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Knowing the Rules
When children play together, in the street or the back lot, they too establish a play community. When someone gets hurt, the game stops. When there's a little kid around, you watch out for him, you play softer when you're near him, you give the kid a break. At all times there is an acceptance of a shared responsibility for the safety of those with whom you play.—Bernard DeKoven, The Well-Played Game
In Rules on Three Levels, we identified three layers of game rules: the underlying constituative rules of a game, the operational rules that directly guide player action, and the implicit rules of proper game behavior, such as etiquette. The examples DeKoven gives in the passage above, that a game stops when someone gets hurt or that play is softened when little kids join a game, are implicit rules, unspoken guidelines for how to play. The implicit rules of a game bridge the paradoxical relationship between the artificial space of the game and the social context in which the game is played. The fact that both players in a game of Tic-Tac-Toe know that each will take a reasonable amount of time on their turn is part of the social trust that enables players to sit down and play together. So is the assumption that players will not cheat or become spoil sports. All are examples of implicit rules. Similarly, the implicit rules that DeKoven identifies facilitate the social play of a neighborhood backlot play community. The implicit rule of stopping the game when someone gets hurt has an intrinsic effect (the game pauses temporarily) only because of an extrinsic social rule (help people that are injured). Considering the role of implicit rules in social play, questions arise. By what process do implicit rules come into being? How do players come to know these rules? How do they affect play? For answers, we turn again to Piaget's The Moral Judgment of the Child. Piaget outlines distinct stages through which children progress as they learn the rules of Marbles. In paraphrasing Piaget's more complex formulations, we divide the acquisition of game rules into three stages: During the first stage, beginning around age 5, the child does not yet understand there are fixed rules to the game. Children of this age will play Marbles in an improvisational way, possessing a vague notion of rules but not yet understanding the idea of fixed rules. In the second stage, around ages 8 to 10, the child comes to know that there are rules, and will regard these rules with a near religious reverence. The rules are felt to have their own implicit authority, which cannot be questioned. The third and final stage generally begins after age 10. Here the child comes to realize that the rules of a game are dependent on a social contract and can be changed if all of the players agree to do so. This final stage is essentially how adults view the rules of games.[9]
Our interest is in the transition into the third and final stage, when a child's consciousness of the rules undergoes a complete transformation. Rather than believing that rules are absolutely fixed, children begin to see rules as the outcome of a free decision reached through respectful mutual consent. Piaget sums up this transformation elegantly: He no longer relies, as do the littlest ones, upon an all-wise tradition. He no longer thinks that everything has been arranged for the best in the past and that the only way of avoiding trouble is by religiously respecting the established order. He believes in the value of experiment in so far as it is sanctioned by collective opinion.[10]
Piaget's model for the acquisition of rules sheds light on a number of issues relating to social play. When a child acquires an understanding of a game's rules, he or she also develops an understanding of the social contract of a game. Like adults, children at this stage of development are able to see rules as structures that describe how players are to relate to one another within the game, both formally and socially. They are also able to recognize that the game world is a flexible world that can be altered collectively. This is an important part of recognizing the existence of a play community.
Additionally, Piaget's developmental model has a loose correlation to the way an adult player comes to know a game. When a player is initially brought into the magic circle of a game, a player is often not yet familiar with its specific rules. Instead, a player has a vague sense of the game's operation, similar to a child in Stage one of Piaget's model. When a player is learning to play a game, the mechanisms of a game seem fixed and the player's attention is focused on learning how to play, like a child in Stage two. The more that a player plays a game the more she sees the game as a system open to manipulation (albeit one whose binding authority must be respected). When the player gets stuck in the middle of a computer adventure game, for example, she might purchase a strategy guide or go online to find a walkthrough guide. Later in her play experience, she might download a hack, design her own level, or start a fan web page. The play patterns of an experienced player demonstrate an understanding of the game as something that is amenable to change. In a very approximate sense, the progress of a player into a game or the general culture of games recapitulates Piaget's model of a child coming to understand the concept of game rules. [9]Piaget, The Moral Judgment of the Child ,p. 28.[10]Ibid., p. 65.
