To be clear, I’m not really invested in the idea that rules are fictional. I was using the term in it’s widest sense, which I would argue makes it a synonym with ‘fake’ and ‘pretend’, in order to make a point. I think you guys rightly demonstrate why that was a bad idea.

Looking back I also think that I mis-characterized Wark’s position, which I feel bad about. I thought I remembered something and didn’t bother to double check if it was correct.

To your variation’s Jesper –

For me it’s clear that Callois is including things like unstructured play in his use of the word game, which I think is fine but is not the same way that I’m using the word. My sense of the word ‘game’ is closer to what you call the ‘classic game model’.

I’ve been reading Suits’ The Grasshopper for my talk on the ludic contract and I have to say that I have some real problems with the definition that he puts forward. I need to think about it some more though and make my own objections a little clearer to myself however.

I also need to return to Marie-Laure Ryan, since I haven’t read her in a long time. From your description though I think I like where she’s going! It would not surprise me if narrative was more like a game than we give it credit for!

Anyway, thanks for the feedback guys!

Three other variations on this:

1) Caillois, p.8-9: “[…] chess, prisoner’s base, polo, and baccara are played for real. As if is not necessary. [...] Thus games are not ruled and make-believe. Rather, they are ruled or make-believe.”
(The opposite argument of what you are making!)

2) This Bernard Suits article discusses the relation between game rules and laws:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/186102

3) Marie-Laure Ryan’s “Narrative as Virtual Reality”, which on a high level is reminiscent of your argument just going in the opposite direction: narrative is like games.

I agree that rules cause state changes in the world, I’m just not sure that that qualifies them as real. The state changes are, but the constraints that led to the state changes are not.

Have you read Bernard Suits? He argues that game rules can always be overridden by more important rules (such as stopping a game to save someone from being run over by a car).

For my own part I use the word ‘fiction’ to refer to things that are ‘pretend’, which for me includes the thematic elements which refer to ‘not-real’ stories and worlds. Rules are pretend, just like fictional stories and worlds, but the actions and events that result from them are not.

Also, I agree wholeheartedly that most culture is arbitrary and agreed upon, much like the rules of a game. That’s probably why I’m such a fan of Huizinga!

People use terms like “real” and “fictional” in all sorts of ways. In Half-Real, I am using the terms in a specific way, as they are defined in fictional worlds theory (Thomas Pavel and others).

Which is to say: The basic question is which world we are referring to at a given time. This world (the world in which I am writing this blog comment), or another world that we imagine?

Real rules: The rules of games refer to _this_ world – they describe what you can or cannot do in this world when playing the game. This is the same for analog and digital games. Hence rules are “real” in this sense.

Fictional worlds: The fiction of a game, like all fictions, refer to an imagined world that is distinct from this one (the real world). This doesn’t prevent us from discussing it, of course. We can discuss and be inspired by Hamlet’s motivation or the characters in Avatar and so on, and we have a range of ways of interpreting the relation between the real world and any given fictional world.

But the bottom line is that we make strong distinctions between this world and fictional worlds. To not make such a distinction is to be “crazy”, and in fact novels such as Don Quixote and Madame Bovary deal with what happens if you don’t. We can then read our Baudrillard and try to claim that it no longer makes sense to have the distinction, and there certainly is an interesting discussion concerning when we think of thinks as “real”, but I think it is safe to say that we all continue to live by the real-fictional distinction anyway.

The idea of Half-Real is to see video games as a special variation on that theme: video games consist of real rules that govern actions in this world, but they also project fictional worlds. I.e. the very real rules of a skiing game determine what you can do in _this world_ with your controller and what happens as a result, all the while you imagine yourself to be skiing in a fictional world (i.e. yes, you are playing a skiing game, but you are not actually skiing).

As I recall, McKenzie Wark’s comment in Gamer Theory seems to be based on the idea that “real” means “important”, hence he is saying that “fictions are important too”. This is not in any way at odds with what I am saying in the book, McKenzie is just using the word “real” in a completely different sense.

As for the rules of Basketball, I think Charles is using “fiction” to mean agreed-upon, socially constructed, or unnecessary. This is also “fiction” in a completely different sense that I am using. In Half-Real, something is fiction if it creates another world than this one. Most of culture is arbitrary and agreed-upon anyway, innit?

As I said before, the “insurmountables” in digital games can be altered if for example we decide to hack into the game engine. There are probably many other methods to go around the “real” in digital games (as your examples suggest). Or we could, potentially, also alter the tokens in a board game or agree to re-arrange the layout of tiles on a game board, or even re-draw them etc. That would mean that the insurmountables of board games too aren’t really insurmountables. It looks like everything speaks for the approaches that are in favor of the arbitrariness of rules in games.

All this got me thinking about what exactly ‘configures’ the limits of what we dare to configure or re-configure while we are engaging in gameplay. What is it that makes the “real” (or let’s call it preferred) gameplay dominating the apparent arbitrariness of game rules and their openness to negotiation? Could it be that this is related to configurative powers on the side of the “text” that articulate the player into the interactive process in a way that sort of structures parts of her way of acting? Do games also come with certain modes of consumption that suggest limits in gameplay which are perceived as “real”? I think it would be interesting to search answers to these questions…

I can’t really speak for what Dr. Juul’s motivations were in arguing that games are ‘half-real’, though he has said (in my interview with him) that it came out of his participation in the ‘narratology vs. ludology’ debate.

From my perspective what you describe as ‘insurmountable’ rules are not really an exclusive property of digital games. A non-digital game like Monopoly has rules that are enforced by it’s materials, specifically the number of places on its board, that are not under negotiation by the players. Similarly, sports like golf and football can be played in weather that has a profound effect on the game and are not negotiable by the participants.

By the same token there are plenty of instances of players negotiating new rules in digital games in the form of speedruns or ironman runs. The game of ‘Grifball’ was actually created by a bunch of Halo 3 players agreeing to all follow a set of rules that weren’t enforced by the materials of the game.