What are rules for?

I would even take a step back and ask: “What are we even talking about when we talk about rules? What are rules? What specifically is a rule, and what might not be a rule?”

Are we talking only about the rules written in the game text? About house rules from the social contract? Generally about social rules at the table? About unwritten rules of a play culture? About the rules of the specific fiction genre we are playing?

After all, we can say that all the following are rules:

a longsword deals 2D6+3 damage
“Be a Fan of Player Characters”
in The Between, one must not talk about a character’s backstory, except in two instances (Mask of the Past & Vulnerable Move)
in principled freeform, I can’t narrate within the domain of your character
during a single session of Blades in the Dark, we established at the table that we will always complete a full cycle of the game

For me, an interesting area of discussion is how these different orders of rules relate to each other.

The dychotomy that currently intrigues me in this context is contrasting the old story game thesis that “the game is about what its rules are about” with the “rules elide” thesis that “rules are there to quickly abstract what we don’t want to focus on during play, but what is important for the convention, and then the game is about what is not mechanized, what is in the fruitful void – where we zoom in and play with the fiction itself.”

Of course, this is somewhat a discussion between gaming cultures, but I wonder what other interesting things could potentially arise from integrating these positions.

Great blog!