An Economy of Rules (part 1)
My last entry about design rules was neither deep nor thorough, but judging by the comments it seems to have found some resonance.
There are rules, and there are rules, and there are laws, and principles, and constraints, and axioms, and maxims, and on and on. Why, we have more words for rules than an Eskimo has words for snow. 
What I’m interested in is not so much what the rules are or how they can be classified (I don’t believe there can ever be a satisfactory classification scheme), but where rules operate and how they come to be.
I’m interested in not a taxonomy of rules, but an economy of rules.
Another Half-Baked Design Principle
It started with a comment from “Brian” on Grand Text Auto. When dealing with players who intentionally misbehave — swearing, flirting excessively, attempting to torture — while interacting with virtual characters, Brian stated this design maxim: “The user is always right.”
Next, Walter on Ludonauts mentioned The God Concept, a design principle advocated by Scott Miller at Game Matters. The God Concept (a rather inappropriate name) is for people who dislike the effects of chance and luck.
I would like to propose my own design principle. I’ll call it Brandon’s Half-Baked Law of Game Design Principles: “People who make up game design principles secretly hate games.”
The Anti-Modalist Manifesto (ca. 1998)
Modalists: perpetrators of modal [inter]activity. In Modalist design, the user is a black box for input and output. Modalists train their users to obediently shift their attention towards a preselected target. Modalists encourage serial actions and schizophrenic behavior.
Anti-Modalists: corrupt and pervert the constructions of Modalist design. Anti-Modalists are concerned with the dismantling of Modalist classifications: art versus science, actual or virtual, mind and body, man against machine, trees versus rhizomes. Anti-Modalists do things right the wrong way (or wrong the right way). We embrasse the inappropriate.
The Wet Paint Manifesto
I’ve been sorting through some files (real, paper files) and I came across something that I wrote some time around 1996-1997. This was before I wrote the Anti-Modal Manifesto (the location of which is currently unknown).
Wet Paint
i.
A sign on a pole reads: “Wet Paint” and it is not true. The paint has dried.
Driving down the freeway, orange signs declare: “Under Construction” but no work is being performed. The act of construction is not at all visible.
Do these signs actually mean their opposites? Under Construction means: there is no construction. Wet Paint means: the paint is dry. Well, there is that small window of time when the signs are correct. But why do the signs remain?
Putting up signs and taking them down again when they have served their purpose is a human activity, it requires a human being present to do the thing. When we see a Wet Paint sign, we understand that it might be old, it may have expired. But we also know (infer) that someone was there to put up the sign.
After having seen the same Wet Paint sign on a pole for three days, one might be inclined to take it down. If not, it might stay there for weeks, becoming dust-blown and wind-ragged, falling to the ground and drifting to the gutter, its sans-serif letters fading and unreadable until some final catastrophic event, a seasonal rainstorm or a street sweeper, removes the final traces.