House Rules and my Wii
Tuesday, February 26th, 2008In “On Children’s Games and Gaming,” Linda Hughes documented how a group of girls developed a set of variations and exceptions to the rules of foursquare, to make the game playable in their social context. When I was a child, my mother’s house rules for Scrabble were that “IQ” counted as a word and that we could preemptively look up specific words in the dictionary (but not browse for ideas)—both rules were intended to make the game more playable for children. My partner and I play backgammon with two house rules: a single point may hold no more than five checkers, and when a player rolls a 2 and a 1, if they can make both those moves, then they can also move the ‘doubles’ of their choice. We think that these rules make the game more interesting.
There are many reasons for introducing rule variations into a game: to make the game easier, harder, or more varied; to grease social interactions; to make the game more intuitive; because the rules were initially misunderstood; etc.
There’s an academic argument to be had around whether rule variations change a game into a whole other game—after all, part of the point of playing a game is to give oneself over to the rules of play, not to ignore or alter them to fit our whims. At worst, such alteration is cheating, and at best it’s playing a different game. In practice, though, the argument is indeed academic. Most of us most of the time have a gut feel for the limits of a game, and we can negotiate within those limits to meet various players’ needs.
With video games it’s different. I tried to convince Final Fantasy VII to give me a break on the chocobo breeding, but it wouldn’t listen to me. My Playstation and I do not have any house rules.
My initial thought is that video games are intrinsically unable to accommodate house rules. This is, of course, because video games are code rather than people. A Playstation disc won’t change details of its programming because one of the players is much younger than the rest of the players, or because this stretch of the game is unbalanced but would be much better if you just tweaked it… right… here.
Video games do contain mechanisms to accommodate some of the problems that house rules address. Difficulty levels allow for different skill levels; save points allow for do-overs; customization of avatars and equipment allow players to tweak character abilities and play styles to suit their own preferences. However, these are intrinsicially part of the game as a system in ways that house rules are not. While they allow for increased flexibility in play, they do not allow for unpredictable and creative solutions to unpredicted dilemmas.
After feeling certain of these limitations of video games, I introduced yet another friend to Warioware: Smooth Moves, and in the middle of giving instructions I realized that I was explaining my Wii’s house rules:
*For The Elephant, don’t hold the controller at your nose; hold it at your chin. The sensors will pick it up much better at that height.
*For The Discard, hold the controller very still in your off hand, and when you want to pick it up, toss it up into your dominant hand.
In some ways, these are very literal house (or apartment) rules. Given the way the Wii’s sensors work, my furniture, the location of my television, and the size of my room, there are locations where the Wii’s position can be reliably tracked and locations that are dead zones. Being in the right area makes the game playable.
The rules of Warioware, however, lead to an interesting negotiation between the physical constraints of the system, the explicit instructions of the game, and my desire to play this game and not another game.
In Warioware, the player is moved through a series of microgames—scenarios lasting approximately 5 seconds in which the player is supposed to hold the Wii controller in a specified position and perform an indicated gesture.
For example, I may be instructed to hold the controller in the Elephant position—hold the controller pointing out from my nose—point the controller to the top of the screen to pick up an apple, and then point to the bottom of the screen to deposit the apple in a bucket.
The fun and the fiction of this game is that there is absolutely no encoded reason why I should hold the controller at my nose. As far as the game can detect, I can just as easily hold the controller in my hand and tilt it up and then down. In fact, given the physical constraints of my apartment, I am more likely to be successful at that maneuver, because I can more easily keep the controller away from dead zones in that position.
In fact, I could win this game without doing any of the contortions indicated by the game instructions.
My gut, however, informs me that such an approach would not in fact lead to my winning this game, but rather some other game—or that I would be cheating.
Hence the house rules. Without having to engage with any alterations in code, I negotiate my position in space and figure out how to modify the suggested positions so that I can maintain reliable controller input while playing the game as faithfully as possible.
This is possible in part because the game asks the player to do things that cannot be detected by the video game system. Rather than engaging with inflexible code—which will tell me whether I am right or wrong!—I am engaging with my own expectations of what I think the game is. And since much of what I think the game is is not detectable by the system, the system cannot tell me whether I am playing properly or not. I’m on the honor system, and I have to trust my gut.
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There’s also something about the fact that Wii games are party games. Wii sports does the same thing. When these games are played as party games, then there is the human element to monitor the negotiation. The huge gaping holes in the system are filled in by people watching and negotiating with each other.