# The Rules We Break
Author:: Eric Zimmerman
## Highlights
> Play is all about that vulnerability, about being responsive, yielding to the moment. You might not be playing, but if you are willing to play, at the drop of a hat, the bounce of a ball, the glance of a toddler, the wag of a tail—then you are open to any opportunity. You are loose. Responsive. Present. ([Location 251](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=251))
> To play is to play with something, to question something that might not be meant for play and to do something inappropriately playful with it. ([Location 281](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=281))
> To play with something is to explore its possibilities, to test its limits, to move beyond the functional and utilitarian and into the realm of the unexpected and inappropriate. ([Location 291](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=291))
> In most games, the rules need to be absolutely, completely clear to everyone—without exception. ([Location 307](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=307))
> When you actually begin a game and decide to limit your behavior to the restrictions dictated by the rules, what happens is play. And play is the opposite of rules. ([Location 315](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=315))
> Play is free movement within a more rigid structure. Like a loose gear, the wiggling movement of play happens because of, but also in opposition to, the logical systems on which it depends. ([Location 331](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=331))
> Media, art, and entertainment are changing. They are becoming less about reading or watching or listening—the consumption of images and information—and more about active participation. ([Location 367](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=367))
> When you’re designing, the tendency is to spend a lot of time discussing ideas and concepts. Instead, design by doing. Get to the point where you are making something interactive as soon as possible. Don’t talk about a story: tell a story. Don’t theorize about the experience: actually build it. Put together a prototype. Exercise your ability to play. ([Location 400](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=400))
> Folklorist Gary Allen Fine, in his book Shared Fantasies (1983), distilled three distinct layers on which identity operates for participants in role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons (1974). There is the layer of the character in the game, who is expressed when the players take action in the game world or speak in the voice of their fictional persona. There is the layer of player, as we manage statistics and roll dice, trying to outsmart the game master and accumulate points for the next level. Finally, the layer of person, with relationships and responsibilities outside of the game: Whose turn is it to pay for the pizza? Why aren’t there more girls in our game club? Playing a game doesn’t mean occupying just one of these layers. It means existing on all of them at the same time. Flickering between and among these levels is play. Play can play with identity too. ([Location 416](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=416))
> game players somehow leave the real world behind and lose themselves completely in virtual worlds and characters. In an arcade fighting game, on one level you identify with the character you’re playing, extending yourself into the world of the game. You also exist as a player, studying the quirks of the game, looking for tiny advantages, trying to outthink your opponent’s moves, trash talking to rattle her nerves. At the same time, as a person in an arcade, you navigate the social hierarchy of the local gamer scene or strategize how to maximize the value of the quarters you put into the machine. This fluctuating play of identity is what immersion really is. ([Location 428](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=428))
> In his essay “A Theory of Play and Fantasy” (1955), philosopher Gregory Bateson observed that when a dog nips another dog—when it gives a play-bite—it is communicating two things. The nip means “I am biting you” (a kind of signifier for a bite), yet a nip simultaneously also means “I am not biting you, I am just playing.” Even dogs, in a sense, suspend their disbelief. When we take part in the artificial conflict of play, we are taking part in this multilayered metaconsciousness. ([Location 467](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=467))
> Nonetheless, play can sometimes go wrong. Occasionally, play-fighting dogs slip into real fighting. Perhaps a moment of panic escalates, and suddenly the growls and bites get real as the collaborative spirit of playing together is shattered by real fighting. ([Location 471](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=471))
> Play is a second-order design problem. You can’t design play directly—you only design the circumstances under which it might arise. ([Location 515](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=515))
> In Poker (early 1800s), there are no rules for bluffing. Bluffing is an emergent behavior that arises out of other structures—the fact that your cards are hidden from opponents, the progressive rounds of betting, the importance of deceiving your opponents about the strength of your hand. Bluffing is not explicitly mentioned in the rules of Poker, but it is the center around which the entire game revolves. ([Location 521](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=521))
