Blog-style posts by Dan Maruschak, often about topics like RPG Design, RPG Theory, or the communities around them.
Philosophy of Games: My current conceptual model

I've been reading some books about the philosophy of games lately and it has spurred some of my own thinking on the subject. I wanted to present a quick overview about my current conceptual model and some of the ideas I've been pondering.
To me, the important and interesting stuff that happens in a game is what happens in the mind(s) of the player(s), but I think there are useful analogs when looking at the physical world as well. If we take a prototypical game like a board game we can look at three broad regions: setup, play, and teardown.
But when you're transitioning into play you're not just setting up the physical play environment, you're also doing some things that are purely mental or conceptual, like agreeing to be bound by the rules, adopting what Bernard Suits called the Lusory Attitude, and committing to valuing things within the game that are different from your values outside the game (for example, caring about getting “points” which are entirely arbitrary and meaningless except in the context of a particular game). This is also the process of “crossing into the magic circle” of play.
Play itself is a continuous or cyclic process. For example, in soccer at any given moment you're trying to get points for your team and/or preventing the other team from getting points, in chess on each turn you're trying to position your pieces in a way that will give you a strategic advantage that will eventually allow you to get checkmate, etc. I don't think it registers as gamelike if the activity maps to some linear set of steps, I think there needs to be some sense of “ongoing process” because you need something that you can mentally encapsulate so you can “step into” it when you want to cross the magic circle.
I also think that play needs to be an agentic process, where you need to be an “agent” affecting the game state analogous to the way we'd say you have to be a “moral agent” to interact with a moral or ethical system (e.g. we blame a murderer for murdering, we don't blame the oxygen that allowed the murderer to live thereby enabling the murder). To be participating in a game is to be a part in a machine, but it can't be a purely mechanical part. Knitting is a continuous or cyclic activity but I'd argue that it is not gamelike, in fact many people find it meditative and some suggest that the “mindfulness” we associate with meditation is on the opposite end of a spectrum from game-playing.
The process of being an agent in a game involves making meaningful contributions to the game-state. This involves changing your position in the “game state”, where that game state is measured against whatever dimensions the game has made relevant. Note that going to a place and seeing what it's like there is a good description of “exploration”, which some have argued is the core of play of certain types of games. While there may appear to be some circularity in terms of figuring out what contributions seem meaningful and what things are valued in a game that may just be a specific case of it being challenging to figure out what's meaningful in a general sense (e.g. do you do meaningful work at your job?).
Is this framework useful?
Here's an example of how I look at a particular issue through this framework: Over the years in the Forge / indie-game / story-game community there has been much consternation over whether it's OK to say someone is “playing wrong” if in Dogs in the Vineyard they don't actually care about any of the NPCs but are instead doing a performative stereotype of the “yeehaw, let's burn everything and let God sort it out!” variety. I think this framework answers that question: Caring about the welfare of the NPCs is one of the things that interacts with other elements of DitV's system, it's part of what makes it “work” like a functioning machine. Not caring about the NPCs and thinking you're playing DitV is as wrong as thinking you're playing basketball if you don't care about the points, i.e. it's not a moral failure, but it is a category error. You can certainly play with the subcomponents of the games, such as doing trick shots in basketball or engaging with the DitV conflict mechanics purely in terms of the fun of creating rich descriptions for a stereotype to engage in, but that's a different thing than actually playing the game. To actually play a game you need to do the complete setup process, including the agreement to treat the important dimensions of the game as if they matter while you play. (And, of course, there are lots of ways that games can get you to care about things or fail to do so – this model is merely saying that it's important to do so, not that it must be done formally or explicitly).



Interesting! That's really useful.
Where would you say the social contract falls? To me, those social expectations, that players will find reasons for their characters to stay together, or not split the party, or all sorts of other things that aren't necessarily spelled out in the rules but are needed to make useful gameplay, add an important layer to the proceedings.
I'd say things like that are part of the functioning of the system, so getting players into the right position and orientation to interface with that system is part of the setup that the game needs. But it's not always obvious that elements are important, e.g. few sports rules include "set up your court on a planet with Earth-like gravity" even though that's probably important for a lot of them to function correctly. (I'm also not sure that "social contract" is necessarily the best term for all those things, though. Some games could have explicit rules along those lines, or use other design techniques to get them to happen even if they're not explicitly addressed, etc., and saying they're part of a "social contract" might imply that only outside-the-game methods can address them).