Exercise 2.4 Rules
"Can you think of a game that has no rules? If so describe it. How about one rule? Why is this exercise so difficult?" (Fullerton, 2019)
I did this exercise with a group of students in grade 11 & 12 and it lead to some very interesting conversations I will do my best to summarize.
A Game with no rules?
The consensus is there aren't any games without rules. Rules are essential for providing a framework from which to describe a game to players.
One Rule Game
If you are succinct enough about the objective of a game you can reduce some games to one rule. The example I used was Hacky Sack. In essence, it is about not letting the hacky sack touch the ground. You could argue for more rules if you are a purest and limit hacky sack manipulation to footwork only. This is where the debate begins
The conversation around gameplay and rules was very circular in some respects as it hovered around how to set the parameters so that multiplayer games could function in that everyone understood the objective of the game and the constraints applied to make the game function. The agreement lay in all players needing to have the same perspective on how to play the game. This is where the debate began about how succinct and concise the rules could be if the participants were all familiar with " global" rules. Paradigms of what was simply common sense and what was a rule were the starting point. Ultimately we determined that culture, age, and experience played a part in how many rules needed to be stated and how many could be implied.