> The SiSSYFiGHT 2000 team did not directly design any of these surprises. We only set the initial structures in place, helped evolve the community, and celebrated playful creativity when it did happen. The sweetest pleasure of design is seeing your audience do things you never could have possibly anticipated. This is the second-order nature of play design: you establish the rules, but the players take it from there. ([Location 538](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=538))
> As we play, we are playing with our own sense of ourselves. We willingly take on challenges and frustrations, just so that we can enjoy them. Philosopher Bernard Suits has called this playful impulse for unnecessary obstacles the “ludic attitude.” In Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia (1978), he observes that if you really wanted to get a Golf ball into a hole, you wouldn’t stand a huge distance away, put trees and sand traps between yourself and the hole, and limit yourself to hitting it with a stick. Yet that is exactly what we do, because people play Golf (1400s). Desire is constituted by contradictions that defy rational sense. ([Location 562](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=562))
> In play, we instrumentalize our own desire. The artificial challenges of games become a kind of mirror. They create a space where we can externalize our wishes and fears and pleasure and pain. In these contexts we come to know ourselves in new ways. ([Location 568](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=568))
> The film captures perfectly the way in which games perch us vertiginously on the edge of our own desire. We play with dangerous possibility, tease our own egos, dance with a primal version of ourselves. ([Location 574](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=574))
> Games are occasions to practice a critical relationship to rules. Everything that this book is about—being loose and playful and creative, understanding rules in order to break them, redesigning systems of inequity for the better—can only happen when more of us play. An exercise in play can be a moment to set aside the worries of the world for an experience of joyful release. At the same time, it can also be a chance to sharpen our critical understanding of why and how play happens. Who gets to play? Who has the privilege to join the game or to break the rules? Who is included and who is left out? ([Location 605](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=605))
> Play can be a way of critically engaging with the world. As you play a game, ask: Who is allowed the privilege of playing in this space? What rules are being followed? Who gets to break them? As you design play, ask: What kind of play are you trying to engender? How does your play fit into where it is taking place? What do you hope will happen as a result? To play is to investigate these questions. To play is to transgress productively; to produce insight and also transformation; to uncover playful ways of being; to find new ways of playing together. ([Location 643](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=643))
> The rules of games are a kind of conversational grammar—players use that grammar to create meaning and express themselves to each other. ([Location 739](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=739))
> Constraints construct play. We often think that games are about limitless power—traveling to fantastic worlds, being anyone, having amazing super abilities—and, perhaps, they sometimes feel that way to players. However, from a designer’s point of view, constraints help build the experience of a game. Each version of the exercise added more constraints, and more constraints made the game better. ([Location 1338](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=1338))
> A system isn’t just any old collection of things. A system is an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something. ([Location 1477](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=1477))
> A designer is like the inventor of a new language. As you make a game, or any kind of system, you assign meanings—to the participants, spaces, objects, and actions. Players employ these elements of meaning in the dialog of play. In part these languages are artificial—they invent meanings separate from the usual state of affairs. In Homo Ludens (1938), historian Johan Huizinga famously called games a “magic circle,” a sacred place defined by its separateness in time and space from ordinary life. ([Location 1605](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=1605))
> That’s a problem: if the choice really doesn’t matter, then the action is literally meaningless. As players explore your design, they have faith that the actions they take will add up to something—a gripping story, a risky strategy, a fun way to get through the current level. Integrating actions and outcomes is how that happens. ([Location 1643](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=1643))
> While games can make use of many kinds of embedded content—from musical scores to pre-scripted dialog—the emergent parts of a narrative system, based on the systemic, participatory characteristics of games, are what unlock the unique potentials for games to play with narrative. ([Location 1710](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=1710))
> satisfyingly frustrating ([Location 1716](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=1716))
