The Rule Book (review)

I’m writing this review in my blog and not publishing it in some more reputable place because I’m so obviously biased: Markus and Jaakko are my brilliant colleagues, so you should probably take my opinion with a grain of salt. I think in this case I’m more critical than I would be if someone else had written the same book – because I have such high expectations for these brilliant people.

The Rule Book by Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola looks at the rules of games. The authors motivate their focus on the rules of games by starting with the basic question “what are games?” and noting that while there might not be a consensus among scholars

if these definitions agree on anything, it is the centrality of rules to games: nearly all definitions of games published during the past century view rules as essential to games. (p. 3)¹

The book notes that while writing it the authors examined the rules of many different games. I think the book shows the value of that approach: the many, detailed examples of different games show how vague ideas about the concrete rules of different games even game scholars (like me) have about rules. What (exactly) do the rules of soccer say about handling the ball with your hands? What (exactly) do the rules of chess say about moving the pieces?

Close examinations of actual rules throughout the book are illuminating and highlight the value of doing the analytical work even when the focus is on theory-building. In addition to being illuminating, the examples are also fun to read, and help in thinking through the different ideas about rules. For example, discussing Monopoly, Formula One and Magic: The Gathering to tease out the complexities related to rules works because the different contexts bring out the differences and similarities between the cases.²

As a book about explaining different types of rules and showing the contextual differences in how they are applied The Rule Book works great and I can wholeheartedly recommend it to scholars, students and designers wanting to improve their understanding of rules.³

However, The Rule Book is also building a theory of rules. To do that, it categorizes rules into five categories, which are:

• Formal rules: the explicit statements that constitute games
• Internal rules: the often private rules and goals that players set for themselves
• Social rules: the indeterminate shared social and cultural norms and values that guide gameplay
• External regulation: the rules and laws enforced by the surrounding society that impact gameplay
• Material rules: the material embodiments of rules and the brute circumstances of play (p. 8)

However, there is a problem with these categories: the book never argues for the existence of these categories, they are not the end result of some analytical process, nor are other categories considered and discarded. The categories are simply given in the introduction, and then discussed in one chapter each. None of them are justified or argued for; they are the starting point, not the end result of analysis.

If the book is to be read as a theory of rules, this is an utter failure. The book has no theory of what kind of thing rules in general are, how categories like the ones used in the book are formed, what they are, or how their relationships to each other should be understood. There are existing approaches that could have given a model for how to do this. For example, defining theoretical terms has been discussed in the philosophy of science for decades (e.g., Lewis, 1970).

The five categories given are also not the only categories used in the book: already the first chapter discusses situational and authoritative formal rules, house rules, equifinal rules, ambiguous rules, self-defeating rules – and more categories are introduced in other chapters. How are these categories related to the five main categories? It could be that these categories could be somehow reduced to the five categories given, but no hint of how this could be done is given.

Some of the chapters also slip in extra categories without any discussion why this is necessary or beneficial. For example, the chapter on internal rules discusses “private rules and goals”, but the relationship between the two is not explicated. I don’t think you can reduce goals into rules, but I’m willing to entertain an argument for that. Unfortunately, none is given.

The book introduces the central theoretical framework in the introduction: constructionist ludology.⁴ Constructionist ludology relies on the social ontology of John Searle, which argues that our reality is largely socially constructed. Searle makes the distinction between brute facts, which are independent of humans, and social facts, which rely on humans. For example, mountains would continue existing if all humans disappeared, but money as a concept relies on humans to continue believing in the value of pieces of paper (or, increasingly, digits in a database). Social facts are created in social institutions. Games are a great example of a social institution: their existence relies on the actions of the people participating. Searle also states that social institutions (like games) are based on constitutive rules, which tell you how to relate to some social institution, but also create – or constitute – it. As the book states:

The aim is to understand games and play on their own terms as socially constructed phenomena while maintaining the realist connections to social context, brute reality, and psychological phenomena. From the perspective of constructionist ludology, games are social institutions constituted by their rules. (p. 15)

This seems to me like a great way to understand games. Some sections of the book rely on it quite heavily, referring to how social facts are created by the process of framing a thing as something specific in some context. This framing is however not used consistently, and it’s explicitly rejected in the second chapter of the book about internal rules (p. 81).⁵ “Constitutive rules” is also not one of the central terms of the book (or one of the five categories), even while it’s central to how Searle understands social institutions.

I’m sure there is a version of this book that could have been written so that Searlean ontology would have been the answer to what the categories are, where they come from, and what their relationship to each other is, but this answer is clearly rejected by the authors. Instead, the book draws on from different sources in different chapters and there is no clear answer to the identity of the categories.

I realize it’s unfair to criticize a book for not being the book I wish it would have been. However, I do think the gaps in the book are clear enough to undermine the central message. There is no theory of rules, but what the book does explain it does in a clear, engaging way.

Stenros, Jaakko, and Markus Montola. 2024. The Rule Book: The Building Blocks of Games. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/14730.001.0001.

1. Anyone following what I’ve been writing about the topic probably guesses that I think this is the wrong answer, because they are formulating the question in the wrong way. ↩

2. After all this detail-oriented work it is particularly jarring when the book gets something wrong, like Rimworld lacking goals. Clearly neither of the authors have played the game, since it clearly communicates goals to the player. ↩

3. I originally referred to the public description of the book in the review. I removed that mention and edited this review after the authors pointed out that they actually hadn’t written that public description. It was a good example of the kind of problem I wanted to point out, but the same point can also be made while sticking to what is actually inside the book. ↩

4. I was honestly a bit surprised to see the term “ludology” being used for what the book does. For me, the term is so tied up in the early identity-building of game studies (Frasca, 2003) that it is hard for me to see it as a simple descriptor for studying games. ↩

5. In other sections of the book there are references to the language philosopher Wittgenstein (p. 42, 175). Unfortunately, the section on internal rules doesn’t cite him, despite him having an extended argument about the impossibility of private rules in Philosophical Investigations. To put it simply, he argues that rule-following can only be validated in a social context. The book mentions this argument in the first chapter (p. 42), but seems to forget it by the time it gets to the chapter on internal rules. ↩