The Meanings & Consequences of Rules & Algorithms

TL;DR; I used to meet resistance to the idea that video game rules (usually expressed in the programming) and algorithms can be meaningful or important. I discuss four ways game rules can create meaning and/or have political implications.

When I first started writing about video games, the humanities  (full disclosure: I am a humanities scholar) were probably at the peak of self-importance, and many of the theories we were taught were presented as timeless and universal for explaining all of human culture for all time. It wasn’t really on the table that these theories should be augmented with anything specific going on in, say, video games, or in anything else, new or old.

When I then excitedly tried to argue that the rules of video games could also be central to the game’s attraction and to their meaning, and should be included in the humanities, this came across as boring, nerdy tech stuff that many people couldn’t believe had any importance, and felt about as relevant to them as the construction of printer drivers.

I realized the other day that it’s been years since I had this experience of someone dismissing game rules as irrelevant or meaningless, and I think there is a reason: Our world is now so completely enmeshed in algorithms and in issues of algorithmic bias, that it’s now a given that rules, algorithms, and programming fundamentally matter.

In many ways, of course, but I can see that I have thought mostly about four ways that rules matter.

1) Meaning and Political Expression

New and popular culture is often dismissed as “meaningless”, and video games have been dismissed this way along with (say) jazz and romance novels. How then to explain why we find video games meaningful?

A central early and influential example is Gonzalo Frasca’s game September 12th, which at first gives the impression of being a kill-the-terrorists-and-you’re-done game, but once you play, the game reveals how killing breeds resentment and perpetuates a cycle of violence. This made September 12th an influential early example of how the rule system of a game could be expressive, and here express a political point about the counter-productiveness of the War on Terror.

Obviously, most games combine some kind of fictional world with a rule-based system. In the September 12th case, the genre expectations set up by the fiction & visual representation is undercut by the rule system, and we are as players forced to reconsider the actions we are performing in-game. What we think of as meaning is usually a combination of rules, fiction, but also social context, style, and so on.

2) Accessibility and Time

When I was writing about casual games (A Casual Revolution), it became clear that two of the primary barriers that prevented people for playing video games were:

1. Accessibility, broadly understood, including game conventions that players were not aware of, as well as font size, interfaces and so son.
2. Time. The fact that many games require substantial time commitments, both in absolute time, and in the chunks of they ask you to commit. I argued for interruptibility as an important design principle to reach a broader audience.

These were examples of how game rules strongly include or exclude players, depending on their life circumstances, tastes, and video game experience. Design very concretely matters for who is going to play.

3) The Existential Experience of Playing

I also looked at (The Art of Failure) how failure in a game concretely has implications for our self-image, and how its meaning is tied both to the fictional world, to our identity, and to the social context we are playing in.

This is also where game design observations interface with education. You can design a game, or a test, in ways that encourage or discourage those who fail.

4) When Rules control the World – Gamification & Algorithmic Bias

Finally, I think gamification and algorithmic bias overlap. Gamification sets up measures for what we are supposed to do – such as approve the most loans, pass the most students, publish the most papers, be most active on social media. In all cases, what is measured and rewarded is usually not quite what we actually think of as valuable. Publishing more papers is not actually valuable, but we have just set up incentive structures that reward it, and punish those who work for a long time on one paper.

As the gamification term suggests, I suppose, these are typical game design decisions, where we set up rule systems that reward – or punish – certain behaviors.

This problem overlaps quite closely with algorithmic bias: By now, we all have firsthand experience with how algorithms select which posts to feature in  newsfeeds, and I think most people understand that AI technologies are both invisible to us, often promoted as objective by companies, while in fact of course they embody lots of biases (here is a bit of a reading list) in gender, ethnic, racial, and class^[i] in health[ii] [iii], image recognition[iv], loan approvals[v], policing[vi], to give some examples.

This not to say that video game studies invented the study of algorithms, but the study of games helped bring this hitherto technical domain to the humanities, and it is much easier to discuss game rules now that public discourse so often touches on algorithms.

How Video Games Interface with the World

To sum up, we can think about how the (political) meaning of video games can arise in many different ways, and we can think about this works slightly differently for rules and for fiction (narrative):

Rules interface with the world literally: what happens in a game really does happen. If you lose a game, or if the rule structures makes a game inaccessible to a large portion of the population because it is too difficult, requires too much time, or makes too many assumptions about the audience, that really does happen.

Fiction (~narrative) interfaces with the world metaphorically: what happens in a fiction does not actually happen. This does not make it less culturally important; it just means that we (often) see fiction and narratives as questions of representation and values.