> Every game is a double seduction. First, you need to be convinced to play, to enter into the “magic circle.” But for the game to have any life, you also need to keep playing—to imbue the system with effort and keep it moving forward until it reaches a conclusion. ([Location 1763](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=1763))
> Goals are a trail of breadcrumbs, sometimes explicitly designed, sometimes scattered by players themselves. As you plot moment to moment, achieving and planning, strategizing and improvising, goals keep your head in the game. They enwrap our minds in a state of play. Until, of course, we reach the end. There is a poetic tragedy to games and goals, whose delicate birth is always rounded by a driving stampede to their own death. Games desperately beg us to begin, only so that they can play themselves out, reach a conclusion, and exhaust their possibilities in a final outcome. ([Location 1784](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=1784))
> Game designer Brian Moriarty has used the term entrainment to describe the curious patterned repetition of gameplay. In French, the verb entrainer means both “to carry along” and “to trap.” It so wonderfully captures the double significance of being pulled into an experience that we willingly enter, just so that we can be pleasantly manipulated. This is part of the beauty and power of games. ([Location 1805](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=1805))
> There is a fundamental difference between rolling a die and drawing a random card. When you roll a die, the next roll still preserves the complete set of possible outcomes. Cards are different. When you draw a card, that card is taken out of the possible outcomes for the next turn (unless you shuffle it in again). ([Location 2201](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=2201))
> Design is at least 50 percent communication. ([Location 3580](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=3580))
> If a player is not aware that the tree fell down in the virtual forest, it doesn’t matter if it really fell or not. ([Location 3583](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=3583))
> What designers call affordances are the specific ways that an object lends itself to being used. A playing card, for example, can be shuffled into a deck, held in a hand with other cards, placed faceup or facedown, passed to another player, discarded out of the game, or even torn in half! Experimenting with the affordances of an object can help unlock possible uses and misuses and lead to interesting play. Remember, affordances can be social and cultural, not just physical: Are you more of a Queen of Hearts or an Ace of Spades? Encourage them to be inspired by playing around with their objects. ([Location 3778](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=3778))
---
Title: The Rules We Break
Author: Eric Zimmerman
Tags: readwise, books
date: 2024-01-30
---
# The Rules We Break
Author:: Eric Zimmerman
## AI-Generated Summary
None
## Highlights
> Play is all about that vulnerability, about being responsive, yielding to the moment. You might not be playing, but if you are willing to play, at the drop of a hat, the bounce of a ball, the glance of a toddler, the wag of a tail—then you are open to any opportunity. You are loose. Responsive. Present. ([Location 251](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=251))
> To play is to play with something, to question something that might not be meant for play and to do something inappropriately playful with it. ([Location 281](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=281))
> To play with something is to explore its possibilities, to test its limits, to move beyond the functional and utilitarian and into the realm of the unexpected and inappropriate. ([Location 291](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=291))
> In most games, the rules need to be absolutely, completely clear to everyone—without exception. ([Location 307](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=307))
> When you actually begin a game and decide to limit your behavior to the restrictions dictated by the rules, what happens is play. And play is the opposite of rules. ([Location 315](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=315))
> Play is free movement within a more rigid structure. Like a loose gear, the wiggling movement of play happens because of, but also in opposition to, the logical systems on which it depends. ([Location 331](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=331))
> Media, art, and entertainment are changing. They are becoming less about reading or watching or listening—the consumption of images and information—and more about active participation. ([Location 367](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=367))
> When you’re designing, the tendency is to spend a lot of time discussing ideas and concepts. Instead, design by doing. Get to the point where you are making something interactive as soon as possible. Don’t talk about a story: tell a story. Don’t theorize about the experience: actually build it. Put together a prototype. Exercise your ability to play. ([Location 400](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=400))
