Characterizing a Game's Rules

This is a response to this post by lumpley
<http://www.septemberquestion.org/lumpley/anycomment.php?entry=156> (AKA
Vincent). You should read at least the first few examples of it before
reading this.

It's important, when analyzing something, to simplify it to its most
important elements, where that simplification doesn't discard anything
important. When just thinking about something, you should be careful not
to simplify too soon; work out the patterns, then simplify. I think
lumpley has simplified some things wrong, so I'm going to start over
with the un-simplified case and work down to something simpler.


      The Eight Elements

The way I figure it, the activity of game-playing can be reasonably
characterized by the interaction of eight kinds of things.

Starting from the die and proceeding clockwise, we have: mechanics tools
(die), quantifiable game state (figures), props (crown), players (smiley
faces), munchies (Dew), the fiction (cloud), the rules (book), and,
overseeing it all, the gamemaster (frowny wizard).

In more detail: mechanics tools are used for randomization and
resolving, e.g. dice, coin flips, possibly calculators, measuring
instruments at athletic events. Quantifiable game state is things like
hit points, locations of Monopoly tokens, cards in your hand. Props are
game-related elements that are in no way game-mechanical, like painted
figures used for atmosphere, or an audio soundtrack played in the
background by a gamemaster. The fiction is some set of things that are
true about the fictional world in which the game is taking place
(Wittgenstein: "the world is everything that is the case"). The rest are
self-explanatory. (This is not to say that all games need a gamemaster.
I am just avoiding oversimplifying too soon for games that do have one.)

Now, when we talk about interactions that occur over the course of a
game, any game, we can understand that those interactions are governed
by the rules. If Bob gets pissed off and punches out Gene, and the game
at hand doesn't involve players actually resorting to real-life
fisticuffs, then their activity is outside the game and shouldn't be
diagrammed on the chart. Any activity that takes place in the game is
going to be governed by the rules.

Let's take a sample rule for a monopoly-like game. "Roll a die and
advance your token that many squares on the board."

Each teal arrow is an individual interaction. Each blue arrow is a
"moderating" effect on an interaction. (It's hard to draw a three-way
interaction with a single arrow unless they happen to be in a line). So,
first, the player rolls the die (as moderated by the rules); then, the
result on the die indicates how to update the game state (move the
token), which is performed by the player, as moderated by the rules.

Now, a few things are clear. First, the player doesn't have to be the
one to move the token. Another player might move it instead if it
happens to be hard to reach for the first. The player doesn't actually
have any choice; so the fact that it's the player picking up and moving
the token is irrelevant. Second, as described earlier, /every/
interaction is going to be moderated by the rules (at least weakly), so
we're always going to have a moderated-by arrow from the rules; so
there's no reason to draw them. That leaves us with this simplified
drawing:

Note that this representation of an interaction is about as
/conceptually simple/ as lumpley's--it only has two arrows--but it has
more information, because we haven't oversimplified the participating
elements.

Now, you could argue that I should go ahead and simplify at least some
of the other elements away--that many of these icons are obviously
unnecessary to the game, e.g. the props and the munchies. Just to
confuse matters, here's a different kind of game, with rules-moderation
arrows omitted.

"If the player bounces the quarter into the cup, then the player can
require any other player to drink the cup." Here I've used lumpley's
notation of an arrow going through a middle item to indicate moderation:
the mechanics of whether the quarter (represented by the icon here) goes
into the cup or not are determined not by a random number generator, but
by the laws of physics. Again, I think it is overkill to indicate
moderation. Of course, this is a game best played in moderation.

Now, let's imagine a game that's GMed, and has rule #2 of lumpley's: "2.
Subtract the roll on the damage die from your character's hit points."
I'll omit moderation-by-the-rules arrows, of course.

Ok, so the player rolls the die (arrow from player to die). Of course,
the player does this under the watchful eye and guidance of the GM, so
we need a moderation arrow there. Then, the player updates their own hit
points on their character sheet, again under the watchful eye of the GM.
Guess what? Everything's under the watchful eye of the GM, so let's
screw those GM moderation arrows.

To be honest, I don't understand lumpley's arrows, so maybe lumpley
won't understand mine. Lumpley uses an arrow from the die ("tokens,
things, props, representations") to the faces ("the interactions of the
player themselves") to indicate the rolling of the die. Why? No clue.
Maybe it should be three arrows: 1. the player rolls the die
(player->die). 2. the player reads the value of the die. (die->player).
3. the player change the value of the hit points. (player->die)

Of course, as I've pointed out, the reading of the value of the die and
updating of the hit point value by the player involves the player in an
entirely uninteresting way, so I don't think step #2 is interesting. But
my way of interpreting 2 & 3 combined is to draw from (on my chart) die
to figures; since lumpley combines mechanics tools and quantifiable
state into a single element, he'd have to draw an arrow from the die to
the die, which perhaps explains why he did it the way he did. Of course,
if you want to show that this die-to-die interaction is moderated by the
players by making it go through the players, you'll have a curving line
go from the die to the players and then back to the die; which is
basically the same as the three lines I proposed above.

