Toddler gaming part 3—rules!

In her games, my daughter loves rules.

One of the fundamental components of any game is rules. Without rules, you may have a fun activity, but you don’t have a proper game. That’s why we RPG geeks have (and gloat over) elaborate tomes of arcane rules addressing even the most improbable situations. Sitting around and telling a shared story may be fun, but most of us find it more fun with rules.

My brother and I used to make a game of shared storytelling on long car trips. Eschewing die rolling and combat tables, we nonetheless invented guidelines for whose turn in was to spin yarns about the brave Mercemer Brothers (the heroes of many of our tales, adolescent boys who foiled almost all the villains’ plots through the judicious use of M80s, which we somehow envisioned as the pinnacle of personal explosive devices). Of course, the storytelling could be surrendered voluntarily, but it had to be given up if one player exceeded five minutes or repeated an event without sufficient variation.

And understanding and exploiting rules grants a degree of pleasure itself, of course.

As I’ve already discussed, my two-year-old prefers games of “pretend,” as I suspect most two-year-olds do. These proto–roleplaying games may involve walking in circles around the first floor and calling it “going on vacation” or making sure that her toys are looking in a particular direction or “talking” to one another.

But already they’re starting to have rules.

Oh, I don’t pretend to understand her rules, but she’s got ‘em.

For instance, in a recent game of “follow me around the house,” S— gave me one of her plastic dinosaurs. “You have to hold it like this,” she said, grasping the one she reserved for herself by the tail and holding it as a sort of saurian pistol. I complied, and we completed two circuits of the house.

“Now hold it like this,” she said, switching her grip to its head. She started to lead me around again but caught me letting my arm hang at my side. “No, you have to hold it right!” I complied, and the game continued.

As an example of a non-roleplaying game, I recently found S— and her friend sitting on opposite arms of the sofa in the den, taking turns calling out the names of objects they could see.

“Wall!”

“Pillow!”

“Kitchen!”

“Farm set!”

“Arm!”

“Farm set!”The girls laughed and laughed, but their laughter increased when one of them shouted something out of turn or had to pause to think of something. They began giggling hardest when they started making up words completely. And if you saw them, you’d know that it’s the same sort of laughter that erupts from any player in a good-natured pick-up game when a challenge is missed.As I said, I don’t exactly know why she makes these rules. Is she simply asserting authority? Somehow, that doesn’t feel right. Instead, it feels as if she wants to really make a game of an activity. Adding arbitrary challenges (holding the toy correctly) and mandating turn-taking adds fun to the fun.

Talking about emergent behavior in response to rules systems is always interesting, but at the moment I’m finding it even more interesting to watch the emergence of rules systems themselves.

Add comment September 11th, 2007