> Folklorist Gary Allen Fine, in his book Shared Fantasies (1983), distilled three distinct layers on which identity operates for participants in role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons (1974). There is the layer of the character in the game, who is expressed when the players take action in the game world or speak in the voice of their fictional persona. There is the layer of player, as we manage statistics and roll dice, trying to outsmart the game master and accumulate points for the next level. Finally, the layer of person, with relationships and responsibilities outside of the game: Whose turn is it to pay for the pizza? Why aren’t there more girls in our game club? Playing a game doesn’t mean occupying just one of these layers. It means existing on all of them at the same time. Flickering between and among these levels is play. Play can play with identity too. ([Location 416](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=416))
> game players somehow leave the real world behind and lose themselves completely in virtual worlds and characters. In an arcade fighting game, on one level you identify with the character you’re playing, extending yourself into the world of the game. You also exist as a player, studying the quirks of the game, looking for tiny advantages, trying to outthink your opponent’s moves, trash talking to rattle her nerves. At the same time, as a person in an arcade, you navigate the social hierarchy of the local gamer scene or strategize how to maximize the value of the quarters you put into the machine. This fluctuating play of identity is what immersion really is. ([Location 428](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=428))
> In his essay “A Theory of Play and Fantasy” (1955), philosopher Gregory Bateson observed that when a dog nips another dog—when it gives a play-bite—it is communicating two things. The nip means “I am biting you” (a kind of signifier for a bite), yet a nip simultaneously also means “I am not biting you, I am just playing.” Even dogs, in a sense, suspend their disbelief. When we take part in the artificial conflict of play, we are taking part in this multilayered metaconsciousness. ([Location 467](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=467))
> Nonetheless, play can sometimes go wrong. Occasionally, play-fighting dogs slip into real fighting. Perhaps a moment of panic escalates, and suddenly the growls and bites get real as the collaborative spirit of playing together is shattered by real fighting. ([Location 471](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=471))
> Play is a second-order design problem. You can’t design play directly—you only design the circumstances under which it might arise. ([Location 515](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=515))
> In Poker (early 1800s), there are no rules for bluffing. Bluffing is an emergent behavior that arises out of other structures—the fact that your cards are hidden from opponents, the progressive rounds of betting, the importance of deceiving your opponents about the strength of your hand. Bluffing is not explicitly mentioned in the rules of Poker, but it is the center around which the entire game revolves. ([Location 521](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=521))
> The SiSSYFiGHT 2000 team did not directly design any of these surprises. We only set the initial structures in place, helped evolve the community, and celebrated playful creativity when it did happen. The sweetest pleasure of design is seeing your audience do things you never could have possibly anticipated. This is the second-order nature of play design: you establish the rules, but the players take it from there. ([Location 538](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=538))
> As we play, we are playing with our own sense of ourselves. We willingly take on challenges and frustrations, just so that we can enjoy them. Philosopher Bernard Suits has called this playful impulse for unnecessary obstacles the “ludic attitude.” In Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia (1978), he observes that if you really wanted to get a Golf ball into a hole, you wouldn’t stand a huge distance away, put trees and sand traps between yourself and the hole, and limit yourself to hitting it with a stick. Yet that is exactly what we do, because people play Golf (1400s). Desire is constituted by contradictions that defy rational sense. ([Location 562](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=562))
> In play, we instrumentalize our own desire. The artificial challenges of games become a kind of mirror. They create a space where we can externalize our wishes and fears and pleasure and pain. In these contexts we come to know ourselves in new ways. ([Location 568](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=568))
> The film captures perfectly the way in which games perch us vertiginously on the edge of our own desire. We play with dangerous possibility, tease our own egos, dance with a primal version of ourselves. ([Location 574](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=574))
> Games are occasions to practice a critical relationship to rules. Everything that this book is about—being loose and playful and creative, understanding rules in order to break them, redesigning systems of inequity for the better—can only happen when more of us play. An exercise in play can be a moment to set aside the worries of the world for an experience of joyful release. At the same time, it can also be a chance to sharpen our critical understanding of why and how play happens. Who gets to play? Who has the privilege to join the game or to break the rules? Who is included and who is left out? ([Location 605](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=605))