Now, note that if the GM follows the same rule to handle an NPC, on my
chart I'd have to change the source of the first arrow. I don't need to
update the second arrow. I'm not distinguishing between state
represented physically on a character sheet and state kept entirely in
the GM's head.

Ok, here's a more complex lumpley rule: "5. If your character's opponent
tries to disarm your character, make a Hold Weapon check. If you fail,
your character is disarmed, and you thus suffer the unarmed penalty
until you retrieve your weapon."

Again, imagining a GM'd game, we have the following sequence. The GM
(pointy hat) decides that the the opponent tries to disarm (fictional
cloud). This state of the fiction requires that the player make a Hold
Weapon check (die roll). [Note that, in truth, the hold weapon check
involves various quantifiable state--character level or strength or
whatever, so perhaps the arrow here should be more subtle.] On a
failure, we imagine the character is disarmed in whatever manner
(non-quantifiable fictional cloud) and also in the quantifiable state
(figures).

Note that the GM-causing-the-fiction is something I added explicitly to
clarify. Note that it's misleading to draw an arrow from the fiction to
the player; really it should be that the fiction moderates the need for
the Hold Weapon check. But hang on for a moment; really, the GM chose to
put the NPC in the "state" of "trying to disarm this player character";
since there are some limited numbers of such states that the rulebook
has explicit resolution rules for, maybe /that/ should be considered
quantifiable state, too?

This is important because lumpley notes in the comments that a
distinguishing characteristic of the RPG is the fact that arrows emerge
from the fictional cloud at all; no matter how cleverly you describe
events transpiring in Settlers of Catan, none of the other players are
going to let you build an extra road segment.

So maybe the arrow from the fictional cloud should point to the
quantifiable state: sometimes the fictional cloud implies certain
discretely quantifiable states-of-the-world for which there are explicit
game-mechanical rules. That state then mandates the Hold Weapon check.
(I still don't like the idea of "mandates" being given by an arrow.)

If you go look at lumpley's
<http://www.septemberquestion.org/lumpley/anycomment.php?entry=156>, I'm
not sure what's going on there. The long arrow from the fictional cloud
to game-tokens/state is "make a Hold Weapon check"? Basically, I think
I'm not sure on where lumpley's coming down with quantifiable vs.
non-quantifiable state, so I'm trying to be explicit about this.

The other thing we can conclude is that, for this rule at least, we
might as well have folded the GM in with the players into a single icon
on the chart. The "Hold Weapon roll" rule is going to apply to any
character--whether PC (rolled by player) or NPC (rolled by GM)--and
whether they were attacked by an NPC (action chosen by GM) or PC (action
chosen by player). However, in a classic game-mastered game, the players
have limited director powers compared to the GM, so there may be other
sorts of rules where this distinction is significant. (Or perhaps more
in a meta-rules sense?)

Finally, I want to suggest that while it is true that RPGs make special
use of the fictional cloud, this is not a trivial matter. On the one
side, as suggested above, if there's a rule for it, it must be on some
level quantifiable and belong to the quantifiable area. Looking at the
flip side, it's argued that for a game like Settlers or Monopoly, the
fictional happenings can never affect the game outcome; they are purely
atmospheric. However, I carefully included a "props" element here that
is purely atmospheric /even for an RPG/.

Lest you think that this simply applies to gamers wearing silly hats,
consider that in some gaming groups, players are not rewarded
game-mechanically for talking accurately or realistically as if they
were their character (e.g. so as not to penalize members of the group
who are poor actors). Similarly, in some groups, a character with
fast-talking skill will succeed independent of that character's player's
plausible fast-talking scenario (as long as the player at least tries);
in which case any of those details are purely atmospheric.

Vincent could still conclude (fairly) that these elements are indeed
atmospheric; they are part of the fun and style of the game, but they
are not interesting from a standpoint of how the game works /qua/ game.
However, as you move away from strongly-mechanical games and you move
into more freeform narrative games, removing any notion of quantifiable
state, this gets fairly muddy. Perhaps this means quantifiable state
starts to blur into fiction state. But if that blurring and slipperiness
means it's hard to distinguishable quantifiable state from
non-quantifiable fiction state, I definitely think it's wrong to try to
clump quantifiable state with game-mechanical tools.


      Other Directions

The eight elements also offer up some opportunities to think about other
things. (A friend points out an important scenario: an arrow from Dew to
rules to GM to fiction: somebody spills soda on the GM's rulebooks, and
the GM has the character attacked and killed by magical blue lighting,
no saving throw.)

In a computer game, the computer takes over the responsibilty for
managing most (all?) interactions. However, those interactions still go
occur, simply moderated by the program. There are still quantifiable
states, mechanics for updating them (possibly randomly). There may be
fiction (human-authored, mostly), and this fiction is updated and
revealed as a consequence of the mechanics. (There is, of course,
generally never any feedback from this non-quantifiable fictional state
back into the game; it's text and cut scenes that are output-only.)


      Comments

You should probably comment back on the original thread
<http://www.septemberquestion.org/lumpley/anycomment.php?entry=156>.

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