The Book is Not the Game, but Maybe Neither is the Game
- a thread

Today I want to talk to you about play culture and finally make use of my sociology degree, but before I talk about that I need to talk about board games.

I see board games mentioned a lot when people are talking about how rpgs should look at rules, usually in the context of providing rules clarity, specificity, or rules as written. But friends? Lets talk about Monopoly.

Monopoly, outside of abstracts like Chess or Go, was the most popular board game for a very long time. And it wasnt particularly fun. By design! The maker of the game wanted to teach about the horrors of capitalism and Monopoly, played by the rules, does that!

The longer the game goes the less fun it is. It turns out that if you ignore hotels and maximise on houses the other players cant win, but it can take hours for the game state to recognize a loss. So one person profits and the rest go round and round losing money. Capitalism!

An interesting thing about Monopoly though. Very few people play it by the actual rules, and thats despite having the rulebook right next to them the whole time. Even more interesting, most people dont even know that they arent playing by the rules.

Most people dont know the auction rules. Most people play with money from free parking. And thats not just me saying it. They did surveys and ended up releasing a special edition of the game a few years ago where the rules matched what people were actually playing. Absurdity.

So what happened? Why werent most people playing Monopoly playing by the rules? Because they learned them from friends or family, and if you know the rules and they work, why look?

Metis vs Techne

There are many ways of looking at how people learn, but one I think does a lot to explain gming is metis vs techne. Broadly speaking, techne is book learning and tends to be more universal. Metis is experiential learning, and its local and specific.

GMing requires metis. You can read a million books with great advice, but actually getting better at it? It requires practice, it requires experience, and that includes playing at a table with a great gm. Playing games run by great people is kind of an apprenticeship!

This type of learning has something of a weakness though. If you learn by experience, your outer limits on learning new things is a combination of personal creativity and exposure to other gms. It also means you learn preferences and style.

This isnt good or bad to be clear. Like Monopoly its just the nature of learning and teaching.

Sorting

D&D is the biggest rpg in the world. If you live in a small town with slow internet you cant necessarily play that Urban Shadows campaign youve been hoping for.

You play the game you can get players for. And you can get the players for D&D. But you dont care about epic fantasy, you dont like Tolkien or any of that. You liked Interview with the Vampire or Twilight or B horror movies. So you discover that D&D has a setting for you.

You run Ravenloft! Heres a question though. If this person has lived in a larger city, would they have played D&D, or would they have played Urban Shadows? Or Vampire? Or some combination?

When you have limited options you change the game to match your preferences. When you have many options you choose a game that fits your preferences.

Norms

Sociology has for a very long time looked at the unwritten and unspoken laws of societies. Very quickly, because this is already long and I dont have a teaching degree:

Norms are the combination of folkways, mores, taboos, and laws that make up how we navigate society.

Folkways are the unconscious things that order society. Waiting in line is the classic example. No one tells you to, its just learned behaviour that makes life easier.

Mores are the ethical and moral assumptions that govern society.

Taboos are very negatively viewed behaviors.

Laws are the written and enforced rules of society.

The Game

Just like norms define a society, but only part of those norms are written down, so too the written game is not the entire game.

Safety tools are a way to make mores and taboos more visible.

Bringing snacks or drinks to game night is a folkway, or muting your mic on an online call.

The game is all of these things together. Its one of my frustrations whenever the “does system matter” question comes up. Of course it does, because the system is the laws.

But the laws are only a fourth of the experience that we go through, and the most visible one at that. Its a part of the experience, but so is how the gm has learned to run the game and social practices and safety tools and play preferences.

All if this is to say, when we discuss games I think its useful to recognize both what the text is doing, but also that the text isnt the only thing being discussed. And disentangling those things will make it much easier to understand each other and learn from each other.

And there is so much to learn! Every time I do one of these threads you all come up with insightful responses, and agree or disagree I always feel like I have a better understanding of our hobby and our industry. And what can be better than that? Thanks for reading!