15. Rules and Verbs

The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions.

—OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, SR.

One school of thought takes rules to be the fundamental element of games. Thus, to explain a game you need to examine the rules. For instance, if you use MDA (mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics) as your framework for understanding games, the only element that you can directly affect is the mechanics. The mechanics, in this case, are just rules of varying scope. But even if you choose to use some other framework to evaluate your game, you’ll likely need to examine the rules of the game as a fundamental element of the experience.

Rules

When you are introducing a game—say, hearts—to a friend, how do you explain the game? Generally, you would say something like this:

The goal is to get the fewest points. At the start of the round, the dealer deals thirteen cards face-down to each of four players. In the first round, each player passes three cards that they were dealt to the player on their left. The player who has the 2 of clubs goes first and plays the 2 of clubs. Then each player has to play a higher-valued card of the same suit. If a player cannot play a card of the same suit, he may play any card except a heart or the queen of spades on the first round. Play continues until every player has played one card. Then the player who played the highest card of the suit first played wins the hand and collects the cards. That player starts a new hand with any card except a heart, if possible, unless someone has already played a heart or the queen of spades earlier in the game. Once all the cards have been collected, each player receives 1 point for each heart they have collected and 13 points if they collected the queen of spades. There’s a special case called shooting the moon. If a player collects all the hearts AND the queen of spades, then every other player is awarded 26 points! It’s really hard to do! The game is finished when one player accumulates 100 points. The player with the fewest points wins.

What happened there? You did not explain the story of hearts. You did not explain what a deck of cards was, or why or how the cards are numbered, or what a card looks like. You did not explain why the game was fun or some strategies players could use to win. What you did was enumerate a bunch of rules. Those rules define the game.

What are the parts of hearts that you can change and yet still preserve the feel and experience of playing the game? Is it that it is a card game that is important? You can change the cards to tokens drawn from a bag and still hearts would play the same. You could change the ranking of cards from high to low and make the ace of spades the lead card and the 4 of diamonds the big penalty card and the game would remain largely the same. You could play it with a theme, such as “hearts is a struggle about trying to rid your nation of pox-laden peasants.” Nonetheless, the game would play largely the same. It is the rules that form the essential part of the game.

Qualities of Rules

Salen and Zimmerman’s book Rules of Play obviously spends a lot of space discussing rules.¹ They define the qualities of rules with the following attributes:

¹ Zimmerman, E., & Salen, K. (2003). Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

• RULES LIMIT PLAYER ACTION. Rules allow you to play games in a meaningful way. Rules of Play uses Yahtzee as an example. “[T]hink of all the things you could do with the dice in that game: You could light them on fire, eat them, juggle them, or make jewelry out of them. But you don’t do any of these things.” This is a silly example, but important. By limiting the player’s action, rules allow you to set up meaningful choices and conflicts. If play were unlimited, players could always sidestep any situation. Rules are essentially limitations demarcating the line between acceptable behaviors and unacceptable behaviors.

• RULES ARE EXPLICIT AND UNAMBIGUOUS. This is perhaps the most important quality of rules for games. If the rules are not complete, then sometimes players find themselves in situations that have no win/lose result and no way to proceed. For example, if you are playing HORSE and the ball ends up stuck between the rim and backboard, what do you do? In HORSE, you need a rule: “If the ball comes to a complete stop and the called shot was not made, then this counts as a miss and it is the next player’s turn.” It’s of the utmost importance that all conditions are handled! Notice here that the rules do not enumerate every possible way the ball could stop. The rules do not say, “If the ball gets stuck between the rim and backboard, or if it gets stuck in tree branches, or if a tornado carries it into the sky,” and so on. This would be pedantic. Instead, you craft rules with parsimony so that they handle all reasonable conditions.

• RULES ARE SHARED BY ALL PLAYERS. Players must understand what rules apply in what situations. Have you ever played a game with a friend and that friend conveniently “forgot” to tell you a rule that cost you the game? This does not mean that all players have to play by the same rules. In Cops and Robbers, the two roles have different rules for how they should play. But all players share that understanding of the rules. If some robbers think that they can leave jail by counting to 20 and some think they can leave jail only when tagged, then playing the game would result in chaos and turmoil. The game would cease.

• RULES ARE FIXED. Imagine that, in the aforementioned Cops and Robbers, just as a robber is being tagged, she announces, “No! I’m still free! You have to tag me with two hands!” Of course, this new rule would spawn an argument. Rules must be fixed, or the changing of a rule must be governed by a fixed rule. For instance, the card game Fluxx’s unique feature is that players change the rules as the game progresses. However, how players change the rules is fixed and understood by all players. Rules can be changed in Fluxx only in a specific enumerated way.

• RULES ARE BINDING. Whoever said “rules were made to be broken” was not talking about how to design a coherent game. The implicit agreement made in playing a game is that the game will be fair and that the players will be subject to the agreed-upon rules.

• RULES ARE REPEATABLE. Say I play Monopoly the correct way: When a player lands on Free Parking, that player receives nothing. However, if I land on it later and decide it entitles me to $500, then there is a problem. Unless the rules determined how that reward changed, then we are playing in an arbitrary manner.

Keep in mind that this list is not something that is written in stone. Some games may have as their purpose to break one of these qualities of rules. But these are special cases. In general, coherent rules have the listed qualities.

