Emergent Play & Control

This week we look at game rules - constituative, operational and implicit ones (according to Salen and Zimmerman), paying special attention to the role of implicit rules.

As we mentioned in class, it is easier to think about rules (of all three kinds) in the board-game context. Video game rules tend to be forgotten, since the constitutive and operational ones tend to be less ‘maleable’ or ‘mangeable’, as Steinkuehler puts it, than in analogue games - they are imposed by the code. So, looking at situations when people play with the rules in a digital context is usually related to tricks players find, as the videos suggested as case studies show. 

All of this week’s case studies are related to tricks players developed to make their gameplay more effective, more beautiful or maybe just to show off their game knowledge. I would say these videos illustrate ‘special interpretations of the game rules’  rather than “ways of playing with the game rules”. This same issue is underlying Jakobsson’s piece. What he calls ‘playing with rules’ is ‘interpreting the rules’, a basic element of game play. The extent to which one can ‘play with the rules’ or the number of different interpretations for a game’s ruleset varies according to the nature of the game. Some designs afford more ‘interpretations’ that others. This resonates with the ideas in “Staying Open to Interpretation: Engaging Multiple Meanings in Design and Evaluation” , by Sengers and Gaver. In this paper, the authors argue that “new techniques in HCI itself are converging to suggest that multiple, potentially competing interpretations can fruitfully co-exist”, this is what I see happening in the games where the cases were taken from. The designs afford multiple interpretations, some being more obvious than others. These examples show some less-obvious interpretations of the rules. The ‘obviousness’ of these interpretations relate to the player’s creativity and knowledge of the rules.

The tricks players develop, besides showing how rules can be interpreted in many ways, show Steinkuehler’s point that “the game that’s actually played by participants (...) is the outcome of (...) [a] ‘mangle of practice’ of designers, players (...) and broader social norms”. Those tricks are a result of players exploration of the designed game rules that have to be evaluated by the game community and that occur in a context. The rocket jumping mechanic was common among several game communities, it didn’t go against its norms. The twixt example, though, is an example of a trick that was within the designed rules but not within the community rules. Social norms dictated this case as an example of “breaking the rules”.