Games, Play, and Joy: Part 2
Using rules as excuses and catalysts.
This is Part 2 of my series Games, Play, and Joy, which is based on a class I taught in 2019 at NYU’s ITP (as part of my residency there), aimed at games-curious artists. As ever, this essay series doesn’t represent the opinions of my employers or whatever — just me.
Hope you enjoy.
Theory
- Part 1: Creating joyful possibilities with games.
- Part 2: Using rules as excuses and catalysts. (you are here)
- Part 3: Playing with systems of power.
Tactics
- Part 4: The art of finding the fun.
- Part 5: Adding gamefeel and juice.
- Part 6: The promises and perils of simulations.
- Part 7: The joy of feeling seen.
Your Turn
- Part 8: Epilogue.
Why do we respect rules? After all, Part 1 was all about shaking off oppressive, limiting forces — those things that would contain us or try to tell us what we can or can’t do. Right?
So how on earth would rules —which are, by definition, meant to constrict us and our behavior — provide opportunities for freedom, joy, mastery, growth, and creativity? Why do we eagerly embrace some constraints and reject others? Why on earth do we stand in the hot sun and hit golf balls with weird sticks from very far away, instead of just driving to the damn hole in a nice little car and dropping the ball in?
Regardless of the game, we ultimately play because we find something exciting, satisfying, and compelling about living within the bounds of a good ruleset.¹ It gives us an excuse to play; a framework to relate to each other (whether competitively, collaboratively, or something else); and a push to be creative within its requirements. A good ruleset acts less like a cage and more like a catalyst, prodding us to experiment and combine strange things to discover moments of genius.
Dave Hickey discusses the genius that bubbles up at the center of a good ruleset in his essay, The Heresy of Zone Defense, describing a play made by Dr. J in the 1980 NBA finals. (If you click no other video in this series, click the video of this play above. It’s worth it.)
What happens in the play is as follows:
[…] Julius is driving to the basket from the right side of the lane against Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Julius takes the ball in one hand and elevates, leaves the floor. Kareem goes up to block his path, arms above his head. Julius ducks, passes under Kareem’s outside arm and then under the backboard. He looks like he’s flying out of bounds. But no! Somehow, Erving turns his body in the air, reaches back under the backboard from behind; and lays the ball up into the basket from the left side!
The crowd is electric. This move is like nothing anyone has seen before. It is, Hickey says, the product of a “stream of instantaneous micro-decisions” against a perfect defense, resulting in a response that was new, necessary, and suddenly possible — even in a ruleset that had seem fully explored. He describes the joy of the moment as “the product of talent and will accommodating itself to liberating rules.”
He continues:
Consider this for a moment: Julius Erving’s play was at once new and fair! The rules, made by people who couldn’t begin to imagine Erving’s play,² made it possible.
As game designers, one of the primary things we do is shape and define sets of rules. We define what players can and can’t do; the goals they should be aiming for; the things they want to avoid; and the contexts (courts, equipment, players) all the above happens in. Ultimately, players may or may not respect all of these diktats — sneaking in a house rule or a cheat here or there — but ultimately, we are in the craft of designing boundaries that coax out and facilitate these unpredictable, emergent, hopefully joyful experiences.
It is not a straightforward ask. “Drawing such lines skillfully,” says Bernard Suits in The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia, “is the very essence of the gamewright’s craft.” He continues:
The gamewright must avoid two extremes: if he draws his lines too loosely, the game will be dull because winning will be too easy[, since] there are no rules proscribing available means. [But] rules are lines that can be drawn too tightly, so that the game becomes too difficult. And if a line is drawn very tightly indeed the game is squeezed out of existence.
Furthermore, we all, to some degree, design in the dark. “The point of game design is not to have players experience rules,” says Eric Zimmerman in Play as Research: The iterative design process, “it is to have players experience play.” A set of rules being ‘about’ something, or ‘meant to’ evoke something, does not necessarily translate into an experience about that thing. That is:
Game design is [...] a second-order design problem. Play arises out of the rules as they are inhabited and enacted by players, creating emergent patterns of behavior, sensation, social exchange, and meaning.
So how do we follow this wobbly line from rules to experience? Let’s start by playing with some of the simplest rules possible and seeing what happens.
In teaching this class, I like to have my students try out two tremendously simple games. You can try them with a friend or housemate. (But don’t invite anyone new over, what with COVID-19 and all.)
The first is Four Long Lines, from The Conditional Design Workbook. It is meant to be played with four players, all drawing simultaneously. There are four rules:
- Draw one long line during 1.5 hours.
- The pen may not leave the paper the entire time.
- You may stop for a maximum of 5 seconds without lifting the pen.
- Do not cross any other lines.
(In class, I tend to hand out 8.5"x11" paper and limit the students to 15 minutes. Sadly, even a 14-week semester does not leave room for 1.5 hours of drawing.)
The sensible thing to do would be to stay tightly in one’s own corner, drawing as slowly and carefully as possible until the 15 minutes are up.
And yet that is not what happens.
People doodle in the wide wobbles and arcs as they would in the margins of their own notebooks, not constraining themselves to the slowest or smallest possible strokes. They collaborate and plan out ways to slip into the center of the page or each others’ corners, sometimes requiring elaborate Twister-esque entwining of arms to pass pens. After long periods of peace and planning, some students glance around sneakily and dart their pen into the center of the page, laughing as their collaborators shriek with mock-indignation about the sudden line problem they have caused. As they inevitably run out of paper far before the time is up, they scramble to think of new ways to outsmart the rules — often cleverly realizing that there’s nothing in the rules that says they can’t coordinate to turn the paper over and have a brand new blank canvas.
