Rule Zero, Star Wars, Ludic Purists and the Perception of Fairness

This began as a meditation on "just what is an RPG anyway?" to respond to purists who wouldn't consider Mass Effect 2 an RPG, but as I was constructing my Civilization V argument for last week's rant (it's a strategy game with the emphasis on 'strategy', not a strategy game with the emphasis on 'game', which, I argue, doesn't mean it's "dumbed down") and as I was reading Tom Bissell's comments on "the Gamification of games," specifically Dead Island, I began to realise that my thoughts on RPGs resonated with games more generally.

Bissell talks about dice-rolling in Dungeons & Dragons, and perhaps that's a good place to start. There is an argument that has long raged in pen & paper role-playing game circles which, for historical reasons, is referred to by the shorthand "TSR vs. White Wolf". Make no mistake: this is a nerd argument, with passionate defenders on both sides. What it boils down to is what is known as Rule Zero, a concept to which my young and impressionable mind was introduced through West End Games' Star Wars role-playing game. Rule Zero holds that, if the rules of the game are deleterious to the narrative quality of the role-playing experience, they should be ignored, or at least taken as a guideline rather than as, well, as a rule. In short, "don't let the rules get in the way of a good story." People on the White Wolf side of the debate enthusiastically adopt Rule Zero (it's no accident that in White Wolf's World of Darkness games, the game master is known as a 'Storyteller'), while those on TSR's side of the fence either insist that the rules are more important than the story, or that if the rules get in the way of the story, then your story is poorly designed and "lol yur doin it wrong".

It's important that I came to understand Rule Zero through the Star Wars role-playing game, because it perhaps explains why I don't get on well with BioWare's Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. KotOR is a fine, even great, RPG (if, perhaps, a little over-reliant on knowledge of the D&D rules system on which it's based), but it's a terrible Star Wars game because it emphasises the rules over the experiential qualities that are such an integral part of why Star Wars is so great.

Lightsabers and a Tatooine setting sometimes aren't really enough.

 In PnPRPGs, in short, proponents of Rule Zero elevate the role of the game master for the shaping of the experience, while opponents elevate the rules themselves.

At first it seems counterintuitive that this concept could apply to video games. Video games, by definition, adhere to their rules. A video game cannot "bend the rules". It wouldn't know how. More importantly, it wouldn't know when to bend the rules and when not to. There are no varying degrees of concreteness to the game rules as there can be in a tabletop game; the rules are absolutely, 100% set in stone.

I would say, however, that Rule Zero is necessary not because there is something about rules per se that is inherently prohibitive to a good narrative experience ('Rule Zero' games still have rules, after all), but that it is because the rulesets of tabletop RPGs necessarily have to be transparent and tractable to human players. A video game may have far more complex rules than a tabletop RPG ever could, but in order to prevent a situation of complete cognitive befuzzlement (I think that's the technical term...), that extra layer of complexity has to occur, as Bissell says, "under the hood". These extra rules should not be transparent to the player.

The upside is that this means the possibility of creating rules that, in a pen and paper game, would be immersion-breaking. Why not have rules that ensure the story is good (apart from the obvious challenge of knowing what those rules are)? If the player never sees them, such "out of character" considerations can be safely implemented. At least, that's the idea behind my PhD.

The downside (if one can call it that) is that this represents a point of divergence between video games and traditional games. In traditional games, it is necessary for a player to know and understand the rules of the game. It's easy to dismiss that as just a practical necessity for playing the game, but it's more than that. It's necessary in order for the player to trust the game, and perceive it as 'fair'. This is why transparent rules are necessary in a pen and paper role-playing game: to circumvent the childhood Cowboys and Indians problem of one child claiming to have shot another child, and the other child denying it.

For that matter, this is precisely why the cliff racers in Morrowind were so maligned (aside from their overnumerousness); the player said, "I shot you!" and the cliff racer, apparently played by a six year old, petulantly responded, "No you didn't!" (which is still dialogue more gripping than Oblivion's "Good morning. That's a nice tnettenba." exchanges, but I digress). Bethesda's insistence on performing the combat mechanics "under the hood" rather than making the rules transparent to the player did make the game seem, at times, unfair.

