Dear Ludic Liberators,
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Last night at the Ludic Liberation Lab we asked the question: “Do Rules Rule Us or do We Rule Rules?” Or, put another way, “What’s the relationship between rules and liberation?”
To investigate this inquiry, we played several games, the culminating one being Nomic – a game of changing rules. Nomic was created by philosopher Peter Suber to illustrate the paradox of legal & logical self-amendment. The paradox is that a self-amending rule system (such as the U.S. constitution & legislative system) eventually leads to logical contradictions and corruptions – sets of rules that make it impossible to actually follow all the rules.
“Nomic” is a very cute name, but the game is not cute. It’s maddening, frustrating, slow. At least it was for the 13 of us (probably all compulsive overthinkers), who stuck around for that part of last night’s lab (apparently the ideal number of Nomic players is 6, so it might have also been the curse of committee). Despite the apparent liberatory potential of being able to change any rule, the rules we felt most bound to were profoundly conservative. These were not the 29 rules the game started out with. This initial set established the way a turn works (proposing a rule change and rolling a die to determine a score), the winning conditions (obtaining 100 points or reaching a legal paradox), and limitations on rule change procedures (immutable rules have to be transmuted to mutable ones first, etc.).
Instead, the rules that were most encumbering were the many hidden rules we were all privately following. Some of us felt unwilling to allow an incentive to exist, even if it would benefit everyone equally. Others wanted to subvert the system, and resisted agreeing to making the game more “fair.” Some wanted to infuse subjective and spiritual guidance into the collective rule-set, even if determining the authentic enactment or violation of such rules would be ambiguous at best. Others wanted to remove minor game limitations, even ones we appeared unlikely to ever bump up against. In other words, the rules we were each using to propose new rules were not collectively known or valued.
In our gameplay, we managed to enact just 3 new rules, which all intended to make playing and winning a little bit easier, but not really freer. Easier is not the same as freer. But freer is definitely not necessarily fairer.
Here’s what I found most interesting and revealing from studying our gameplay:
Governed by a collective rule set that required full participation and consensus (unanimous) decision-making, some players consistently voted against their own (winning-oriented) self-interest, and also against collective liberation (i.e., making the rule-set more open), but FOR the preservation of existing collective limitations.
Not everyone voted this way, and some people would have voted this way even if we weren’t required to achieve unanimity (a rule we failed to overturn). But this observation suggests, to me, some conjectures*:
*a conjecture is a proposition suspected to be true based on preliminary evidence
1. We love to limit Other people.
I invite you to try on this statement for yourself and your understanding of human behavior. Do you you think it’s true? Do you feel like no no no, it’s definitely not true, not for you anyway? Perhaps you never try to limit another’s actions, in any way? How about if we phrase it like this:
1B. We love to limit other people via an externalized system that removes our individual accountability for creating/enforcing the limitation.
Isn’t that what the State is? What employee handbooks are? Application requirements? Terms & conditions? Refund policies? “Morality”? The Bible? Expectations of reciprocity you thought were just “good manners”?
Another conjecture:
2. We love to obey precedent.
(I could remove all the “love to”s from the above statements, but I want to suggest that some part of us not only does but chooses and enjoys these things).
Precedent is like sediment, it accumulates quickly and then moves across contexts. If a stated rule is followed by 10 more rules in order or time of encounter, that first rule feels more solid, unchangeable, even if it is always up for negotiation like all the other rules. In other words, if it precedes, it leads. We feel bound to precedent, to tradition, even if we had no say in establishing it, and have not examined its logic and potential consequences.
Does history actually repeat itself, or do we, when presented with its precedent, feel compelled to repeat history?
Precedent is not just limited to the within-game system. Some players justified their rule proposals with statements like “I’m the kind of person who….,” ruling from their identity, personality, historically espoused and aspired values. Without an explicit rule to “be someone else,” we feel compelled to repeat our own historical precedent. Perhaps personality is just a kind of sediment of the self.
So, in my personal conclusion to the investigation of rules (you are welcome to make your own conclusions, of course, either in private or by sharing them in a comment to this post or via email),
in the struggle between human groups and rules, RULES win. Hands down.
As soon as we learn a rule, we are compelled to obey it and preserve its legacy. But, liberation from rules is still possible! Paradoxically, perhaps, it involves simply making new private rules, ones that no one else is required to ratify and that no one other than you can really police. Frustrated by our divided will, players resisted the game’s constipated progress by playing different games at the edge of the official game. In our debrief, some (though certainly not all) of these strategies were revealed, including:
claiming they had “no taste for winning” and simply enjoying observing the flow of events
deciding the deliberation of proposals, however drawn-out, was itself the game
playing a side-game of snarky commentary and razzing of other players
conducting “research” on what was happening 🙋
leaning into the bureaucratic death drive, and enjoying the opportunity to contemplate numbness and void
leaving the situation (Zoom room) altogether, thus committing a kind of game suicide
Perhaps we can (and already do) play the above “edge games” in almost any circumstance when the official rules feel too restrictive.
Another bit of life wisdom… When asked what players would do differently if they could play Nomic again, many agreed on the following:
Propose sillier rules that invite more joy.
Having recently joined the Count Every Vote Block Party in Philadelphia which accompanied the slow, painstaking, administrative process of counting thousands of ballots with a raging street party and public celebration, I can wholeheartedly affirm: YES, LET’S 🎉
A GAME GIFT IN EVERY REPORT 🎁
Besides Nomic, which you should totally play with your friends (or enemies), you can try out our freshly play-tested Infinitely Inclusive Popcorn 🍿 – a way of establishing an order of turns and warming up a group. The first person to go passes the turn by describing the next person with a quality that both adds something more specific to the description and does not exclude anyone else from the quality who is still undescribed. The following turns must repeat all the previous descriptors. For example, you can start with “I’m Natalia and I’m a carbon life form, and I pass it on to Keanu who is also a carbon life form and a mammal.” By the end of the activity, you’ll have as many things in common with one another as the number of participants in the room! :)
🗓 Don't miss any more labs! The Ludic Liberation Lab meets every 2nd Thursday of the month, 6-8:30pm Eastern Time, so add it to your calendar. WE'LL SEE YOU NEXT MONTH ON DECEMBER 10th!
Do you have feedback and findings from your personal Lab experience that you want to contribute? Please send them to ludicliberation@gmail.com. The email is also where you should send proposals for future playful liberation experiments you’d love to conduct at the Lab! 🎲🔬
from one human with vowels & consonants in their name, who has hair of various thicknesses, who has a height, who sits in a room lit by artificial light in front of a screen, who gets sad sometimes, who has a speaking voice, and has eaten something today
to many others who share these very same existential conditions:
may you find & follow the rules that bring you the most joy,
n a t a l i a
Gamemaker/Destroyer