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Contract for Artifice
Within the bounded play community of a game, the community arises with the onset of the game and disappears when the game is finished. A bounded play community is more synonymous with an individual game, and the rules of the game have a great influence on the nature and experience of the play community. In other words, a bounded play community is more artificial than an unbounded one, because it has less traffic with contexts outside the magic circle. This social contract for artifice affects the meaning of social relationships within the limited context of the game.
In order to understand how the social system of a game can be considered artificial, we turn to the work of the psychologist Jean Piaget. Much of Piaget's work focused on the cognitive development of children; his research had a tremendous impact on theories of the mind in the twentieth century. For our purposes, the most applicable of Piaget's works is his book The Moral Judgment of the Child, in which he details some of his research on child development. Working with children from a particular region of Switzerland, Piaget systematically studied the process by which young children acquire the ability to understand game rules. He did so in order to draw a correlation between the process of understanding game rule structures and the process of understanding moral structures. From this work, Piaget drew conclusions about a child's social and psychological development as a whole, tracking the child's entry into the moral realm through an understanding of the social contract engendered by the rules of play. Although we won't be detailing Piaget's experiments or the complex stages of a child's psychological development, he makes a number of important insights relevant to a discussion of social play and game design. One of the assumptions shaping The Moral Judgment of the Child is that the rules of a game are fundamentally different than larger social rules shaping social convention, such as the cultural and legal rules that guide moral and ethical behavior. The difference lies precisely in the artificiality of a game's rule-system, as Piaget makes clear: All morality consists in a system of rules, and the essence of all morality is to be sought for in the respect which the individual acquires for these rules. Now, most of the moral rules which the child learns to respect he receives from adults, which means that he receives them after they have been fully elaborated, and often elaborated, not in relation to him and as they are needed, but once and for all and through an uninterrupted succession of earlier adult generations. In the case of the very simplest social games, on the contrary, we are in the presence of rules which have been elaborated by the children alone…the rules of the game of marbles are handed down, just like so-called moral realities, from one generation to another, and are preserved solely by the respect that is felt for them by individuals. The sole difference is that the relations in this case are only those that exist between children.[6] [our emphasis] Although Piaget is referring specifically to traditional children's folk games such as Marbles, we can glean a larger point from his premise. "Rules of society," such as moral guidelines, permeate our lived social experience and affect all of our interactions with others. A person might need money to get on the subway, but by and large, observance of society's rules (for whatever mix of personal, cultural, and legal reasons) keep subway riders from taking that money by force from a stranger. These kinds of behavioral rules and guidelines are one way of understanding social identity within society. Rules of games, on the other hand, are quite different. We know that games operate only within the time and space of the magic circle. Only when a game of Chess is in play do players covet the King and avoid the illegality of moving pawns backward on the board. Outside a game, players do not feel compelled to "capture" a king piece, or otherwise structure their behavior according to the rules of Chess. Conversely, within bounded play communities, game behavior is not entirely constrained by life outside of the game. As Huizinga states (or perhaps overstates), "Inside the circle of the game, the laws and customs of ordinary life no longer count."[7]
This is why Piaget can use children's games as a special, isolated case of social rules: because the rules are, in fact, generated without concern for larger social institutions. The rules emerge from the context of the games themselves, the play of children, rather than from culture at large. As Piaget notes, "We are in the presence of rules which have been elaborated by the children alone." Piaget's marvelous insight into the autonomy of chil-dren's folk games is true to some extent of all games. Even in the case of commercial games designed by adults for adults, there is a sense in which the games create their own private social sphere. Although it is true that there is plenty of interplay between game rules and societal rules, such as a game designed to propagate a certain ideology or make use of existing social content, the bounded play communities games create exist in an artificial space marked off in some way from society at large. As a result of this isolation, the bounded play community of a game implies a kind of social contract. This contract consists of rules that determine how players interact with each other in the game, as well as the meanings and values that the players give life through play. Sustaining the contract to the end of a game requires players to maintain the integrity of the magic circle. Rule-breakers can damage this fragile frame. A cheating player will test the limits of the social contract and possibly disrupt it. A spoil sport is likely to destroy the social contract entirely. A social contract, a commitment to a shared set of behaviors and values, is a social frame for understanding what it means to enter into the magic circle. For example, a game is a space of conflict with an uncertain outcome. In other spheres of our lives, most of us would not willingly enter into a conflict, especially one with a real risk of loss. The social contract of a game acts as a kind of psychological buffer against uncertainty, protecting players from the risk inherent in game play. There are many elements to this social contract, such as the level playing field of conflict we discussed in Games as Systems of Conflict. There are also distinctly interpersonal aspects of the social contract of a game as well. DeKoven describes two of these, safety and trust, in The Well-Played Game:
Safety
The safer we feel in the game we're playing, the more willing we are to play it. But, for this experience of safety, we can't rely solely on the game.We must also be able to believe that we are safe with each other. Trust
We need…some guarantee, somewhere, that no matter what happens in our pursuit of the well-played game, we will not be risking more than we are prepared to risk. Even though I'm aware that I might die as a result of trying to climb this mountain with you, I can accept that as part of the game. On the other hand, when I discover that you're cutting my rope so that you can get to the top first, I find myself much less willing to play.[8]
Safety and trust are two elements that are part of the social contract of a game. Generally, players must feel a sense of safety and trust to be comfortable enough to enter into the social space of a game. The concepts of safety and trust are, in many ways, more a function of a player's existing relationships and attitudes than something a game guarantees. As DeKoven states, players "can't rely solely on the game" for trust. They must rely on each other. Having a sense of trust allows players to enter into the game in the first place. What is trust? It is a shared sense of understanding, not just of the knowledge of the rules of a particular game, but of the way all games are played, including the rules of etiquette that allow you to trust that other players won't become cheaters, spoil sports, or bullies. Once again we have a paradox. The game itself is an artificial social space that players enter, yet the "rules" by which players come to know a sense of trust belong to the world outside the game, to the realm of shared social and cultural values. What connects the values of the game and the values of the real world? The answer is a concept we introduced many chapters ago: the implicit rules of a game. [6]Jean Piaget, The Moral Judgment of the Child (New York: Free Press, 1997), p. 13–14.[7]Johann Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), p. 12.[8]Bernard DeKoven, The Well-Played Game (New York: Doubleday, 1978),
