Playing kids spend a lot of time deciding how they are going to play, instead of … well, playing.

The first thing kids do when they are going to play “house”, “war” or “cops ‘n’ robbers” is to decide the rules of the play universe. Who are playing cops and who are playing robbers? How do you decide if you are hit when somebody shoots? Who is mommy, who is daddy and who are the kids? Where does the family live? Sometimes this process can be equally or more important than the actual play that follows. Most of the time this process has similarities to game design.

Negotiation is an important tool when kids establish game rules

The other day my six-year old son Jakob brought home a new friend, a slightly older girl called Liva. They met in the court yard and had known each other for about ten minutes when they entered Jakob’s room. Their first step was to decide what to play and with what toys. They quickly picked out some of Jakob’s action figurines as their toys of choice. Next the “what are we playing?” game design begins.

“So, this is one of the good guys, and this one is a bad guy”, Jakob said.
“Ok, then all the bad guys stand over here, right?”, Liva replied.

They started grouping and familiarizing the figurines while picking out their own personal favorites and adding special abilities to them. Soon two large groups started forming formations on the floor getting ready for the eternal battle between the good guys and the bad guys.

“This one is both a good guy and a bad guy”, one of them stated boldly.
“But you can push a button on his tummy and then he switches to a good guy again”, the other one added.
“Ok, and then he’s got a sign on his belly that says if he’s good or bad”.
“- But the others can’t see it – Only us”.

Negotiation is an important tool when kids establish game rules. Only rules that both kids agree on are fun. The kids are creating a shared vision of their play universe of choice – shared being the key word. So called bad ideas are filtered out of the game by the micro democracy that – at least these two – kids unknowingly establish to govern their play.

More or less as soon as all the tiny plastic figurines were placed in articulate formations on the floor, the kids lost interest, and moved on to skate scooters and water balloons. I guess they mastered their own game as soon as they had established all the rules they could think of for their imaginary universe. Once the game was mastered, the novelty wore off. All the playing had taken place inside their heads while designing the game. All the energy was spent getting to know each other by creating a shared play vision – establishing a common ground from which new play could grow.

Establishing the rules is a significant and fun part of real-life playing … Sometimes it seems even more fun than playing.

I wonder if this can translate into computer games as well? We know that “a major part of the fun in computer games is figuring out what the rules are” (source). The only thing is, that allthough you may make creative choices, you don’t create anything new, when you are exploring the rules of a game. Even though you may be on a journey through an unknown digital world, you basically just sit there and take what ever the game designer has lined up for you. You submit to the rules of the game instead of creating the rules.

Computer games are like that. And we know they work – But could it be different?

Game designers could maybe make basic worlds with some founding laws of game physics. On top of this they could add a pool of simple rules that the players could apply or remove during gameplay. The rules should be simple enough to combine without conflicting, yet they should have universal impact on the game. The players would not create the rules as such, but they would create the unique combination of rules every time they played the game.

What would happen if casual multiplayer games were micro democracies? What if players had to decide what rules they were playing by on the fly? What would happen when players applied rules in combinations that the game designer never had foreseen? What would happen if players could tag rules they didn’t find funny, and that if majority was won, the rule would be dropped? What would happen if any rule applied to a game would have a point where it expired? What if the overall color-mood of the visuals was decided by what rules was in play? What would happen if … ?