Rules Meditation

You are a thief in a dungeon, or at least you're pretending to be, and there's a warrior blocking your entrance to the next room. Are you able to successfully fight your way past?

Well, you could talk through the process in which you combat him. Discussing what is likely for you to do, how well he can respond, navigate through the whole conversational process. Perhaps at certain moments during this, you and the player describing the actions of the warrior would come to some disagreements surrounding what occurs — he says he would smash through your armor, you say "nuh uh." Maybe we ask someone else to mediate, we invent some method to resolve the specific aspect of our disagreement, or we establish some trusted resource to help us figure out the relative hardiness of my armor against his ax — an encyclopedia perhaps, or a forum, or a rulebook.

Our resolution method, if we find ourselves pulling on some consistent tools or enjoying the ways we have to resolve this, might result in codifying specific methods of resolution in order to ensure we don't have these same disagreements over and over for the future. Sometimes, if we don't want to have to figure it out ourselves, we'll end up referring to an outside resource we trust to have good ideas about the whole process — a blog, a rulebook, a game designer. The way we might choose to enter the granularity and mechanism of our method is going to emerge from how many degrees of abstraction we are interested in remaining.

Perhaps we find ourselves in this situation often — my thief's knife against your warrior's neck. Is there a way we can dwell on the outcome of this that feels more present for us? Maybe we say, "no actually, our fight doesn't feel very much like a debate. It would feel a lot more like a dance-off." Or a game of poker, or chess, or a rock-paper-scissors tournament. When we make our fight coterminous with these other mechanics, we reduce our fight — we say the emotions which emerge are no greater than those that emerge during these smaller systems. But perhaps we also elevate these other symbolic mechanics, perhaps the emotions we feel when playing chess really do bring us to the sensation of combat — or at least, the way combat feels in this world, of warriors and thieves and dungeons.

Maybe we should get up from the table and settle this ourselves — what better way is there to model a fight than if you and I wrestle it out here on the living room floor? We've left the table behind, but even while sitting at the table, there are other examples of this kind of de-abstracted presence. When I talk out loud, we can presume that's my character speaking, and the words I say are identical without abstraction. When I slam my fist against the table, so too does my thief. Sometimes I might not even realize that what I'm doing is shaping how I play — if I'm flipping through a book to find the answer I need, or taking a note of a path in the dungeon for me to circle back around to, it can be unclear how abstract this really is. The sensation of how we choose to abstract the truth of what we're doing is just as important as the actual moment of abstraction. We are, after all, bodies.

So I present a question, "Are you able to successfully fight your way past?", and we figure out how to answer it together. Rules are a process we've agreed will consistently produce an answer to the question without negotiation — this is how Vincent Baker phrased it one time in conversation. In the absence of agreed-upon rules, we must now negotiate how we answer this question. Sometimes the process of negotiation is fruitful, but sometimes it isn't. The process through which we answer the question creates a precedent we will use in the future together, but sometimes, when we don't want to have to engage in full negotiation or we don't particularly care about the question raised, we find a quick answer and move on — in that sense, rules elide, but if we stop there we lose sight of what else mechanics grant us.

If the question is "Are you able to successfully fight your way past?" then maybe we answer that through mechanics, or another source, or we find that answer together. But maybe that's not the question we want to answer. Maybe a better question would be "How do you beat up this warrior?" or "How does the warrior kill you?" or "What secret love do you reveal to the warrior when you fight?" Rules provide answers, and in doing so, prompt new questions — maybe questions we wouldn't have thought to ask, or would've been scared to ask, in the darkness of the dungeon together.

The absence of an already-established answer will provoke negotiation around its answering — if I ask how I could seduce the warrior instead of killing him, the process of answering this question could take up the next six months of play, or it could be shot down in an instant. Rules are ideological; they reflect a procedure for answering certain questions. Sometimes this ideology is regressive, even when it's trying not to be. Sometimes this ideology can be liberating, and provoke us to find new approaches to answering questions.

Rules allow us to strategically abstract, but they also give us a toolkit to strategically linger. They answer questions and provoke new questions, but those questions won't be consistent from person to person. We use mechanics because the sensation of the mechanic is appealing , but rules cannot provoke a consistent emotional response, they only frame the question asked. Nothing can control how we emotionally react to the situation we're in, no matter what rules we choose for our characters' fight. That said; we seek out rules we hope will feel compelling, that will pull on us, that we may trust to affect us.

Sometimes we don't want rules answering our questions, sometimes the rules restrict us and leave us wanting a better answer. Sometimes we intentionally find rules that overly-restrict us because there is some pleasure in that restriction: it's fun to put on handcuffs and then beg to be let free. But if we don't like being restrained, we can always see what happens when we shatter the cuffs.

To conclude, here's a small game:

The Story of the Thief and the Warrior

Go on a date with someone else. Your goal is to steal their heart. Their goal is to catch you. After the night is over, discuss at what points during the date each of you felt like your roles, what actions each of you took which possess a second meaning in the other world.