Scribbles and Horrors

Here we have another essay by Pedantarius, in response to Fantasy Games are More Than Nested Rulesets. Once again, I urge readers to remember that I submit these out of familial obligation rather than any opinionated zeal of my own. - Scribble

Rules are Bigger Than You Think

By Pedantarius Wobble

My illustrious cousin appears not to have a clear idea of what a rule is, and so doesn’t realize they are making the very point I am: games are about player experience mediated through a constructed situation.

Largely this is my fault for not defining my terms properly. I do not disagree that players are experiential beings, and I also do not disagree that players’ imagining affects their rules-choices.

What I’m saying is that, when it comes down to it, what’s really happening during the activity of play (not to get too spiritual-psychological) is that players are reacting to a material-social scenario. The player would not imagine a forest at all unless they were prompted to by words or dice. The idea that an imaginary situation itself has any substance is a meta-fiction, and this metafiction isn’t particularly distinguishable from other metafictions within games.

For example, in games in which there are winners and losers players assume the roles of rivals. They intentionally act in such a way as to exceed the others as much as possible. This is a metafiction–the players all know that in the real world they are friends, and that play of the game is for mutual benefit.

Indeed, as Natura points out, the experience of this metafiction affects the way players interact with the game. How often in Diplomacy does a player feel feelings of betrayal, and begins to make reckless moves as a result of this emotional reaction?

The metafiction encompasses all its parts. This includes written rules and mechanical status, sure, but it also includes the metaphysical components, the most important of which, to be clear, is the players’ experience.

Why do the proponents of diegeses want to downplay the experience of one metafiction over another, for the sole purpose of reifying the Imagined Setting? You miss important and interesting components of play when you do this.

By expanding the term rule to what it really means–not mere writing, not simple agreement, but the whole defining context in which play occurs, I am allowing space to consider under-examined parts of games.

The rule “Natura decides what rules should be applied based on their experience imagining a character lost in a forest.” is a perfectly good one. But we should recognize it as a rule. We should pay attention to when we use it and when we discard it.

To be clear: I am not saying that human game activity is reducible to writable rules structures. What I’m saying is that the depth of personhood is contained within my understanding of the term rule. Take the human player as a unit capable of experience, rationality, and creativity, put them in a rules situation, and a game comes out.

The diegetic vs. non-diegetic rule dichotomy limits conception of games to a very narrow paradigm, one which hides crucial aspects of all games. We have to stop thinking of games from entirely inside of their metafictions, and pay attention to play activity as a whole.

- Pedantarius Wobble