The Rule Book – Thoughts That Stuck

I recently finished reading The Rule Book: The Building Blocks of Games by Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola (2024). You can find the open access version on the MIT Press website.

It’s an altogether great introduction to what rules in games and play are and how they work. Just very good all around! (If you’re looking for a more critical take, see Jonne Arjoranta’s great critique. In principle I agree with all of it, but I think for the kind of book The Rule Book is, it’s very good as it is.)

Here’re some thoughts that stuck with me.

Rooie rules

I enjoyed the discussion on “playing nice”. It’s mostly done via Linda Hughes’s 1983 essay “Beyond the Rules of the Game: Why are Rooie Rules nice?” which is a great anthropological examination of kids playing Foursquare. It made me reflect on my own attitude towards rules, and also got me to realize that I basically always prefer to play by Rooie rules.

In fact, me and my wife now regularly refer to Rooie rules whenever discussing rules in any games we play or watch.

This is why I love reading academic works: they give me words and concepts to understand (and sometimes change) what I’m doing. Sure, I’ve always favored playing nice, but the discussion about Rooie rules in The Rule Book and Hughes’s article gave that feeling a lot more nuance and structure!

The Rooie rules (named so after one of the players) were basically a shorthand for a set of rules that codified nice play and an expectation to a somewhat general amicability between players. You COULD play competitively but only insofar as it made sense in the current “nice” context of the game. Basically, nothing bad is permitted unless it fits into the wider framewok of nice play (and its social performance) as understood and negotiated by players.

For example, you could hit the ball real hard and make an exceptionally competitive move, but only if it doesn’t upset others, disrupt the game flow, or appear blatantly antisocial. The Rooie rules were a shorthand for a collective, shared good time; “playful collusion” as Hughes calls it.

And like so many things on the playground (as well as in life), it only lasted until being challenged by selfish assholes:

“Rooie rules and playing nice worked well until boys, who played closer to the letter of the rules and did not subscribe to the idea of playing nice, joined the game” (p. 95).

A nicer way to put it would be that the two groups didn’t have a shared understanding of the rules, but it does also neatly demonstrate how so many nice things are super fragile in the face of open hostility – the existence of a challenge to the niceness kind of shreds the psychological bubble of safety regardless of whether the challenge succeeds or not. That’s a lesson learned with assholes the world over, on playgrounds, sports, and internet forums alike.

Bouldering

My beloved sport of bouldering is mentioned in Chapter 5: Material Rules. It’s used to illustrate the combination of rules and the material environments of play. That is, unlike tennis or football, bouldering does not rely on strictly reproducible or singular arenas of play: every route is different and its rules of traversal and possible affordances of action are, basically, encoded in the stone.

The formal rules of (outdoor) bouldering are actually very limited. You figure out and follow a “line” up a rock face or a boulder, which establishes or completes a route. And the route can be climbed using any bodily techniques and moves at the climbers’ disposal. Simple!

But here, the climbing surface becomes "a material embodiment of the rules" (p. 149) that guides the actions of climbers and invites an endless variety of moves and routes within the general paradigm of "climbing".

Climbing is not unique in this, of course. But it does mean that when looked at in this way, climbing and e.g. downhill cycling are more alike, structurally, than downhill cycling and track cycling. It’s about the effect the playing surface has on the actions of the players and the rules enacted.

It’s a combination of rules and nature that creates the sport.

This makes indoor bouldering especially interesting, since indoors the routes are not random but handcrafted and designed: they are constructed from holds intended to be used in particular ways, by routesetters whose work is not dissimilar to that of game designers’.

Indoors, the sport loses some of its variety but gains a curious dialogue between the climber and the routesetter. It’s a dialogue built on the material environment of play which, in climbing gyms, at once simulates the natural routes outside but also shifts them into a more regulated and, arguably, more playful variant.

Instead of facing the natural world with a playful attitude (taking a rock face and scaling it as a challenge), indoors both the route and the act of climbing are manifestations of play (creating a problem and then solving it). This makes for a sort of metagame of climbing where climbing and routesetting styles change over the years, and climbers and manufactures of climbing holds and climbing equipment react to these by coming up with new techniques, holds, and tools (and vice versa).

I think there’s a lot to discuss about the current state of indoor sport climbing through the lens of controlled variables and design space as codified into the environment of play: the material surface of play as embodying the rules as well as acts of climbing.

Rules and bodies

There’s a nice brief subchapter in the book about rules, gender, and sports (“May the Best ‘Man’ Win”), perhaps best summarized by this passage:

“While sports medicine has had a long history of treating sex as a binary brute fact, the reality is more complicated” (p. 167).

I haven't got a lot to say about this other than that I'd wish anyone saying anything about the topic had read – at the very least – this subchapter.

A good paragraph

“A ludologist truly wanting to understand a game must understand both the practical dimension of priority of different rule categories for the game and how the less obvious rule categories relate to play. On paper, truth or dare has very little to do with external regulation—but in practice, the very point of the game is to subvert social codes of surrounding society.” (p. 177)

Heck yeah!!