Childish.

This is the point that the "gameplay is king" crowd are trying to get across, and it's not a point to which I'm unsympathetic. These ludic purists (let's call them what they are) believe that games should make their rules transparent in order to offer this perception of fairness. They believe that play should be defined through transparent interaction with the game's rules. They believe that the purpose of a game is to test the player's ability to manipulate the game's rules. This view is deeply coloured by traditional games and more than a little reductive, but despite that it's a perfectly fine preference to have.

What I am less sympathetic to is attempts to paint this personal preference as an immutable Law of Gaming. It's a labour under the misapprehension that 'game' is a suitable term for the electronic experiences in which we routinely partake. It's not. It's a misnomer, but one we're stuck with. It's an argument of semantics and terminology: Some video games are actually games in this sense, but only some.

This has always been the case, though. Traditional games tend to have only ludic rules, while video games tend to have some combination of ludic rules and simulative rules. This distinction is very important, but not always clear. Jenga doesn't need a rule for gravity -- nature takes care of that -- but a video game with any degree of physics certainly does, as does a tabletop role-playing game where the action is not physically happening. The difference is that in the RPG, the gravity rule is ludic (at least insofar as it can't be determined by common sense, such as precisely how much damage a character takes from falling), while in the video game, the gravity rule is more likely simulative.

To reiterate my argument from last week, Civilization IV is a game that tests a player's ability to manipulate the rules of the game, while Civilization V is a game that tests a player's strategic thinking in a more analogue way by making the rules less transparent. Ludic purists will inevitably see Civ IV as the worthier game, and that is not an invalid opinion. It is, however, wholly informed by personal preference, wholly subjective. Civilization V also stands, as I implied last week, as a sterling counterexample to the ludic purist's oft-advanced claim that without total transparency of the rules, there can be no strategy, and that therefore games that hide rules from the player are "dumbed down".

It's somewhat trite, at this point, to suggest that some people are more interested in the somewhat needlessly nebulous concept of 'gameplay', while others play games in search of emotional experience, but the argument between transparent rules and "under the hood" rules does seem to indicate that there is a trade-off between the "perception of fairness" of a game and the experiential complexity that game is capable of providing. I've deliberately avoided making reference to Caillois' ludus-paidia spectrum in this post because I don't think it's quite the same thing (although it's close), but I do see these things as existing on a spectrum. At one end of the spectrum is the Platonic ideal of games, with perfectly transparent rules, which exist only to test the player's ability to manipulate those rules; at the other end of the spectrum, the things we are reluctant to call 'games' at all -- interactive narratives and the like. Video games populate all points in between, not some bizarre monoculture in which one approach is right and another wrong. And that's totally fine.

On Complaints.

The RPS Hivemind's very own King Jim wrote this week about how Actually, It's Okay To Complain in response to Ben Kuchera's statement on ars technica that In gaming, everything is amazing and no-one is happy.

Jim's statement is very well-reasoned, but it doesn't tally with the kind of complaints I see everywhere. The core of his argument, it seems, is that it's important to say how things could be better, because that serves as a motivation for developers to make things better. That would be fine, if people were complaining about how things could be better. Instead, they're complaining about how things are getting worse, which appears to me to be completely disconnected from reality.

Those who know me might know that I have a special place in my hate for the abuse of the term "dumbing down". The other day, I heard someone call Civilization V "dumbed down". Civ V is different to previous titles in the series, in that it makes you engage more directly with actual strategy than with trying to use the rules of the game to your advantage - it's a strategy game with the emphasis on 'strategy', rather than (like previous Civs) a strategy game with the emphasis on 'game'. Is that really dumbed down? And this is a pattern that exists with a lot of "dumbing down" complaints. There is a certain irony to the school of, "I don't get it, therefore it's dumbed down."

