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Breaking the Rules of a Game
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SKU	GDC-03-025
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Breaking the Rules of a Game,
417

Game Design, Lecture

Eric Zimmerman
CEO, gameLab

Katie Salen
Director of Graduate Studies, Design and Technology, Parsons School of Design
Playing a game means following the rules. But in almost every game ever designed, breaking the rules is also part of the play. From Monopoly "home rules" to the mods, cheats and hacks of digital gaming, part of playing a game involves bending, tweaking, and breaking the authority of the game rules.

What does this mean for game designers? Should game designers be discouraging rule-breaking among players? Or incorporate rule-breaking into their game designs? What does the phenomenon of rule-breaking have to teach us about how games work? If a game rule can be broken, is it still a rule?

In this lecture, these and other questions regarding rule-breaking and game design are addressed. The goal of the session is to better understand what game rules are, how rules are broken by players, and how rule-breaking impacts game design. Rule-breaking comes in many forms, and not every form of rule-breaking is bad for a game. How can game designers embrace rule-breaking as a formal, social, and cultural strategy for game innovation?

Rule-breaking is a simple fact of games, and game designers would be well-served to better understand it. This session will explain the common types of rule breaking on different game platforms and the kinds of players that break rules. Rule-breaking can be good or bad for a game design, and this session covers concrete strategies for both avoiding destructive rule-breaking and for encouraging rule-breaking when it helps build a game community or more engaging experiences for players.

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