Types of Rules

Rules of Play also discusses a useful distinction between types of rules that should be understood:

• OPERATIONAL RULES. These rules are most often thought of when game rules are being discussed. These are the explicit, listed rules that are described in instruction sheets for board games or tutorials for digital games. Nearly all qualities of rules discussed in the previous section are operational rules since they pertain to how to “operate” the game. When designers write design documentation, it is important that they make sure operational rules are complete and enumerated.

• CONSTITUTIVE RULES. These rules are a little harder to understand. They define the game’s logic. Designers do not necessarily give these to the player because they are inherent in the game’s structure. These rules do not direct the player to action. They instead describe the system. For instance, a constitutive rule of hearts is that there are 13 heart cards in the deck and only 1 queen of spades. A constitutive rule of hearts is that all players start at zero points. These are the basic underlying rules that you would need to explain to a computer for it to re‑create the game. This type of rule is needed for play, but it does not need to be spelled out in the operational rules.

• IMPLICIT RULES. These are unwritten rules that are tacitly agreed upon by the players. This includes things like expected behaviors of the game and good sportsmanship. What rule in hearts covers marking the cards? How about shouldering your players aside to have a look at their cards? Neither of these things is actually written in the rules, yet players would agree that these behaviors are unacceptable. When writing rules, a designer does not necessarily have to include the implicit rules, but the designer must determine if a rule is obvious or if it is so off-the-wall that it bears including in the implicit category.

When writing tournament or competitive rules, for example, a designer must account for as many degenerate conditions as possible or allow for an arbiter that is empowered by the rules to declare that an implicit rule is broken. Football has a rule that the referee can penalize any conduct deemed an unfair act or a mockery of the game. This is a rule that essentially allows the referee to use judgment to disallow any conduct that is not explicitly covered in the rules but that violates the spirit of the rules.

Verbs

What would you say you do here?

—FROM OFFICE SPACE (1999)

Another common way of examining a game is to examine what the player chooses to do. “Play” is an obvious answer of course, but each game plays differently. Is the type of play the same in soccer as it is in backgammon? Clearly not. What can you use to determine how a player plays? One way is to examine the verbs that an observer could use to explain the actions that players take. Each verb must relate to something a player does to affect the state of the game within the game’s rules. Actions such as “breathe” or “exist” are not state changes and are not affected specifically by the rules of the game, so you do not consider them as player actions.

For instance, here are some verbs in various games:

• Baseball—run, hit, catch, slide, take a pitch, throw, pitch, steal, jump, tag, tag up, dive

• Super Mario Bros.—walk, wait, run, jump, stomp, hit block, grab, bounce, throw

• Portal—walk, jump, shoot blue portal, shoot orange portal, pick up, drop

• War (card game)—draw, compare

These verbs can (but do not necessarily) create a choice for the player. If these verbs do not create choices, as in the example of War, this can clue you into where the players are playing the game and where the game is playing the player!

The classic game Dragon’s Lair consists mostly of predetermined animated cutscenes interspersed with quick-time events that branch the story to other animated cutscenes. The story involves a young knight on his quest to rescue a princess. However, because the interaction is so limited, it could be said that the verbs of the game are not the things that the protagonist does, such as dodging or using his sword to vanquish evil snakes. The only actions the player can take are to press a direction button or press the sword button. The only verb for the player is “to react” and press the correct button. From the perspective of player verbs, playing Dragon’s Lair is not much different from playing Simon.

A game with no verbs for the player is difficult to defend as a game with meaningful choice at all because it’s impossible to offer a player a choice when the player has no way to affect the game state. At the same time, a game with too many verbs becomes cumbersome and unfocused.

In Super Metroid, the player is blocked by different-colored doors that lead to new rooms. The designers could have added an additional verb to the game so that the player could open a door. However, that was unnecessary. Instead, they used an already established verb—shoot—to open a door. Creating a new verb was unnecessary because the player has already learned how to use the verb “shoot,” and the “open” action would have no connection to any other verbs or mechanics in the game. Designer Anna Anthropy refers to these unconnected actions as orphaned verbs and suggests developing in such a way that many interactions are served by just a few verbs.²

² Anthropy, A., & Clark, N. (2014). A Game Design Vocabulary: Exploring the Foundational Principles Behind Good Game Design. Pearson Education.

As an example, look at the wide variety of puzzles served by Portal’s parsimonious set of verbs. Players can create a set of portals to move a remote block across a map, drop the block on an enemy turret to disable it, use that portal to traverse a large space, pick up the now dead turret, and use the turret to weigh down a pressure sensor. Complicated interactions are possible with a modest menu of player actions because of the clever design of the verb interactions.

Summary

• Rules are one of the essential elements of games. It’s difficult to discuss play of a game without at least tangentially referring to the game’s rules.

• Rules must cover all cases within a game in order to direct player action should that case arise. Analog games can be more lax about this requirement because mentally flexible human beings arbitrate them. Digital games must be complete in their rules because otherwise a computer will not have instructions on how to continue.

• One way to classify rules is to label them as operational, constitutive, or implicit.

• Verbs explain what the player does in the game. These actions relate to state changes in the game itself and are thus an expression of what the player’s existence in the game involves.

• Avoid orphaned verbs—verbs that have no connection to other verbs and mechanics in the game.