This is related to the gaming community's deep-seated mistrust of "streamlining". To understand streamlining, we have to look at evolution vs. intelligent design. No, really, we do. What a lot of opponents of evolutionary theory don't understand is that evolution works with what it has. To them, evolution doesn't make sense because they see evolution as a process of refinement leading to some pinnacle and constantly improving. Since evolution doesn't do that, they say evolution must be wrong. But no-one ever claimed evolution does that. Evolution selects those random mutations that confer a benefit (or at least, don't confer a detriment) to environmental fitness. But those mutations have to be applied to genetic templates that already exist. Evolution can't backtrack: If it could, we might see much more efficient creatures on Earth today than we actually do. What this has to do with games is that game mechanics have evolved. Despite the fact that games are provably and indisputably intelligently designed (well, indisputably designed, anyway), a lot of the elements that make up games today are the 'genetic' legacy of those games' forebears. We end up with a conglomeration of stuff that's been put together almost accidentally. Streamlining is the 'backtracking' that isn't available to biological evolution, but is available to game design, and it allows us to use our advanced knowledge of user experience, interface design, media psychology and all that good stuff that basically amounts to an increased understanding of the medium (which has experienced a boom thanks to this console generation's relatively long life-cycle, so people aren't hurrying to keep up with the tech and can concentrate on other game stuff) to create a more effective game. But, of course, people complain about that because People Fear Change.

Let's talk about Deus Ex: Unreal Revolution.



DX:UR is a mod for Deus Ex that shows what Deus Ex would have been like if it were more like the recent prequel Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Of course, the complainers have jumped on it as a defence of their complaints about DX:HR by... showing that the mechanics of DX:HR would be terrible in the original. Yes, they would. You know why? Because they were designed for a different freaking game. It's like saying that taking your opponents' pieces would be terrible in Monopoly, therefore Chess is shit. It's like saying Blackjack is an awful game because a royal flush is a losing hand.

And then there are the people who complain about a game when the ink isn't yet dry on the press release announcing the game. The game isn't nearly finished, and it won't be released for ages - the design probably isn't even finalised. I'm all for speculative cynicism, but they work on the assumption that it's going to be shite and go from there (often based on the bizarre tin-foil hat assumption that it's not in a publisher's best interests to release a good game). Well, you know what they say about assumptions, but this creates a dilemma. Of course, I want to read about games in which I am interested, but I also want to play the game without the priming effect of that critical mass of complaints being deleterious to my enjoyment of the game. Complainers are, in a very real sense, detrimental to people enjoying games.

Business practices are another common target for complaints, and the situation here is a bit more nuanced. There are some business practices that deserve complaints, such as the implementation of excessively restrictive DRM when the only people that are bothered by it are legitimate customers and not the pirates the measure is ostensibly meant to dissuade. Or the trend of medium-inappropriate marketing (read: trailers) rather than demos that let you find out if the game's any good. Or the deeply entrenched arcane traditions of retailers that mean games can't be released on the same day and date worldwide. But the tone of those complaints, often involving gruesome metaphors of being anally violated by the big bad corporation, and exhorting the Comrades to Fight The Power and Stick It To The Man is, let's face it, just fucking silly.

Offering a product for sale at a price that involves some kind of currency is not a "shady business practice", and it's not hard to see from where the accusation of a sense of entitlement that is often levelled at gamers comes. When I don't think a game is worth the asking price (for whatever reason), my usual course of action is to, you know, refrain from buying it. I don't generally feel the urge to start a revolution. DLC is very cleverly marketed to make you want it, but all the complaints about it are based on the premise that you need it, which is a false premise. Yes, a lot of it is overpriced and not substantial enough, but you know what? Probably 10% of DLC is worthwhile, just like 10% of everything else.

As an aside, related to asking prices, I want to pick up on something Ben Kuchera said in his article: "Every game is too expensive, although we demand ever-increasing levels of interaction, graphical fidelity, and length." More to the point, inflation means that everything else is priced twice as highly as it was 20 years ago, while games are priced the same if not less. We're effectively paying half as much for games as we did 20 years ago, but apparently that's not good enough.

Maybe Jim's more right than I give him credit for. Maybe the complaints with which I have a problem aren't the most numerous, but are simply the ones I notice the most. I'm not claiming to be unbiased and objective, here, and perhaps I'm just ignoring a multitude of more constructive complaints. But I think the most constructive conclusion we can draw from this is that, like everything else, complaining isn't 'good' or 'bad', but good and bad and everything in-between.