Into the gaps of the rules, they bring their whole selves: their creativity, their social dramas, and their inherent cleverness looking for a place to be expressed. All facilitated, catalyzed, and excused by a set of four very simple rules that seem, on the surface, to have absolutely nothing to do with any of that at all.
Exquisite Corpse is another drawing game with extremely straightforward rules, brought to us by none other than the Surrealists (themselves expert game designers — but that’s for another essay). A sheet of paper is folded into four equal parts, and passed around such that each person draws a segment of a person without being able to see any of the segments that came before. The content can be anything, and the only “requirement” (not so much a rule, more a point of politeness) is to leave small marks onto the next section, indicating where the next drawer should pick up. The drawing is only revealed at the end.
The resulting drawings are bizarre, grotesque, and hilarious, even if all participants attempt to draw a normal human form (and — spoiler alert — almost no one ever does). There is simply too much hidden information to try and make anything comprehensible. So people give up on comprehensibility, allowing themselves to be drawn in by the excitement of attempting to make something strange within the boundaries they are given — and perhaps, even if they don’t admit it, to try and at least troll the person after them.
When the Surrealists started playing Exquisite Corpse, the alchemy of this ruleset set the participating artists on fire. Alexxa Gotthardt notes:
Surrealists immediately took to the collaborative game. Many of the movement’s practitioners played it regularly, almost addicted to the automatic drawing it inspired.
“The suggestive power of those arbitrary meetings…was so astounding, so dazzling, and verified surrealism’s theses and outlook so strikingly, that the game became a system, a method of research, a means of exaltation as well as stimulation, and even, perhaps, a kind of drug,” Kahn wrote. “From then on, it was delirium. All night long we put on a fantastic drama for ourselves.”
Furthermore, it stirred up something beyond one single person. Each bizarre drawing was somehow larger than the sum of its (grotesque) parts, on both artistic and social levels:
Drawing collaboratively provided a release for Surrealist artists, and offered a well of fresh inspiration through their peers. Breton once explained that the game both strengthened the “ties that unify” its players and allowed them “to take our common desires into account.” Similarly, Kahn celebrated the images that resulted from Exquisite Corpse as “unimaginable by one brain alone.”
While the Surrealist group disbanded in the 1930s, Exquisite Corpse stuck. Today, artists continue to use the game as a means to probe the nature of collaboration, partnership, and unfettered creativity.
Looking at Four Long Lines and Exquisite Corpse, a few things become apparent:
- There are almost no rules.
- There is nothing inherently funny about these rules.
- There is no required behavior (competitive or collaborative) suggested.
- These rules do not, at any point, demand that people be weird, or draw artistically, or otherwise be visually creative. (That is, there is nothing in the rules of Exquisite Corpse preventing you from just drawing two straight lines from the prior drawing to next drawing and immediately passing the paper along. It’s just that no one ever does.)
And yet both games act as an excuse and a catalyst for new forms of engagement and creativity — with drawing, with one’s fellow players, with one’s own practice, and beyond. Just with a few simple rules.
Sometimes, the simpler the rules, the more evocative they are. These games often have a certain kind of “stubbornness”: games that can only be played on their own terms, whose rulesets toe the line of possibility and playability. What happens when we ask our players to do things that are nearly impossible? What do those rulesets point at? What do they make us feel?
Games can be stubborn in their temporality: the time they take to play, or the possible times they can be played at all. (What does it mean if we can’t play Keeping In Touch because there are no trees near us? What would it mean to commit to planting trees in currently-unplayable areas?)
They can be stubborn in the demands they place on us, pushing us to physical or social limits. (Microdisobedience is nearly impossible to play without, at some point, getting arrested. How far are the players willing to go?)
Some rulesets may not tell you when to stop, or how to win.
Jon Bois’ 17776: What Football Will Look Like in the Future (perhaps the best piece of games writing of all time — yeah, I said it) is a set of speculative riffs on football: modified games in which, due to a typo, the field is 1 yard long and 1,000 yards wide; in which the end zones are separate American states; and in which a multi-state football field, running top to bottom across the United States, accidentally goes over a cliff. The series uses increasingly ludicrous and unplayable games as a way to question why we find games and play meaningful — even when (perhaps especially when) the rules we struggle against and impose on ourselves are impossible.
Rules function as excuses; as temporary relations; as set-aside spaces for experimentation; as catalysts for genius. They have constraints, but those constraints justify the use and exploration of everything else.
They give us excuses to do things we can’t do in everyday life.⁴
They give us excuses to be personal and vulnerable.
They also let us do things that we can’t safely do in real life. They can provide a safe space to embody power and assert agency that may not exist in regular life, which can provide its own kind of catharsis and joy.
Anyone can design rules. What do you want to do with them?
We’ll get more into this in Part 3.⁵
Disclaimer: I’m friendly with several of the folks I cited here. But as a rule, I only cite folks whose work I think is legitimately important and great, regardless of whether we are friendly or somehow mortal enemies.
¹ See also Bernard Suits’ concept of the lusory attitude.
² A note from me: remember that basketball was originally designed in the 1890s, by James Naismith. It went through many rapid evolutions of rules as other people poked at its boundaries (read a few clever rule interpretations here), but that’s still nearly 100 years later.
³ Check out Ono’s Grapefruit for more conceptual art rulesets. Katherine Cross also wrote a great piece on What Yoko Ono’s art teaches us about video games that’s well worth checking out.
⁴ We’ll get into this much more in the next section, but Doug Wilson talks a lot about games as excuses in his work, especially his PhD dissertation, which is well worth reading in full.
⁵ I also gave a talk about this subject at Eyeo in 2018 — before writing this class, but still relevant. You can watch it here or read it here.
Hope you enjoyed! If folks seem to like this series, I’ll keep going. If you want to buy me a socially-distanced coffee, you can do so here. If you want to donate somewhere, I think these folks are pretty cool.
