Rules Are Rules, Leave It At That

In all honesty, I think Juul is completely overanalyzing video games in his assessment of the relationship between rules and the fictional world. His concept of an “incomplete (and incoherent) world” is completely logical and easy to follow but that’s because it’s common sense. Video games, while advancing more and more each day, must have rules and boundaries, otherwise users would have absolutely no objective. Therefore, I think it is meaningless to qualify a relationship between the two.

Video game players don’t buy games because of the objectivity in rules; they buy games because their interests align with the fictional world created within the game. Pokémon has the same general layout as World of Warcraft: a player must adventure through the world and encounter a multitude of people and creatures in order to decipher what task must be accomplished next. The rules of the game are merely there because first it contains all possible actions a player can perform. This goes hand in hand with the other reason for rules and that’s simple computing power. If World of Warcraft were to have no rules then players could act in unprecedented ways. This would obviously create a problem as programming can only go so far. Therefore, many rules are simply the bounds of programming.

Juul uses Mario as an example of his idea of an “incoherent world”, noting that it contradicts itself or prevents the player from imagining a complete fictional world (123). He says that the game’s three lives rule is unexplainable by anything within the fictional world. If everything were to be explainable within the fictional world it would be complete, however that would create a world far too big (computing power). Thankfully, he at least comes to the conclusion that these rules are necessary otherwise games would be too hard or impossible to fathom.

My problem is that he feels the need to qualify this assertion with evidence and concepts like an incoherent world. Video games are meant to be fictional, they’re meant to have rules that guide players towards a common objective, and they’re meant to be played without concerning oneself with every minute inconsistency. Juul has dissected this relationship, or in his mind dilemma, between a fictional world and rules far too much. Players aren’t concerned with this because it’s common sense; the two go hand in hand. Without rules a game doesn’t exist and without a fictional world you have programming logic.

While I don’t think the rest of Juul’s arguments are poor, I find this first part to be particularly boring and pointless. It provides no argument that couldn’t be reasonably figured out by playing any sort of video game for the first time (extremely explicit language). A person never exposed to video games could work out pretty quickly the relationship between rules and the fictional world.