An interesting subset of games are digital (aka computer) games. Computer games have many things in common with other games, but they also have their own particular aspects and issues. I just finished reading the Rules in Digital Games chapter in Rules of Play, and I disagree with most of it. Much of that disagreement arises from my fundamental split on what counts as a game rule, but a large part also comes from the way I go about categorizing games. It also becomes clear in this chapter that one of their rule categories, operational rules, is much broader than I’d thought.

So, digital games. One of the first questions is, what counts as a digital game? World of Warcraft? Definitely. Tetris? Certainly. Civilization? Absolutely. Internet poker? …Maybe, but probably not. Playing against a chess program running on a local machine? I’d say no. Clearly all the games are running on a computer, but I tend to make a distinction between ‘real’ digital games and computerized versions of non-digital games.

Salen and Zimmerman consider all games played on a computer to be digital games, and the elements of the user interface are part of the rules of the game. In some ways this makes sense, because the interface affects the feel and play of the game. However, a rule like “a player may type the left arrow key to move the current piece one space to the left” isn’t something I’d consider a rule of the game (in my mind the rule would be “a player may move the current piece one space left or right”, and whether they accomplish that by typing a key or moving the mouse or waving their arms is irrelevant).

A computer can simulate the physical world (with varying degrees of precision, but the principle holds). Likewise any mode of communication/interaction can (at least in theory, though practice certainly lags) be done in a virtual environment. There’s not a game that exists that couldn’t be implemented digitally. Virtually sitting in virtual Central Park, virtually moving your virtual chess pieces, I think you’re playing a board game, not a computer game. So, how to distinguish between digital and non-digital games? I do think the distinction exists and is useful, but it gets blurry at the boundary, and it doesn’t necessarily produce non-intersecting sets - some games exist as both digital games and non-digital games.

It’s probably useful first to consider some other divisions of games and then get back to digital games. Consider the two rule implementations Tic Tac Toe and 3-to-15 (towards the bottom of the post). You could then ask “is that rule set a math and memory game or a territory control game?”, but I think the better question is “which skin best represents the game state and presents the rules in a way that players understand and interact with most easily?”. The first question doesn’t really have a correct answer beyond ‘it depends’. I think most people would answer the second question as ‘the 3×3 grid where players mark Xs and Os’, and thus that rule set gets placed in the category of [very simple] territory control games.

Returning to digital games, I would define them as those rules sets for which a computer is the easiest/most effective way for a player to understand and interact with the game state and mechanics. A computerized version of Tic Tac Toe is still a simple territory control board game, not a computer game. Master of Orion is definitely a computer game. Risk… is on the fuzzy border. It was created and first produced as a board game, but the most natural implementation of the system is probably on the computer (IMO, other might place it squarely in the board game category). Magic is another game that could reasonably be placed as naturally digital, or naturally a card game, or more likely both.

Various aspects of game mechanics and state make a game likely to work best in digital form: lots of number crunching, information hidden from all players or known to an arbitrary subset of them, lots of randomizers of various kinds, many complex sub parts to actions, automatic changes (especially complex ones) to the game state, etc. You know what they are. I guess it might be worth trying to list them all at some point. Anyway, the point here is that if you’re trying to design a non-digital game and it has these kinds of attributes then maybe its natural representation is as a digital game. Likewise, if your trying to design a digital game and it DOESN’T have any of these attributes, then it may well work better as a board, card, dice, or other non-digital game (which of doesn’t mean that it can’t be implemented on a computer).

One question they examine this chapter is “Are the rules of a digital game the same thing as the programming code that makes up the game?” In some ways this is an interesting question. Certainly the code allows one to play the game. If you make the category of operation rules very broad, enough that it includes all UI, then it’s possible that you could consider that code also part of the game, but this gets you mired in gray areas very quickly. They bring up an interesting example in the game Thief, where the player and the opponents can hide in the simulated shadows. In one sense the code that determines just how dark a shadow is and whether or not a player is hidden might be considered a complicated rule. I could be talked into that. However, without such external influence I’d probably consider the rule to be that entities may hide in sufficiently dark shadows, and leave ’sufficiently’ as a changeable parameter. In designing a game with such a rule have to decide at design time exactly what light values are covered by ’sufficiently’ - that could be set later, or even left totally open. E.g. the game engine just creates and runs the virtual world and whether or not the player looking at the monitor can make out the figure standing in the alley determines what ’sufficiently’ is.

