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Rule-Breaking as a Game Design Practice
Our discussion of rule-breaking is not just an explication of the ways in which players break the rules of a game. It is a game design schema, a way of looking at all games that offers a framework for solving particular game design problems. However, it is a different kind of chapter than the other formal schema we encountered in our investigation of RULES. Framing games as systems of rule-breaking questions many of the unspoken assumptions of earlier schemas. We did not, in considering games as emergent systems, information, or cybernetic feedback loops, ever consider that players might disrespect or transgress the authority of the rules and the magic circle. Player behavior is not universally law-abiding. Given any particular game, there are many ways to play it and many ways to bend and break its rules. For game designers, this means that you should never take players' behavior for granted. You need to assume that your game will be played not just by earnest rule-followers, but by zealously dedicated players, inappropriately unsportsmanlike players, brilliantly secretive cheaters, anduncaringly nihilistic spoil-sports. Some of these player types can help expand your game's space of possibility, whereas others can wreck the game for everyone involved. How do you take these possibilities into account in your game design? As always, there is no single solution. But framing your game as a system of rule-breaking lets you formulate your own answers. There is yet another way to frame rule-breaking: as an attitude toward playing and designing games. We have seen a number of examples of how rule-breaking can enhance meaningful play. In professional sports, digital games, and in the cheating variant of Illuminati, breaking rules is part of the game itself. In all of these cases, through rule-breaking the space of possibility fills with alternative modes of play. What is the lesson here? Perhaps it suggests a shift in the way that we think about game design. In The Well-Played Game, Bernard DeKoven advocates a fundamental adjustment in players' attitudes towards the rules of a game: You're not changing the game for the sake of changing it. You're changing it for the sake of finding a game that works. Once this freedom is established, once we have established why we want to change a game and how we go about it, a remarkable thing happens to us: We become the authorities. No matter what game we create, no matter how well we are able to play it, it is our game, and we can change it when we need to. We don't need permission or approval from anyone outside our community. We play our games as we see fit. Which means that now we have at our disposal the means whereby we can always fit the game to the way we want to play. This is an incredible freedom, a freedom that does more than any game can, a freedom with which we nurture the play community. The search for the well-played game is what holds the community together. But the freedom to change the game is what gives the community its power. [4]
Rather than obeying game rules as an ultimate authority, DeKoven would like players to assume authority over the rules. Once they feel confident and in control of the rules, players can break them and modify them in the course of playing a game. They do so not out of a mischievous desire to disrupt the authority of the rules, but out of a directed attempt to create a deeper experience of play. This beautiful vision for games does not describe the way that most people normally play. However, there is one type of game player that already has this attitude: game designers. Game designers, particularly those that design through an iterative process, already posses a methodology in which playing a game means breaking, tweaking, and modifying rules. In a sense, DeKoven is advocating that game players become more like game designers. How are game designers rule-breakers? Being a game designer means that you are constantly testing the limits of a game you are creating. Which aspects of the rules are working and which are not? Do you need to add a feedback loop, or modify the amount of randomness in the game? Are players being faced with meaningful decisions at every moment? The best way to answer these game design questions is by changing the rules of your game, trying out new variations, and seeing what happens. Of course, DeKoven's vision for dethroning the authority of a game extends beyond just professional game designers. He would like to see all game players adopt this attitude toward play. What would it mean if all players felt free to break the rules of a game, to play not just inside the space of a game, but to modify and change the shape of that space itself? One answer to this important question is that it would require a fundamental alteration in the attitudes of game players and game designers. If players regularly break the rules, are they really rules at all? If players no longer stay inside the magic circle, are they really playing a game? Making this shift might be liberating, but it would certainly change the way we conceive games, game play, and game design. Yet another answer to DeKoven's challenge is that perhaps the phenomenon he describes already exists. Perhaps all players already play, not just inside the frame of a game, but with the frame of a game itself. If this is indeed the case, then all the varieties of rule-breaking players, from dedicated and unsportsmanlike players to cheaters and spoil-sports, are natural extensions of the flexibility of game structures. Rule-breaking is simply one of the ways that we play. Lastly, rule-breaking can be considered not just a way to play or design games, but a more general attitude about game design itself. If the conventions and genres of game design are the rules by which most designers "play," then the innovators are those designers that manage to break the rules. Games hold great promise, but only if we are bold enough to truly break the rules of our field. This is harder than it seems. We know that to skillfully break rules requires an intimate knowledge of the rules themselves. And our hope is that this book provides some of those "rules of play"—rules that you will mercilessly and playfully violate in order to expand the space of game design's possibilities. With this chapter, we finish our first Primary Schema. In RULES, we consciously limited our gaze to the strictly formal boundaries of the magic circle, generally ignoring the player experience and the larger contexts in which a game takes place. But as we move forward, we will slowly widen the scope of our investigation, as we include those aspects of games that have been left out. How stable is the authority of a game's rules? How permeable is the boundary of the magic circle? How is it possible to not just play a game but play with the very structures of gaming? We directly address these questions and many more in the PLAY and CULTURE schemas to come. [4]Bernard DeKoven, The Well-Played Game (New York: Doubleday, 1978)
