end of the day, any rules of a game played on a computer must have rules written in code, which means that they’re explicitly defined somewhere.

Enumerating all rules

I’ve been focusing on defining reality, or a computer simulation of reality, so far in my explanation of how I began to understand the concept of rules in a game context. However, my explanation is lacking if you move a step forward and consider a game with rules not explicitly and completely defined mathematically. An example we had in class was Chess. It was interesting to see how implied the rules are in many games, chess included. The example we were provided with was a player taking an infinite amount of time to make a move. To be honest, I’d like to see some more examples, since everything I could come up with was the same idea: blocking a game by refusing to do something. If anyone has any ideas, please comment. The point that was made in class was that it’s impossible to enumerate every rule for a game. In the example of taking forever to make a move, then a new rule must be made to enforce this. This process is supposed to be cyclic and result in an infinitely long list of rules. Again, if anyone has any examples to the contrary, please provide them.

So what sort of rules can be made to enforce desired behaviour, such as not taking forever to make a move?

Rules as an enforcement of social authority

One understanding that lots of people jumped to was rules in the context of a university or civil laws. These rules are made by people to define what other people can and cannot do. These are not really enforceable (if they were, there wouldn’t even need to be a word for “crime”, as it logically couldn’t happen). That’s the most interesting difference between the different understandings of “rules” I saw in class: the laws of physics are a truth that cannot be broken; the laws of man are broken daily.

So what does this mean in the context of game rules? The conclusion I’ve reached is that there are three types:

• The first type, physics-like rules, are probably not actually enforceable when we talk about games, unless you want to recycle rules enforced by nature (for example, saying that when you kick a ball up in soccer, it comes back down). I suppose these rules exist in every game, but there’s no point in stating them because suggestion opposite rules, or attempting to remove the rules, would mean that nature itself would cause players to break the rules of the game.
• The second type, law-like rules, are the most common. For example, in chess there are two teams of pieces with distinct colours, black and white. There’s nothing to stop someone creating a new piece, a red elephant, and placing it on the board during a game. This would be in violation of that rule, which means they would lose.
• The third type is the type which had some interesting discussion in class, and involved the case of taking forever to make a move. These rules are implied and not explicitly stated. These unstated rules originate from our personal experience of growing up in a human culture. “Players take turns making moves” implies to many people that these moves are within a reasonable time. The difficulty with this set of rules is that they’re very difficult, if not impossible, to define. A point raised is class is that what a “reasonable” amount of time is cannot be defined in a rulebook. The definition of a “reasonable” amount of time resides in our culture, and is a concept in our collective consciousness that cannot be defined with a number. Is it 20 minutes? 5 minutes? There are too many variables to consider, so if a number is going to be chosen as a definition, is will undoubtedly by arbitrary, and incorrect in many situations.

I think this is probably one of the most incoherent posts I’ve ever written but I don’t have any time to clear it up right now. Hopefully I can get around to making my thoughts here a bit more structured some time soon.