Re: “Rules Elide” and its consequences.
I’ve been watching Vi Huntsman’s (very good) Art, Agency, Alienation recently - bit by bit, it’s very long - and it’s got me thinking about Rules Elide again. I’ve read Rules Elide several times at this point, I think it’s a pretty provocative text (in a good way), and each time I read it I feel compelled to write something about it. To me, it feels incomplete as a theory of rules but I’ve always struggled to articulate why. After watching AAA I think I finally have some of my thoughts down on what I think it’s missing.
I’m not going to summarize Rules Elide within this post but will reference it heavily, you should give it a look first. This response is more of an additive work rather than a takedown.
An Addendum to Elision:
Rules Elides main contention is the function of rules within play are to elide away the parts of the narrative we decide are unimportant or that we are uninterested in. When we do this, we free up mental space to worry about the things we actually care about. The primary example given for this is a situation where a character is picking a lock. We could go back and forth about the interior shapes and mechanics of the lock, and the various methods that the character uses to breach it, but chances are that one, we don’t really care about the process of lockpicking as much as we care about the excitement of what’s on the other side and the potential consequences of failure, and two, everyone else might get up and go do something else if we spend an hour describing an activity this boring.
What isn’t pointed out is that the process of elision is actually doing a secret third thing. I’m going to be completely honest with you: I know jack-shit about locks or the process of picking them. I’ve held locks, I’ve held lockpicks, I broadly know what the action of lockpicking looks like externally by watching others do it. But the actual method is completely unknown to me. However, I would expect my level 5 rogue or whatever chump I’m playing this week to have this knowledge. When we elide the process of lockpicking, or any other knowledge based action, we bridge the gap between what the characters can do and what the players know.
Rules as Standard-Creators.
So, I’m willing to agree that the primary function of rules within a TTRPG play environment is to elide, at least most of the time. I am, however, not so convinced that this is the only thing that they do (as Sinclair seems to believe: “To say that rules elide is to say that they do nothing else.”).
One of the appeals of tabletop games to me in general is that element of consequential decision making, the idea that the choices I make are going to have tangible consequences on the shared, imagined, fiction. I don’t seem to be alone in this, at several points in my life I’ve witnessed TTRPG’s pitched as “games where you can do anything”. This is obviously marketing-brained and a little silly, you don’t need a gamebook to play a game where you “can do anything” at all, but it points us in the direction that these games are enticing due to their freedom of choice.
But here we come to a problem. To make meaningful decisions, we need meaningful information. How can we decide to take an action if we cannot predict, at least on some level, the consequences for doing so? Leaving everything in the hands of the GM leaves us in what I’ve heard some people call the “Mother May I?” zone. If we return to the primary example of unelided lockpicking, we can imagine at any point in the process the GM might throw their hands in the air and declare “Oh no! As you pull the pin back, your lockpick snaps!”. This is a reasonable consequence for not lockpicking very well but the moment at which they do this is completely arbitrary and this is likely to lead to frustration and disillusionment. “If it’s completely up to the GM when we succeed and fail, what’s the point in doing anything?”, the players cry out. Of course, this neglects the fact that the whole game is arbitrary but the appearance that it isn’t is useful.
So how do we solve this? We use rules to create Standards - accepted baselines and agreed upon limitations - to create structure for play. If we’ve all agreed, implicitly by using the rule, that when I approach a regular lock and attempt to pick it that I have a 2 in 6 chance of succeeding and a 1 in 6 chance of breaking my picks, I can now use that information when making decisions about whether to pick a lock or not. The actual rule is arbitrary but its presence removes arbitrariness from play.
Wait a minute! Maybe rules can create agency?
I think this might be the most disagreeable part of my stance here but stick with me. A lot of the hardcore elide crowd seem to view rules as things that, by necessity, can only take away agency. As sort of a necessary evil to enable smoother play. This may be true but neglects to mention who this agency is taken away from.
In a classic rpg play set up, the agency actually really rests almost entirely with the facilitator or GM. Yes, the players get to decide the actions that they take, but the GM decides on the consequences of those actions. Maybe we’re getting into philosophical grounds here but I would wager that if the consequences of our actions are completely arbitrary and not held by any baseline at all, we don’t really have agency. With this in mind, I propose that the creation of Standards creates agency for the players by removing agency from the GM.
Preempting responses.
With that said, I’d like to pre-respond to some of the questions and ideas I think this article might prompt:
Q: Couldn’t these rules exist outside of a gamebook?
A: Yeah, a gamebook is not necessary to create agreed upon Standards.
Q: The idea that agency needs to be taken away from the GM to be created for the players seems to play into strung-out “GM vs. Player” tropes.
A: I can see how it might be interpreted that way. I think it’s important to remember though that this line of thinking is not unique to TTRPGs. Lots of philosophy grapples with the idea that people may not have any agency at all when there are forces - God, deterministic factors - that control the decisions that they can take and the outcomes of those decisions.
Q: Rules aren’t the only way we could come up with a baseline. What if we just appealed to previous rulings and situations?
A: By appealing to previous rulings you’re just creating an implicit Standard (there are lots of these). I’m willing to admit that rules are not the only way to create standards though.