New Rule

The other night I attended a birthday party involving the oh-so-American phenomenon midnight bowling. A number of my friends were in attendance, many of them as couples. Midnight bowling is really a drinking-game version of regular bowling, so by the time the second game began people were fairly wobbly, and their feelings and attitudes towards their companions became more transparent. I abstained from drink and so was able to notice a curious phenomenon, one that every romantically-involved male player knows well: the game vs. the girl.

Habitual game players can be counted on to play to win — it is the nature of humans to act competitively in competitive situations. Rejecting the premise of competition is uncommon, and extraordinary circumstance usually accompany such instances. Given the nature of competitive activity, it is natural to become deeply absorbed in the contest and to devote one’s full attention to it, at the expense of peripheral stimuli. This attention absorption is well known to game players and their friends and families, but consider the circumstances that conspire when a girlfriend or spouse is involved. Assuming the player is liable to become immersed in the game and devote his attention to it at the expense of his companion, and assuming that he feels guilty and ashamed of this and will consciously strive to counter the attention drain, we have an emergent set of variables that are, in a poetic way, new rules for the game. Whatever the player is playing, the rules and goals as they apply to them personally are changed by the addition of this person’s presence. Sometimes, they don’t even need to be present; merely existing and demanding attention is enough.

What I observed was a friend consciously sabotaging his play so as not to beat the hostess in the first game. He is a strong bowler and could easily have won if he had concentrated on the fixed rules, but he chose to appoint a different set of goals and constraints for himself based on his concern for social dynamics. However, as those social dynamics are, in fact, dynamics, they can be thought of as being part of the game itself. They have direct impact on how the player interprets meaning in the “meaningful choices” presented by the game.

Certainly we all know about white lies and throwing a game to make another feel better, but what I postulate is that, in the context of a game, doing so is actually a form of modding — the player is altering the game to reflect his or her private set of variables, and the resulting play they pursue reveals an adaptation of the original rules. It might be interesting to try to document this phenomenon and attempt to model it into a prescribed ruleset for games like ARGs or LARPs (though that would of course be incredibly geeky).

Tags: Game Criticism, General //