From my perspective the rules of a digital game are the same thing as the rules of a non-digital game; game rules are an abstract system. The computer is one way of implementing them, but I don’t think the game is different in any relevant way if logical bits and electrical signals are used to track and represent the game state rather than painted cardboard and carved wood. The rules of a game may be embedded/represented/implemented in the program code, but the program code is not the rules.

I’m mostly ignoring the realm of implicit rules in digital games. The book counts such things as “the program can be started, stopped, copied, deleted, renamed, etc. like any other program files” as an implicit game rule. Ummm… no. That’s not an implicit rule of a digital game any more than ‘the speed of light will not be exceeded’ is an implicit rule of chess. I’m just going to say that the implicit rules in digital games aren’t of a different nature than implicit rules in any other game, and leave it at that.

As mentioned previously, Salen and Zimmerman divide rules into 3 main categories:
* operational : how the players play the game, e.g. mark an X or O in any box in the grid
* constituative : the underlying formal structure of the game, e.g. given a set of 9 elements and two empty sets, elements are removed from the first set and added alternately in the second and third
* implicit : the unwritten rules of the game, e.g. a player takes their turn within a reasonable amount of time

They then consider as separate games unique combinations of operational and consituative rule sets, though the boundaries are necessarily a bit fuzzy (is it the same game if you use a die as a randomizer instead of a spinner? Or draw cards? Or keep score with chips rather than on a board? etc.) The question of how much a game has to change before it’s a different game is extremely difficult to answer. However, that particular discussion is one for another day. Back to rules…. Reading this section of the book got me thinking about the un-articulated ways I group rules. I haven’t really bothered to make it clear to myself before, and it’s probably a good exercise to do so.

When I design a game I don’t think too much about the implicit rules. There certainly are some, as well as some amount of assumed vocabulary (e.g. that ‘take turns’, ‘go around the table’, ‘deal cards one at a time’, etc. are terms that don’t need to be explicitly defined in the rules). So, I mostly think about what the authors call constituative and operational rules. However, I don’t mentally put them in those groups. I split them into two large groups, each of which is subdivided into two groups.

The first large group is the rules of meaning. The first subset of rules are the definitions of the parts of the game, which cover things like the attributes of the randomizers, the characteristics of the board (or other play space), the pieces, etc. The second subset of rules are the evaluations, which cover what the parts mean to the players. Basically, these rules allow the players to evaluate the state of the game - who’s ahead, who’s behind, is the game over, did anyone win, etc. The meanings rules cover specific terminology (symbol set maps, whether to words or objects), and underlying structures. The second large group is the rules of transformation. The first subset of these are the mechanics, which deal with how all the parts interact with each other. The second subset are the operations, which cover the way players may manipulate the game state. The transformation rules also deal with both the abstract game system and the representations the players use.

Looking at chess, for example:
meanings - definition: the board, the pieces, where the pieces start on the board, being captured
meanings - evaluations: check, checkmate, stalemate
transformations - mechanics: how each piece may move and capture, special moves (en passant, castling), capturing, promotion
transformations - operations: white first, take turns, dealing with check, castling conditions, resigning, touch-move

My division of rules arises from the way I design games. I don’t [usually] come up with an abstract game system and then lay operational rules on it (nor vice versa). The first rules I usually come up with tend to be mechanics and their related definitions. From there I consider possible related definitions (for what other things could that kind of mechanic be used), related mechanics (what other things can I do with those things I’ve defined). Then the evaluations and operations come into play, giving direction and interest. Also tossed into the mix are the skin (what sort of things do I want the player to be thinking about and doing), the theme (the topic or story, if any, e.g. Pirates, or Escape, or War, or Running With Scissors, or whatever), and the feel (serious, fast, light, silly, deliberate, etc.).

