Games are, at their core, collections of rules. Behind the pretty artwork and beneath the adept programming, we find the soul of the game: the rule design.

Chess and Go Let us begin by considering some of the oldest games: Go and Chess. The ancient Chinese game of Go looks simple. Players alternate turns placing black and white stones on a 19 by 19 grid, trying to surround enemy stones and enclose territory. The rules are simple, but the resulting gameplay is extremely complicated. Each play of a stone can affect the safety or strength of the stones near it. These effects ripple across space (the board) and time (over many plays). Go exhibits what biologists call "emergent properties" of complexity that are much greater than the sum of its simple rules.

Chess has similar properties, but they stem from an entirely separate set of rules. In Chess, one's pieces start in a very cramped position, all in each other's way. Players must "develop" their pieces, that is, get them out from behind each other so they can exert maximum control of the board. The catch is that the board is extremely small. Once each player develops his pieces even moderately, they are now in direct conflict with enemy pieces simply because there is no where to hide on the tiny Chess board. The overlapping influence of many pieces is only one source of Chess's complexity (though that description hardly does the game justice!).

Marvel vs. Capcom 2 As for more modern games, allow me to yet again reference the fighting game Marvel vs. Capcom 2. In this game, players pick three characters, only one of which can be active at any time. The inactive characters can be called onto the screen to do a preset "assist" move, which allows the player to attack in parallel (simultaneously with his active character and with an assist move). This obvious advantage is offset by the assist character's extreme vulnerability. He cannot block, and he must perform his entire move (which often includes somewhat slow recovery) before leaving the screen back to safety. The more a player's assist character is damaged, the less energy that character will have when the player switches the assist character to be the active character.

It's a neat set of rules that all work together. The ability to attack in parallel creates lots of opportunity for creative gameplay, and the mechanic has built-in checks and balances. What's interesting is that when the game first came out, a friend of mine asked me if it's any good. I was unable to answer. I told him, "The rule design seems to make a lot of sense, so it has the potential to be good. But it's impossible to tell until we all play it more." Good rule design can ruined by poor balance, slipshod implementation, bugs, and myriad other factors.

What struck me most about my friend's question was that purely by the rule design, I knew the game had the potential to be good. It also struck me that although I had seen all the art in the game, seen all the characters, understood pretty much all the moves...the entirely of whether the game would actually be good rested on the shoulders of the implementation, the balance, the tweaking. The programming was good enough to express the rule design, and the art was good enough to "look cool." A great illustration of the importance (an limits) of design.

Counterstrike The Counterstrike mod for Half-life is an even more amazing illustration of rule design. I've been told that this game is currently the most popular first person shooter, and that at one time (perhaps still) it was more played online than all other first person shooters combined! And remember, Counterstrike is a mod of a game, not even a full game! Here's another case of programming and art playing only minor roles in the quality of a game. There are 10 zillion other mods of Half-life with basically the same programming quality (they all use the same engine from Half-life of course) and with no worse art.

 

Further consider that I am not a fan of realism in games, and that despite Counterstrike being one of the most realistic first person shooters available, I find it by far the most fun. Why? Rule design. In Counterstrike, you play a 5 minute game round, then the game resets. If you die, you're out until the next round, but you can freely observe everywhere and everyone in the level as an invisible ghost. There is even somewhat of a metagame since money (used to buy weapons at the beginning of each round) carries over between rounds. Counterstrike also features interesting win conditions asymmetric across the two teams. Rather than just rack up frags, one team must try to compete an objective (such as plant a bomb or rescue hostages) while the other team must prevent the first team from succeeding.

These rules create great pacing. Since the fear of death is much greater than in Quake (one shot kills, you'll have to wait until the next round to play again), every corner and doorway becomes frightening (see my article on suspense). Tension builds, climaxes are reached during fast firefights. When you die, you have a minute of downtime before starting the next round which can be used as mental rest or as strategic reconnaissance in ghost mode.

Magic: the Gathering The trading card game Magic the Gathering goes the extra mile by being a game almost entirely about rules. Magic is a (mostly two player) game where each player tries to reduce the other's life points from 20 to 0. Each player has a deck of 60 cards chosen from a set of over 1,000 legal cards. Decks contain one-time-use spells, continuously active spells (called enchantments), creatures that can attack the enemy over and over, and land cards that are the resources needed to play all the other cards.

There's a concrete set of rules governing the game Magic, but the most interesting rule is the Golden Rule of Magic: any rule

printed on a card supercedes the base rules of Magic. It's a game about overriding the rules. One rule is that each player draws one card per turn. One spell lets a player draw 4 cards that turn. One rule says that a creature who attacks this turn cannot block an incoming attack on the next turn. Not only are there creature cards that allow this, but there are even cards that allow all your creatures to break that rule forever! Playing Magic--or more specifically, building a deck designed to abuse the rules in a certain way--is more like designing a game than playing one. I recommend that every game designer check it out.

Magic has no programming, and completely superficial art. It's a true example of a game being purely rule design. Or perhaps of rule design completely stealing the show.

There's another, less known card game called Flux, which is also a game about changing the rules. It has a variety of cards that change the win conditions of the game. Whichever player plays the Pyramid card and the Sphinx card wins...until I play the card that says whoever plays both the Milk card and the Cookies card wins! Is the game a satire of games about rules? Or a satire of itself? I'm not really sure.

Nomic If you think a game can't be any more oriented towards rule design than Magic (or Flux), then I have some news for you. The game of Nomic is a game explicitly about changing the rules of Nomic. It's a game about itself, orders of magnitude more so than Flux. Nomic has no programming at all, not art, not even any cards. It's just a set of "initial rules" which mostly explain how to change the these rules. The rules are divided into two sets: mutable and immutable. One rule says that immutable rules cannot be changed. Another rule says that mutable rules can be changed. Another says that it's possible to change a rule from being immutable to mutable, and vice versa. (So you could demote an immutable rule to mutable, then change it, then promote it again.) Another rule states that players take turns and that a turn consists of proposing a rule change and voting on it in a specific way. A player wins if his rule change somehow entraps the game so deeply in paradox that play cannot continue. A player can also win by reaching a certain point total first, but that rule is mutable and would surely be one of the first to go!

Don't forget that all these rules can be changed. Players could implement rules that each turn also consists of making a move in another game such as a Chess, and that winning that game is an alternate win condition for Nomic. Players could create new classes of rules besides mutable and immutable, or even modify the rules to make Nomic into another game, perhaps Monopoly or Tiddly-winks. It's quite a trick to alter the rules so radically that no more rule changes are possible, though.

Nomic isn't quite as addictive as, say, Tetris, but it's sure interesting to contemplate playing! It's the furthest example of rule design gone completely crazy, overshadowing the entire game with rules about the game's own rules. Let it serve as a reminder that rule design is an important component of game design...but should not be the only component unless your goal is to make a game so unusual and out of the main stream that it's mentioned only in articles about rule design. ;)

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 2nd, 2001 at 6:24 am and is filed under Articles, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.