Beautiful rules

Stenros and Montola (briefly, alas) also approach the beauty of rules, and suggest the game of go has the most beautiful rule for ending the game: “The game ends when both sides agree that there will be no more moves” (p. 193).

And indeed, sometimes a rule is just SO GOOD. Often it’s so because it’s efficiently phrased and leads to delightful outcomes. Go’s ending rule suggests harmony, balance, and respect. It’s very nice!

But this got me thinking about other similarly affective rule snippets. I love Blood on the Clocktower’s rule of “If you talk over new players you might die in the night” (via Shut Up and Sit Down).

Also, the chill and rigorously non-violent animal-folk adventure RPG Wanderhome has a character class called the Veteran, whose core rules are “You have a sword, sheathed at your hip. You can unsheathe it whenever you want. You must never unsheathe it.” The Veteran also has the ability to, at any time, draw their sword and kill anyone in front of them. The player must then retire the character forever.

This is… a lot in a gameworld the rules describe as a place without violence.

It’s such a heavy thing to hold in your mind and at the table! Even when you never ever ever intend to use the ability, knowing that it’s there gnaws at you like a memory from a painful past. Which, really, is the whole point of the Veteran, which makes this rule so great.

Also! Many Potter-ish live action role-playing games (many of which are no longer set in the actual Wizarding World, because yeesh) have a rule where you can basically cast any spell you wish upon anyone else, but it is the target of the spell who decides what happes: maybe the spell misses, maybe they reflect it, or maybe it has a surprising result.

It's like the "yes, and…" rule of improvisational comedy: it enables actions to build off of each other while shutting out bad play.

This is something I’ve taught my kids. Magic duels are all the rage at playgrounds these days, and nothing stops play faster than one kid casting killing curses and everyone else either getting upset or casting impenetrable barriers (or getting stuck in endless loops of counterspells).

I saw that happen so many times and it always just kind of gave a bad vibe to an otherwise fun activity.

Having the target decide the outcome makes magic less bossy and so much more magical!

Addendum 2.2.2025

As an addendum to the thoughts I wrote down last year, having had more time to think about The Rule Book and to see how it’s lodged itself into my personal ontology, I have this to say:

The title of the book is a trap! This is not, actually, a rule book. It proposes a sort of analytical framework for rules (rules for rules, if you will), which I first thought was one of its strong points.

But like all truly interesting academic works, it’s strength is not in its most immediate offer. Those taxonomies and categories of rules are nice to go back to every once in a while, but the book is, above all, an object to think with. To borrow from Goffman (sorry, game studies people, I know), it keys you into a particular mindset towards rules: to see familiar things in a new light and to stay sensitive to not just rules as a procedural layer of culture and interaction but as a nuanced and multi-tiered domain in itself. And it’s this refocusing paired with a mindset pervasive throughout the book – analytical, open, mischievous, gentle, and critical – that has stayed with me far longer than the actual analytical framework the authors propose.

I expected this book to be a wrench but it was a workshop instead, and that’s the highest order of compliment I can give to any scholarly work.

State of the Generation

I was drafting a relatively low-stakes document for work, so I thought it'd be an interesting avenue for seeing how ChatGPT could help in spitballing the text.

I've messed around with LLM applications a bit before but I thought I could now try and incorporate one into my writing process properly.

I found out that:

1. ChatGPT is very good a suggesting a variety of ideas and angles that seem professional and well thought out.

2. Most of these ideas come roughly from a single creatively sterile business/corporation viewpoint – like reading variations of an especially trite LinkedIn post. You can change this by fiddling around with the prompt, but everything is still pretty boring and generic.

3. None of the suggestions made by ChatGPT were particularly useful. I need to produce a piece of writing that's at least marginally interesting, and none of ChatGPTs suggestions had any traction beyond, again, a boring LinkedIn post. There's a huge market for Garbage Professional Text (GPT, heh) but I have no use for it.

4. I hoped ChatGPT would've functioned as a catalyst: even bad suggestions could lead to good ideas. The smooth-brained and sterile dribble ChatGPT cranked out wasn't it, though, even if it all sounded very convincing.

5. If you want a formalized tool, Eno's "Oblique Strategies" scratches a similar itch but is way better, since you usually get your creativity flowing from the get-go. There’s also a great bot that pulls a random Oblique Strategies card a few times a day. It has saved my professional bacon many times!

The point is: if you want to write honest, interesting things with some real soul, the process is just as important as the end result. There's a lot more of "you" in the work than you'd think, even if what you're writing is a piece of fairly rote PR stuff or whatever. You CAN cut corners, but by doing so you're also making your work more boring.

If capitalism requires you to pump out crap super fast, then ChatGPT is great, and that's a big part of the problem right there.

I'm not saying ChatGPT or other LLMs wouldn't be a huge thing for everyday writing especially in corporate and bureaucratic environments in the future – much like spellcheck and automatic formatting help out (and fuck shit up) in the professional everyday all the time nowadays. I can totally see how I could benefit from an "AI helper" or whatever, but, you know… Ehhhhh.

In summary, for now, I still regard ChatGPT as a mediocre tool for creativity (and a dangerously great tool for faking proficiency), and so far my writing process is too important for the final output to sacrifice it for the speed and platitudes of automation.