My approach could be considered just a different slice on the same set the authors talk about. One could stick definitions and mechanics together and get something like the constituative rule, and likewise evaluations and operations could be the operational rules. However, it’s not quite an exact match. The operational rules as described in the book lean a little more towards what I think of as the skin of the game (which is also related to the theme of the game…). This gets back into the question of how different do two games have to be to be different games. Basically, when I look at two games I consider them the same if their abstract systems are the same. To use the terms in the book, if two games have the same constituative rules I think of them as the same game.

Clearly, that’s a designer bias. From a player’s perspective, how you play the game can make a huge difference even when the underlying systems are the same. The book has a great example in this regard (Rules of Play page 128-129)-

Consider the standard game of Tic Tac Toe. Then consider the game 3-to-15 by Marc LeBlanc. 3-to-15 works like this:
1. players alternate turns picking a [whole] number from 1 to 9 that has not yet been picked.
2. if a player manages to get a set of three number that sum to 15, that player wins.
3. if all the number have been picked and no one has won then te game is a draw.
From a players perspective they’re completely different games. However, consider this matrix
294
753
618
which illustrates the winning sets of three numbers on the rows, columns, and diagonals, and also demonstrates that the abstracts systems of the two games are identical.

Wearing my player hat I’d consider the two games to be different (at least until I figured out the matrix). Wearing my designer hat I’d consider the games to be the same, but with different skins. Skins are highly relevant in designing a game, not just something that’s thrown on after the abstract system is created. The skin determines in large part how the player feels about the game and type of things the player tries to do, e.g. whether a player thinks about territory control and position or arithmetic and set theory. HOWEVER, I don’t consider myself to have designed a new game if I put a new skin on an existing system, I would probably call it a variant (of a particular kind, more on that when I get around to the what-makes-a-different-game discussion).

Salen and Zimmerman consider game rules to have these characteristics:
- limit player action
- explicit (more regarding this in a moment)
- unambiguous
- shared by all players
- fixed (on some level, even if fluid on others)
- binding
- repeatable

The first point is to them the most important one: “Rules Limit Player Action. The chief way that rules operate is to limit the activities of players.” For me that doesn’t work. I understand what they’re getting, but when I consider rules from that perspective I find it doesn’t help me in designing a game. To discuss why I have a problem with it I need to get into the discussion of kinds of rules.

Salen and Zimmerman break rules into three categories: operational rules (how the players play the game, e.g. mark an X or O in any box in the grid), constituative (the underlying formal structure of the game, e.g. given a set of 9 elements and two empty sets, elements are removed from the first set and added alternately in the second and third), and implicit (the unwritten rules of the game, e.g. a player takes their turn within a reasonable amount of time). Those categories aren’t exactly what I would have used (thoughts on my rules categories are for a later post), but they’re close enough. Reconciling the category of ‘implicit rules’ with the the trait ‘rules are explicit’ is… tricky. It’s not explored yet in the book, but for now I’m just going to use the simple distinction that operative and constituitive rules are explicit, and implicit ones aren’t.

The relevant complication arises in the interaction between the category of implicit rules and the idea that rules limit player action. While it’s true that rules do in fact limit player action, by counting everything that limits player action as an implicit rule in the game one quickly gets an unbounded list of rules, ranging from ‘players may not take too long on their turn’ to ‘players shall not shoot their opponents’ and beyond. By defining game rule in such an open ended manner the list of implicit rules ends up including every potential action that is not limited by physics alone. There are a number of problems I have with that. The biggest problem is that thinking of game rules as having such a broad extent is detrimental to my design process.

For my thinking, game rules have all the qualities that the authors state, EXCEPT, the first is replaced with this narrower concept:
Rules define meaningful actions. The chief way that rules operate is to define the actions that a player may do that affect the state of the game.