> Play can be a way of critically engaging with the world. As you play a game, ask: Who is allowed the privilege of playing in this space? What rules are being followed? Who gets to break them? As you design play, ask: What kind of play are you trying to engender? How does your play fit into where it is taking place? What do you hope will happen as a result? To play is to investigate these questions. To play is to transgress productively; to produce insight and also transformation; to uncover playful ways of being; to find new ways of playing together. ([Location 643](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=643))
> The rules of games are a kind of conversational grammar—players use that grammar to create meaning and express themselves to each other. ([Location 739](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=739))
> Constraints construct play. We often think that games are about limitless power—traveling to fantastic worlds, being anyone, having amazing super abilities—and, perhaps, they sometimes feel that way to players. However, from a designer’s point of view, constraints help build the experience of a game. Each version of the exercise added more constraints, and more constraints made the game better. ([Location 1338](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=1338))
> A system isn’t just any old collection of things. A system is an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something. ([Location 1477](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=1477))
> A designer is like the inventor of a new language. As you make a game, or any kind of system, you assign meanings—to the participants, spaces, objects, and actions. Players employ these elements of meaning in the dialog of play. In part these languages are artificial—they invent meanings separate from the usual state of affairs. In Homo Ludens (1938), historian Johan Huizinga famously called games a “magic circle,” a sacred place defined by its separateness in time and space from ordinary life. ([Location 1605](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=1605))
> That’s a problem: if the choice really doesn’t matter, then the action is literally meaningless. As players explore your design, they have faith that the actions they take will add up to something—a gripping story, a risky strategy, a fun way to get through the current level. Integrating actions and outcomes is how that happens. ([Location 1643](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=1643))
> While games can make use of many kinds of embedded content—from musical scores to pre-scripted dialog—the emergent parts of a narrative system, based on the systemic, participatory characteristics of games, are what unlock the unique potentials for games to play with narrative. ([Location 1710](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=1710))
> satisfyingly frustrating ([Location 1716](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=1716))
> Every game is a double seduction. First, you need to be convinced to play, to enter into the “magic circle.” But for the game to have any life, you also need to keep playing—to imbue the system with effort and keep it moving forward until it reaches a conclusion. ([Location 1763](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=1763))
> Goals are a trail of breadcrumbs, sometimes explicitly designed, sometimes scattered by players themselves. As you plot moment to moment, achieving and planning, strategizing and improvising, goals keep your head in the game. They enwrap our minds in a state of play. Until, of course, we reach the end. There is a poetic tragedy to games and goals, whose delicate birth is always rounded by a driving stampede to their own death. Games desperately beg us to begin, only so that they can play themselves out, reach a conclusion, and exhaust their possibilities in a final outcome. ([Location 1784](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=1784))
> Game designer Brian Moriarty has used the term entrainment to describe the curious patterned repetition of gameplay. In French, the verb entrainer means both “to carry along” and “to trap.” It so wonderfully captures the double significance of being pulled into an experience that we willingly enter, just so that we can be pleasantly manipulated. This is part of the beauty and power of games. ([Location 1805](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=1805))
> There is a fundamental difference between rolling a die and drawing a random card. When you roll a die, the next roll still preserves the complete set of possible outcomes. Cards are different. When you draw a card, that card is taken out of the possible outcomes for the next turn (unless you shuffle it in again). ([Location 2201](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=2201))
> Design is at least 50 percent communication. ([Location 3580](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=3580))
> If a player is not aware that the tree fell down in the virtual forest, it doesn’t matter if it really fell or not. ([Location 3583](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=3583))
> What designers call affordances are the specific ways that an object lends itself to being used. A playing card, for example, can be shuffled into a deck, held in a hand with other cards, placed faceup or facedown, passed to another player, discarded out of the game, or even torn in half! Experimenting with the affordances of an object can help unlock possible uses and misuses and lead to interesting play. Remember, affordances can be social and cultural, not just physical: Are you more of a Queen of Hearts or an Ace of Spades? Encourage them to be inspired by playing around with their objects. ([Location 3778](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09ZH9RVRQ&location=3778))