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<blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 8396546" data-attributes="member: 71699">I was reflecting on the resistance that D&amp;D rules put up to our using them. There's a monetary cost barrier. There's a cognitive cost in reading and parsing hundreds of pages of rules. They do not force themselves upon us: very much the opposite of that!One way rules are conceived of in game studies is that they are constitutive: a game doesn't exist in their absence. Another way to think about this - perhaps relevant to the current thread - is to suggest that we simply cannot say what game exists in the absence of shared rules. We come into possession of Wittgenstein's beetles. Up-thread [USER=7026093]@Puddles[/USER] described a referee who I take to be unpredictable and inconsistent. How can we know what game is being played? Descriptions of FK reference something that has predictability and consistency - it will be about war, there will be terrain, there will be units, units will be able to render one another hors-de-combat, etc. An umpire who departed radically from what was expected would no longer be doing FK.Perhaps the argument is one between preferring exogenous over endogenous rules (in the sense used by Bjork and Holopainen). In which case, the argument is perhaps truly over incommensurables. D&amp;D is a published game, available to players everywhere. A set of exogenous rules however delightful cannot be that. Or to put it another way, how might a set of exogenous rules be made available to players everywhere? What is the minimum that must be consistently established so that players can speak in terms of playing the same game? Possibly the argument is best understood as a preference for how many rules - a sliding scale - or the level that rules work at. Neither of those are an abandonment of rules. Maybe most fruitfully a discussion about their rightful role.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="clearstream, post: 8396546, member: 71699"] I was reflecting on the resistance that D&D rules put up to our using them. There's a monetary cost barrier. There's a cognitive cost in reading and parsing hundreds of pages of rules. They do not force themselves upon us: very much the opposite of that! One way rules are conceived of in game studies is that they are constitutive: a game doesn't exist in their absence. Another way to think about this - perhaps relevant to the current thread - is to suggest that we simply cannot say what game exists in the absence of shared rules. We come into possession of Wittgenstein's beetles. Up-thread [USER=7026093]@Puddles[/USER] described a referee who I take to be unpredictable and inconsistent. How can we know what game is being played? Descriptions of FK reference something that has predictability and consistency - it will be about war, there will be terrain, there will be units, units will be able to render one another hors-de-combat, etc. An umpire who departed radically from what was expected would no longer be doing FK. Perhaps the argument is one between preferring exogenous over endogenous rules (in the sense used by Bjork and Holopainen). In which case, the argument is perhaps truly over [I]incommensurables[/I]. D&D is a [I]published[/I] game, available to players everywhere. A set of exogenous rules however delightful cannot be that. Or to put it another way, how might a set of exogenous rules be made available to players everywhere? What is the minimum that must be consistently established so that players can speak in terms of playing the same game? Possibly the argument is best understood as a preference for how many rules - a sliding scale - or the level that rules work at. Neither of those are an abandonment of rules. Maybe most fruitfully a discussion about their rightful role. [/QUOTE]

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