I wrote a review of The Rule Book: The Building Blocks of Games by Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola. It's a great book about making sense of rules, but leaves a lot questions unanswered. The book is also freely available, if you want read it.
https://jonne.arjoranta.fi/2024/rule-book/
[#]GameStudies
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Heck yeah! I've been waiting for (or maybe hoping for) your take on this book!
I also struggled with the "extra categories" throughout the book but always thought they kind of fit into one of the core categories. It almost felt like the core categories worked as a lens through which one could perceive the extra categories, which is maybe kind of a cop-out interpretation but worked well enough for me.
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At times I wondered if it was a playful joke: announcing five categories and immediately adding like ten more. I'm pretty sure there's a Monty Python sketch like that somewhere.
Sometimes it also felt like several core categories could apply to an extra category. But I never figured out whether I'd missed something or if there really was such fluidity in the categories.
Which is to say your critique is spot on, even if I think the book works pretty well regardless!
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@jaranta The Searlean critique is bang on, too! I think of the book as a sequel to Jaakko and Markus's dissertations (which they refer to in the book as well) so I was happy with the brief intro to constructionist ludology. But again, as with the extra categories, it felt like constructionist ludology was something you could use to understand the things you find in the book rather than an actual theory to pick up or a methodology explaining how the book was put together in the first place.
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@personamatters @jaranta Re Jonne's footnote 3, indeed they've been actively trying to reframe (reclaim?) ludology for the last decade I think
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@MKarhulahti @personamatters I can see some value in doing that, but I'm not sure we need that. 🤷
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@jaranta I don't know if this reflects your position accurately or if I'm just projecting my own thoughts onto your review, but it feels like we wanted a book solid enough to use as an easy reference, but we got a book one can definitely reliably cite but which will require tacking on all kinds of extra stuff to fill in the gaps the authors left.
I mean, a lot of books are like that, and sometimes that's for the better! But still!
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@jaranta Like, Jaakko and Markus have both certainly written texts I've considered imminently citeable. As in, if I write about X, I'll always drop in a ref to their paper Y. And this book kind of does that for rules but not in the way I thought it would!
Maybe they pulled an aarseth? They wrote something everyone considers excellent enough to write about but flawed enough to endlessly disagree with!
Then again, I don't know if I actually disagree with them. Hmm.
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@personamatters I think I actually wanted a more complicated and difficult book: one where they connect all of these things together and create a grand theory of rules.
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@jaranta One can hope this book was a necessary step towards that!
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