Scribbles and Horrors

When I sit down to play a game with someone, I am partaking in a kind of faith.

Let’s start with tic-tac-toe. When we play I agree to certain rules about how the gamestate can be altered. this is the ruleset of the game. Before the game begins our approach to the ruleset is one of agreement or disagreement. We say, either explicitly or implicitly, “Yes, I agree to play Tic Tac Toe with you, according to these rules.”

When actually playing the game, the relationship we have is no longer simple agreement, it is belief. When someone plays an illegal move (for example, placing an ‘X’ somewhere outside the grid) the first objection is “Hey, you can’t do that! That’s not a possible move!” My objection is one of possibility or impossibility, not agreement or disagreement. I do not (at least, not at first) accuse my fellow player of breaking our agreement to play this game. I instead contend that the illegal action is simply impossible. I have faith that the rules define what is possible. When this reality is challenged, my response is outright denial: you can’t do that–that sort of action simply doesn’t exist within this game.

To play a game of any kind is to have faith that the rules define what is and is not possible, and so long as I believe this to be true–so long as you and I and everyone act as though it is so, it is. The most important first step for playing a game is having faith that it is possible to play it.

Doubt arises when the rules appear contradictory, or when different players understand the rules to be different things.

In one of the early sessions of Verdun: A Dagger at the Heart of France (V:DaTHoFA) Idraluna and I discovered an apparent contradiction in the rules. The rules for Zones of Control in that game state:

The ZOC extends generally into the six hexes immediately adjacent to the unit. A ZOC does not, however, extend out of tunnels or forts, into city, town, fortress, partial forest, or forest hexes, or across trench or prohibited hexsides. (p. 2)

Clear enough. However, the rules for Fortresses state something contradictory:

Units in a fortress hex are quadrupled in defense against assault, but may not themselves make an assault attack. Units with a zone of control continue to exert it while in a fortress. (p. 6)

When I occupied one of Idraluna’s forts, this became a real question: does my 4-1-9 infantry exert its zone of control or doesn’t it? This caused some doubt about the rules–we were uncomfortable with the idea that two contradictory things could be true at once.

The doubt was so unpalatable to us that we paused play, had a discussion, and settled upon a decision which ignored the ZOC rules in favor of the fortress ones. We came to a new agreement as players (”We will play Verdun according to the ruleset, except that units in fortresses exert zones of control, despite what the rules say.”) This agreement made, we continued playing and had a good time.

The practice of coming to an agreement about interpretations of rules is common and good, but it demonstrates, I think, that we valued the comfortable notion that our game was playable more than we valued the rules as written. This is what it means to play games, after all. We had faith that the game would work without contradictions and continued under this belief until skepticism made it impossible. After we agreed on an interpretation, I think we both had a stronger faith that Verdun was playable in its new form.

Were we playing the same game after this? What was it that made us so uncomfortable about contradiction?

I should clarify that by “faith” I do not mean “high trust” in the RPG sense. Faith is as important in zero-trust games as it is in high-trust ones. What I mean is not faith in other players, but faith that the game itself is working, or will work.

I wrote a fairly unfun game a while ago called Revolution which in part was an attempt to explore these questions. I wanted to know what would happen if the players refused to play according to the ruleset. In this example, what would happen if a non-Sovereign player refuses to hand over their token. What happens in that moment, to the game, to play itself? Isn’t it possible to be still kind of playing a game even while ignoring the rules, so long as you believe you’re playing it? How much does the agreed-upon ruleset really define play?

Maybe you could say that, when you break free from a ruleset like that, you are simply bringing in new socially-defined meta-rules and interpreting the written ruleset as hypodiegetic. But what force do even these have, unless there is belief that moves made in the “Bully the player with the Sovereign role into changing the rules to make the game more fun” are valid? What’s the crossover-point between those towo?

I wonder whether there isn’t a continuum of dispositions to rulesets. I wonder if we couldn’t playtest rulesets which are progressively less coherent to see where the line is between “playable” and “not playable” is, in the true sense. When does it happen that we’re not playing a game anymore?

Mishmash is a game which does seem like fun and I do want to play about this question.

One final example:

I am working slowly on a wargame called Assault on Castle Slazzo. There is an artifact which operates according to the following rules-text:

Ø - APPLIANCE FOR THE DISILLUSION OF THE ANTITHETICAL

The APPLIANCE might better be described as a ridiculous concept or idea rather than any sort of physical manifestation. The militiaman who first sights the APPLIANCE carries it. The APPLIANCE concerns p and ~p. The militiaman carrying it can, once, for any unambiguous verifiable statement about the game state p, reveal that its logical negation ~p is also true. The strain of such a revealing invariably kills the carrier, thus removing the APPLIANCE from play.

In AOCS it is likely that there will be many statements about the gamestate which are both true and not true at the same time. Surprisingly, this was entirely playable in playtesting.

I’ve written previously that Nomic is a social game masquerading as a logic game. But now I’m starting to wonder if all games are sort of masquerading as themselves. All pen and paper games are notebook kayfabe.

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This post was inspired by discussion around this one: https://kattkirsch.b … r-replaying-modules/