In my mind this gets much more at the idea of what is a game rule. Much of what Salen and Zimmerman would consider the implicit rules of a game is excluded by this. They use an example that in Yahtzee players don’t eat the dice because there’s a Yahtzee rule (implicit) that says ‘players may not eat the dice’. In my understanding that wouldn’t be a rule, implicit or otherwise. Most of that kind of thing I’d put under the general heading of what it means to play a game, with sidetracks into etiquette, sportsmanship, and nutrition.

One difficult thing with my approach is that strictly defining cheating is a little trickier, but far from impossible. For example, in most games of Monopoly stealing money from the bank would be cheating. With the authors’ definition of game rules, stealing would be cheating because there’s an implicit (or sometimes explicit) rule that a player may not steal (IMPORTANT NOTE: I haven’t yet gotten to the book’s discussion of play and cheating, I’m just inferring that’s how cheating is defined based on the definitions and framework the book has so far presented). With my definition stealing would be cheating because it would not be listed as one of the ways a player may manipulate the state of the game. In the authors’ version cheating is breaking a rule (and there are many, many implicit rules, proscribing the various ways that players might otherwise cheat). In my version cheating is manipulating the state of the game in a way that’s not listed in the rules (which is my general definition of ‘cheat’, and then there’s a single implicit rule of ‘a player may not cheat’).

I expect this very low level split in thinking about the purpose and definition of game rules will lead to many more divides as the book goes on. However, I have faith that there’s a good reason for the authors’ particular approach - I expect it will lead to some approaches to game design I have not considered (and likewise I expect some of my approaches to game design are excluded by the authors’ definitions).

Recently I’ve been working my way through Rules of Play by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman. It’s a text book about game design, written with a very academic, analytic bent - Salen and Zimmerman are “working to establish a critical discourse for game design.” Thus far (about 15% of the way through), that seems to mean defining terms and trying tie together / pull from various other authors and thinkers on games and play. I expect it will get more into process later (the authors state from the start that they begin with definitions, which is perfectly reasonable).

This is kind of a response to some ideas set out in the book, probably the first of several, in no particular order. It’s largely just a recording of some thoughts inspired by the reading. It may sound somewhat critical at times, but it’s not meant to be - I’m not endeavoring to correct their presentation but merely to record my own ideas on some topics, and the parts that tend to get me thinking the most are those where I differ from them. So…

The basic definitions section reminds me of math, where one starts with a very limited set of axioms and derives a whole system from them. It works in math, where the system can truly be defined from the base up. It’s trickier with words, which are very slippery, fluid, subjective things. They start with ‘meaningful play’ and after about 80 pages end up with RULES, PLAY, and CULTURE (they’re caps) design schemas, on the way defining design, game, rule, and other such bits and pieces. For the most part the details don’t matter to me (I mean, its interesting stuff, but they’re axioms - assuming I want to understand what the authors are saying I have to accept them as the givens for what follows). That being said…

The way (both the process and the result) they define game is intriguing. They take definitions from 8 notables in the world of game design and thinking, break them into parts, build a grid, and look for commonalities. Then they remove “the unnecessary bits” and come up with this definition:
“A game is a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome.”

This definition includes puzzles as games (according to the author), and is very hazy on things like RPGs and simulations (SimCity, flight simulators, etc.). I think, though I’m not sure, that one of the main goals of this definition is to separate game play from more general play. Anyway, that definition more-or-less works, I guess - I’m certainly willing to accept it as the operative definition for the rest of the book. If joe-average-game-designer came up to me on the street and told me that was his definition of a game I wouldn’t try to argue them out of it, but I probably would start some kind of discussion about it…

In our [game group] conversations on this topic (’what is a game’) we’ve developed the idea that game-like things fall into one of four categories: activities, puzzles, toys, and games. Generally, everyone in the group can agree about which category a particular thing falls into. (Though, the death of the author has an analogous ‘death of the designer’ - whether something is a toy, puzzle, activity, or game depends finally on how it’s used by the players, not what was intended by the designer.) We have at various times dissected what aspects of a thing incline us to put it in one group and not another, and sifting through all that the definition I (and not necessarily others in the group) would use is:
a game is a finite collection of rules which define a start, a game state, a finish, relevant actions (i.e. how the game state can be changed and thus also the range of possible game states), and methods of determining winners and losers, and by which one or people (known as players) choose to abide for the goal (not necessarily exclusive) of having fun.

