Play’s Republic

Our discussion in class last night made me remember the games of my own childhood. Garrison talked about creating his own games with friends - I think many of us did this. If we didn’t make up entirely new games, we certainly made new rules for existing games. Many of these rules were designed to benefit us inordinately, by allowing “everyone wearing a yellow shirt to get an extra turn” or some such iteration. Sometimes it was as simple as re-rolling the dice over and over, until you got the right number to land you on the square you wanted. We were discovering that we could have power over the very fabric of the game world. I think this is an important point in the development of all players - when we first realize that the game world is not set in stone, that the rules are not dictates from ‘on high,’ and that we can in fact shape our destinies in ways we never could in the real world. Such a discovery of power is, for a child, an incredibly exciting moment. Suddenly you can make your character more powerful than any other! You can get $5000 more Monopoly dollars just by saying that you should! What an amazing discovery. It’s no wonder that children are eager to go down this path and explore how they can bend, subvert, and entirely avoid the rules. We might call such behavior “cheating,” but I think this term isn’t quite accurate, since this ‘rule-bending’ is such a new concept at this point in the child’s game-playing experience. (What we might deem ‘cheating’ would come later on, if the child persists in this behavior past the point of mere exploration, and rather than achieving the enlightenment described in the next paragraph.)

The most important moment, however, comes when the child grows tired of having almighty powers to manipulate the rules such that she can win in 2 minutes, without even trying. We come to realize that with too much power and too little constraint, the game loses its challenge. It loses its meaning. There is no more fun in killing all the monsters if you can do it blindfolded, with one hand, because your Strength and Agility ratings are off the charts, and your sword has +3000 in sharpness and accuracy. Where’s the challenge? There is none.

It is at this point, when we realize that we miss the challenge, that I believe we also come to understanding the real value of rules. Yes, rules create constraints that we must struggle within. Often rules cause us great aggravation, when the monster has killed us ten times running, and we cannot simply cheat and run around its back or poke it in the eye with a sharp stick. But without these rules, the game loses all shape and eventually all value to the player.

So we learn that rules are actually a very, very good thing. That’s not the point of this post. The point is to give some thought to how we come to this conclusion - through first-hand experience of how meaningless games would be without rules. In essence, we have to become cheaters in order to learn why we would rather play honestly and win honestly.