Rules have meaning

Looking over that digression about my personal hack of the ORE rules, it struck me that this is what I mean by the expressive language unique to games. Specifically, that last note about whether or not Will points could be cashed in to cure sanity damage. By including such a rule, I'm making a statement about the way the world - and moreover the human mind - work within the confines of the fictitious world I'm creating. And, of course, by doing so I'm making a statement about either a) how the real world works (In RPG theory terms, this would be the simulationist model) or b) the way the world works in the stories I want to tell with the system. An RPG system is designed to tell a certain kind of story, by design or omission.

By including the rule, I declare that the human mind can recover from trauma through sheer force of will. And, by not including the rule, I declare the opposite: No matter how strong your personality, once you're broken you are very likely to remain broken. Choosing which interpretation best suits the story I'm looking to tell involves both what I think is true in real life, and what I think is best for the story and the enjoyment of the player. When I eventually decided to drop the rule, that decision reflects both my beliefs about real people (that there are a lot of forceful people walking around carrying psychological burdens) and how I want the stories of my Player Characters to play out (I want them to be those forceful people, traumatized and without easy solutions).

Now, from a purely mechanical point of view, "Will" and "Sanity" are merely game resources, and whether or not they are inter-exchangeable is a soulless question. This is where we get malarkey like the belief that a game's rules cannot be art, because they're simply mathematical interplays which may bear "meaningful" labels. In RPGs, this can be counter-argued by the point that in-game values are a guide to imagination, and have as much meaning as the players apply to them. But even in games which lack the collaborative storytelling element, rules carry meaning. In chess. the rules and their interplay posit that pawns are intrinsically less valuable than other pieces - but losing too many of them will limit your options. One could, if they wanted, spin this into a "moral" about not cavalierly sacrificing apparently useless followers to advance one's larger schemes. An anti-games-as-artist (Man, I need a catchier name for that) might claim that this is a reach, but it can be derived from the rules as written and played, involving no greater leap than any given interpretation of Waiting for Godot. Tetris, a profoundly abstract game, presents "completeness" as a nebulous goal and "incompleteness" as something to be desperately avoided. In this, it speaks to a human belief so deeply held and intuitive that articulation in a traditional manner would be pointless. Whether that accounts for the game's constant popularity is anyone's guess.

The laws of a nation, the rules of its real games, are a narrative out of order, a belief system describing how the world should work according to thousands of authors, self-contradictory at times and starkly clear on a few basic points. The rules of a game, likewise, reflect the world the author hopes to create, if only for the purposes of illustrative fiction.