Activities are distinguished by not having winners or losers defined by the rules and by having an open-ended game state and set of relevant actions - E.g. RPGs, Calvinball. Toys are distinguished by not having winners or losers, nor by having a definite end (and toys are distinguished from activities in having a fixed set of relevant actions) - E.g. The Sims. Puzzles are distinguished by not having winners or losers (though many puzzle solvers will equate ‘achieved the finished state’ with ‘won’, in which case for them that thing would be a game) - E.g. Rubik’s Cube, Crosswords, Jigsaw Puzzles.

My definition is different in these main ways:
- it excludes puzzles
- it allows the inclusion of the real (i.e. isn’t restricted to ‘artificial conflict’)
- it requires a purpose/intention of fun
- it is player-centric (in two main ways - players choose to play, and players have the intention of having fun)
- plus there are some differences in the details of ‘what is a rule’, more of which anon

‘Fun’ is notoriously difficult to define precisely, let alone accurately. In large part that’s because fun is entirely subjective. Still, I don’t think that gets in the way of my definition being a useful one. It does have the effect that a game designer only creates (or discovers?) proto-games which aren’t actually games until one or more players play them with the intention of having fun (whether or not the fun is realized), but as soon as anyone (including said designer) plays it with that intent then it becomes a game. I think the ‘artificial conflict’ is how the authors try to get at the idea of fun from a kind of side-ways approach. However I think the restriction of artificiality (”Artificial: Games maintain a boundary from so called ‘real life’ in both time and space. Although games obviously occur in the real world, artificiality is one of their defining features”) excludes a number of things which I would call games. For one example off hand, poker played with real money has a very definite real world element in the conflict, but if a player also played for fun I would still call it a game.

It’s also worth noting that the collection of rules which a game uses may be used in a non-game way, by giving the player(s)s no choice in the participation, by the player(s) participating with no goal of having fun, or both. I would call something that was a game in every way except choice and/or fun by the more general term ‘contest’.

All in all a precise definition of game doesn’t matter that much. It’s sometimes fun and/or useful to discuss whether X is a game or a puzzle or a toy or an activity, but where exactly the final product falls is irrelevant. It’s main use is in helping the designer(s) think about his, her, or their projects. So, enough about defining games. Next topic, rules….

Bryan Alexander came to the college today to give a pair of very good talks. If you have a chance to attend any of his presentations or classes I highly recommend it.

The first was a lunch talk on Web 2.0 and Pedagogy. It was aimed in large part at faculty, but we had a number of attendees from administrative departments as well. I think it gave people a good idea of what is Web 2.0 and why they should care, but we’ll have to wait and see what the actual response is. I expect we’ll get som faculty wanting to create blogs or start wikis for collaborative writing projects. At the very least it will serve as a good common basis for discussing blog policy on campus (most or all of the concerned parties made it to the talk).

The second was a follow-up in the early afternoon. The audience here was mostly technology people of various flavors (from a technophilic reference librarian to people in our media services group to public affairs web folks). This second talk was more interactive, with people asking questions as it went along and with the focus changing based on what people were asking about. Also, it dealt a bit more with tools and examples than theory. It was a great survey of what tools and technologies we would (or will, more likely) be dealing with as Web 2.0 sensibilities penetrate further into the academic world.

Bryan really makes me want to do and think more about web 2.0 (and game) stuff. But then there’s all this othe stuff I want to do with my time, not to mention things like my job which keeps me in paycheck. Choices, choices….