clearstream
(He, Him)
For me, it is hard to understand the value of emptying some words of meaning this way. So I would prefer to continue to differentiate between rules and principles. That said, I would agree with a sense that the boundary between principles and rules - once they are written down - is not unambiguous.My personal feeling is that the following are all rules and you need them all to make a game work:
1. Mechanics
2. Procedures
3. Principles
I feel like when we regard principles as distinct from rules we might not regard them as prescriptively as we should.
As a quick take, typically
- Principles overarch rules and guide interpretation and application, as well as matters not covered by rules
- Rules are constitutive or regulatory, and amount to instructions as to how we may update the game state (fiction and system)
- Parameters are settings or values that identify the current instantiation
- Mechanics are methods invoked by (typically) agents to interact with the game state, formed from collections of the above
- Procedures are stipulated sequences of the application of rules (possibly or in many cases amounting to mechanics)
- Examples provide insight as to what the designers had in mind
- Guidance is text that has lower deontic weight, intended to influence but not instruct
- Titles and indexes characterise and locate the text, but again exercise much lower deontic weight