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Designing Elegant Rules
It is curious to realize that when players move pawns or tokens along a track (as in Chutes and Ladders) their action is really just a different way of keeping score. Conversely, any game in which players display or record a numerical score could also be realized as a race game, with representations of the players moving along a track. Why should a game choose one operational form over another? Why should Chutes and Ladders be played on a board if it could also be played in other ways? Can we use the framework of game rules to help make these kinds of design decisions? As a game designer you generally want players focused on the experience of play, rather than on making sense of the rules. One important aspect of designing rules is creating experiences where elegant rule design maintains proper player focus.
What do rules have to do with design? Are we advocating that game designers create their games by thinking explicitly in terms of constituative, operational, and implicit rules? First of all, there is no magic formula for designing meaningful play. There are as many approaches to creating games as there are game designers. As a game designer, you might be driven by a desire to explore storytelling, visual aesthetics, social interaction, new technologies—or even new kinds of formal rules. Despite all of these possible approaches, there is something intrinsically structural about games. Even if you are not focused on rules as the creative inspiration for your game design process, you are still going to have to create a set of rules in order to design your game. This means that looking at games formally—as a system of rules—will ultimately be an important part of knowing how your game works. Understanding the formal qualities of games is just as important as understanding their experiential and cultural aspects. More than a procedure for designing games, the three kinds of rules provide a framework for understanding how rules operate. As a game designer, the systems you're building through the iterative process of game design will have rules as one of their raw materials. Designing and re-designing game systems means, on some level, tinkering with rules. Understanding how rules operate makes it much easier to design meaningful play.
In Chutes and Ladders, there are many reasons why the game takes place on a board, with players moving pawns, instead of, for example, players keeping score on a piece of paper. One reason is the game's audience. Children use the squares to help them count. Instead of adding 6 to 57 on a sheet of paper, they can simply count up six squares to arrive at their new location on the board. More importantly, however, the board takes care of that pesky constituative rule number four, the rule that embodies "climbing" and "sliding." If the players are keeping score on paper, all of the jumps up and down have to be recorded on a separate sheet for reference. The elegance of the gameboard is that it combines these two operational functions, at once the marker for progress as well as the reference for climbing and sliding. This makes for a successful game experience. Meaningful play emerges from a tight coupling of action and outcome: a discernable and integrated outcome. The use of a gameboard in the process of generating a random number, recording progress, and seeing whether or not your token climbs or slides, helps emphasize the meaning of the game in a number of ways:
The board contains all aspects of the game information— progress toward the end space as well as climbing and sliding—at once.
The representations of the players (their tokens) are all in the same "space," making comparison of relative positions immediate and intuitive.
Players can clearly see the consequences of their actions, whether it is moving normally during a turn, climbing, or sliding.
It is easy to take the elegance of a game such as Chutes and Ladders for granted. Compare it with a game in which the operational rules make the game more difficult to play. Remember Marc LeBlanc's Tic-Tac-Toe variant 3-to-15? The problem with 3-to-15 is that by picking numbers instead of making marks, players cannot see the implications of their actions. Unless players are able to keep a crystal-clear picture of the magic square puzzle in their heads (as well as remember all of the past moves of the game), they will not be able to use the kind of strategies we normally think about when playing Tic-Tac-Toe. 3-to-15 becomes a game about memory and math, instead of the very simple territorial conflict that is Tic-Tac-Toe. If memory and math were what the designer intended to emphasize, then fine. But if your intention is to have players strategically plot their moves on a grid as they play, the operational rules of Tic-Tac-Toe are far superior to those of 3-to-15. The idea of elegance through clarity works for Chutes and Ladders given its audience of young children, their limited attention and math skills, and the way that the operational rules of the game create an overall experience. However, it is easy to think of games in which the same kind of clarity of information could destroy the game. Imagine, for example, a game of Assassin in which all of the players know everything about each other, such as where they live and who has been assigned to which targets. Assassin is a game that requires secrecy, confusion, and hidden information. Having too much information destroys these elements, making clarity of information an undesirable quality of game play. However, the ways that players learn the game itself—how to enter the system of secrecy, confusion, and hidden information—has to be clear. Rules themselves must ultimately be unambiguous. When a game creates ambiguity, it is always within some larger frame that is clearly articulated and shared by all players. Creating that clear ruleset and tying it to the actions and outcomes of genuinely meaningful play is one way of understanding the entire process of game design. Understanding how constituative, operational, and implicit rules work together in your game is a key element of this process.
