Rules and Instructional Games

At its simplest form, a game is just a set of defined rules. There are rules indicating the maximum number of players who can play a game, rules describing how to score points, rules indicating what is allowed in the game and, in the case of digital games, rules that apply to writing the code that makes the video game character jump. Without rules, games would not exist.

Rules for play.

But the multiple levels of rules within games is not always clear and when designing a game or using game-based elements to enhance learning, an understanding of the different levels of rules is important. In the book, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, the authors define three types of rules that apply to games.

Operational Rules. These are the rule that describe how the game is played. When you want to play a game and someone explains that you can’t open the door until you collect the right key, they are describing to you an operational rule. Or they tell you that collecting 2000 tokens allows you to buy a cooler snow board. Those are an operational rules. Once you gain a basic understanding of operational rules, you can start to play the game.

Constituative Rules or Foundational Rules. These are the underlying formal structures that dictate how a game functions. An example is the mathematical formulas used to calculate how many times the number six will appear on the die. These tend to be abstract and need only be understood by the designer of the game. However, occasionally a player can determine these underlying rules and use them to his or her advantage. In the 1990’s a group of math students from MIT used a method of counting cards in the card game Black Jack to win millions of dollars at casinos in Las Vegas. They achieved this feat by moving beyond the operational rules governing the game such as “the cards from 2 through 9 are valued at their face value” and “the 10 card, Jack, Queen, and King are all valued at 10” to the foundational rules such as “we are playing with three decks which means there are 156 cards and that means there are a total of 48 high cards and four of them have been played already so the probability that the next card is a high card is .28. ” View article about MIT Card Counting Here.

Implicit Rules or Behavior Rules. These are the rules that govern the social contract between two or more players, in other words, the rules related to being a good sport about the game…game etiquette. These are implied rules and are usually not written. Yet, they have a powerful influence over the game. If they are violated, it is usually a penalty and in team game can constitute the player being kicked out of the game.

Another set of rules exist in an instructional game and those rules are the Instructional Rules, not mentioned in the game literature but absolutely required rules for gamification of learning and instruction.

These are the rules that you want the learner to know and internalize after the game is played. It is the reason they game is being created in the first place. These rules are the rules that govern the learning within the process of the game. For example, we were creating an online board game to teach inventory managers concepts and ideas to reduce inventory within the organization. One of the rules was that if the player got an answer wrong, the inventory levels in the factory went up.

So the player with the lowest score won the game, not the player with the highest score. This was a conscious choice to reinforce the instructional rule that lower inventory was desirable. The actual game play would not have changed if the score went down but the instructional lesson may have been diminished if it had.

Consider what instructional rules you want to add to your “serious games” to make the lessons more impactful.