Title: The Rules We Break: Lessons in Play, Thinking, and Design

Author: Eric Zimmerman

Completed: July 2023 (Full list of books)

Overview: I expected this book to be more about design in general. I knew games would be the focus, but there was little else. That said, no book since Reality is Broken has gotten me more excited about playing games. There are a bunch of game ideas that you can play or use as a jumping off point for game design. There are some interesting ideas related to education, including a general dislike of “gamification” as it is often used to put a thin veneer of “fun” onto otherwise didactic lessons. This reminds me of exhibit design at science centers. In both cases, starting with a focus on “what they will learn” almost guarantees no one will enjoy the exhibit or game. Rather we should focus on what they will do. Given enough experiences of a phenomenon, people will develop an understanding of the basic principles which can evolve as they gain other, deeper experiences.

Highlights:

• the twenty-first century might be termed a Ludic Century, an epoch in which games and play are the model for how we interact with culture and with each other.
• More than just goofing around, play is a profound way of understanding how we relate to each other, how meaning is made, and how to critically engage with the world.
• When you’re designing, the tendency is to spend a lot of time discussing ideas and concepts. Instead, design by doing. Get to the point where you are making something interactive as soon as possible. Don’t talk about a story: tell a story. Don’t theorize about the experience: actually build it. Put together a prototype.
• The third stage begins around age ten. Children come to see Marbles as a social contract, a set of rules that gain their authority only because the players agree to follow them. This means that if everyone agrees, the rules can be changed. This is essentially how adults see games too: as a voluntary, social construct. Play in this sense is wonderfully flexible but also quite fragile. Play happens only if and when we all agree to it.
• For Piaget, the game of Marbles was a lens for exploring how our morals develop. For DeKoven, the play community is a chance to practice being better people together. These are not just abstract ideas. Every moment of play is an opportunity to exercise collaboration with other human beings and to explore the curious social contract of play.
• Think about: Enjoying the rules I used to hurry through explaining the rules of a game like Five Fingers, with the idea of getting everyone playing as quickly as possible. I have learned from grandmaster of play Bernie DeKoven to slow down and enjoy the performance of explaining rules. Take your time. Be clear and repeat key ideas. Make jokes. Build suspense. Have fun.
• Any simulation is a statement about the mechanics of reality. Crucially, what you exclude is as important as what you decide to include.
• Part of what defines a game is the goal. An outcome. Winning or losing, or receiving a score. A final goal certainly doesn’t have to be part of every kind of play, yet in a very traditional sense, a goal is what makes a game a game. Friends can casually ski down a slope together, or they can race against the clock to see who can get a faster time. Game designer Frank Lantz calls the goal of a game a kind of gravity. It orders events, letting you know which way is up and which way is down. Without a goal, how do you know that a move was good or bad? How can you decide what you should do next? In many kinds of play, we invent our own goals.
• Field-defining scholars who study games and learning, like James Gee, Constance Steinkhuler, and Kurt Squire, view any well-designed game as intrinsically valuable. Games can engender communities of learning, they can help us think rigorously, they provide contexts where we can learn how to learn. Yet the gamification of education too often treats games like injectors of curricular information: games exist to deliver data more efficiently. This approach replicates today’s unfortunate trend of test-driven factual knowledge—the absolutely lowest form of learning —and has nothing to do with how education can address the complex challenges facing the world today.
• “Where do you get your ideas?” This is a question an artist or designer or other creative person is often asked when they talk about what they do. Too often. The question implies that the most important moment in the life cycle of a project is the moment of conception, the mythical instant of genius when the answer appears in the creator’s mind, and that the rest of the work after that is just fleshing out the details. There’s just one problem: that story is dead opposite of reality. Why? Because it ignores what is actually far more important: the process. An initial idea is just a starting point. The hard work, the real work, the place of discovery and creativity, is each step along the way. I’m not the first to say it: ideas are cheap. Everyone has good ideas.
• How do people get a genuine sense of real authorship over what they do? The answer is brilliantly simple: don’t fake it. They need to have actual, real authorship. The only way to make someone feel like they are making important decisions is to let them make important decisions. This is the opposite of a more traditional approach, in which a lead designer or creative director carries the vision for a project and has final approval over everything. Giving everyone on a team autonomy sounds scary, and it is! Yet it’s the only way to really get everyone’s heads in the game. So how does this not devolve into anarchy? The first step is to clearly define everyone’s roles and responsibilities—and to give them actual autonomy within that clearly defined role.
• The practice of making something by trying out an early version of it is at the heart of iterative design. Playtesting goes by many names: editing, rehearsal, modeling. It is a methodology that can be applied to just about any field and any kind of project. Question: When do you start playtesting? Answer: Before you think you are ready. If you feel totally comfortable sharing your work in progress, it’s probably too late! Playtest as early as you can so that there is still time to make changes based on any findings you discover.
• To break rules requires knowing what the rules are and giving yourself permission to leave them behind. This approach to creativity comes down to two things: having literacy about what already exists and feeling the freedom to go beyond it.
• a great example of hardcore creativity, consider Chindōgu, the “art of useless inventions.” It has produced such absurd objects as foot umbrellas to keep shoes dry and a chopsticks-mounted fan for cooling down hot soup noodles. In fact the now-ubiquitous selfie stick first appeared as a Chindōgu invention in the 1990s—twenty years before it caught on! Kenji Kawakami invented Chindōgu and its philosophy, embodied in ten principles, including: Chindōgu are tools for everyday life; Chindōgu are not for sale; Inherent in every Chindōgu is the spirit of anarchy. Chindōgu means embracing these sometimes contradictory, rule-breaking rules.
• Criticism is like spicy food. It is painful at first, but then you develop a taste for it. Eventually, you can’t get enough. The goal is to inculcate that craving to give and receive feedback—hard-hitting, helpful, sensitive, insightful feedback—in yourself and your collaborators.
• I sometimes get into arguments with friends who are worried about teaching. They feel like they haven’t yet accumulated sufficient knowledge or expertise in order to instruct others. That’s hogwash! In fact, they have the entire idea of teaching exactly backward. They shouldn’t teach because they have arrived at some kind of endpoint. They should teach to learn about something, to get better at it, and to investigate it more deeply.