"Does Super Mario Bros. Have Any Rules?"

No! Yes! Well, maybe? Depends on what rules are! No, it depends on what a game is! Depends…

I knew I would be sparking some controversy by posting that online. It's openly cheeky and disruptive to how people think about rules in games. I'm proud of myself for managing to find a question that prompts both responses of "obviously no" and "obviously yes." I wasn't expecting the degree of response, or the way it would get grabbed across platforms and become the Topic Of The Day in multiple different RPG spaces. I also wasn't expecting the frustration it would provoke or the condescension people would throw in my face (but maybe I should've — it's not my first day having opinions online while female). 

I think this question exposes a fundamental misunderstanding at the heart of laymen/hobbyist conceptions of what a game actually is and what it does, and my hope is that by discussing what exactly a rule actually is (and how a video game developer would understand them fundamentally differently than how a TTRPG designer does) we can actually re-examine our approach to game design, and maybe pick apart the inherited and assumed relationship between toys, rules, games, and play at the heart of TTRPGs.

Rulings NAND Rules

Before we can figure out whether or not Super Mario Bros. has any rules, we've gotta figure out what a rule actually is. Thankfully, The Rule Book has us covered. The Rule Book (2024) by Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola goes deep into what on earth a rule is and how it functions. It's a fantastic book, and I'd whole-heartedly recommend it to everyone who wants to learn more about games from a foundational perspective. They lay out five kinds of rules, each of which contain subcategories (and each is covered in a chapter in its own right):

• Formal Rules, which are what people point at and call "rules" in a board game or TTRPG. These include codified rules and also "house rules."

• Social Rules, which govern how people treat each other and the culture of play that surrounds the game.

• Internal Rules, which are restrictions and goals people put on themselves, which they don't need to vocalize to others.

• External Regulation, which are restrictions applied to the game by external pressure, like the law, the venue, or parents. 

• Material Rules, which are the "brute facts" of the game, the materiality of the toys that compose it. These are "hardly rules at all" and, much like External Regulation, behave fundamentally differently than the first three kinds of rules.

As an example, if we're playing Tag on the playground:

• "If you get tagged, you're it" is a Formal Rule.

• "Don't be a dick" is a Social Rule.

• "I'm showing off how fast I am at running." is an Internal Rule.

• "Don't run into the road!" is an External Regulation.

• "The faster kids are harder to tag than the slower kids" is part of the material of the game.

The first three kinds of rules have a lot of qualities that overlap. They emerge and are shaped by consensus and can be changed by their players at any time. The latter two operate differently. External Regulations cannot be changed by the will of the players, and the materiality of a game will not shift except through changes to that materiality. You and I can consent to play "Hover-Football" all we want, but no matter how hard we agree we cannot make the football hover except by changing the materiality of the football in question. 

This gives us an insight into part of how a game is constructed: there are the toys and equipment which compose the physical reality of the game and then each player's understanding of the rules (which is often, although not always, harmonious). A lot of games care a lot about the materiality of their toys, and bake a lot of the assumptions of their game rules into this materiality. It would be cheating to fill a football with helium, but that's only because the codified rules of Football via the NFL outline the expected dimensions of an American Football. The NFL has no rules governing the altitude of its football fields, which means that the Denver Broncos benefit from their mile-high home field advantage. 

Whether or not changing the materiality "counts as" breaking a rule varies tremendously based on the cultural biases and assumptions of the game's community. Choosing to call this materiality part of the game's rules provokes a lot of uncertainty. Would that mean that playing Football in Colorado is a different game than playing Football in Miami? While this materiality is certainly an important part of the game, and I'm certainly open to considering it part of the rules of the game, I think that it operates on a fundamentally different set of principles than other kinds of rules, and therefore could be said to not be a rule at all.

At the very least, if it is a rule, it's an inescapably different kind of rule than formal, social, and internal rules.

An Aside About Women's Sports

The idea that changing the materiality of a game somehow constitutes cheating is at the heart of the transmisogynistic farce trotted out by anti-trans advocates in sports. Without an understanding of the physical proportions of different sexes, the ways hormones materially change those proportions, or the history of women's sports in general, people love to pontificate on how even the mere trace of some kind of historic maleness is enough to render a woman unable to compete in women's events, even if it's a game like Chess, where the materiality of the player's body is entirely irrelevant. The debate about whether a game's materiality is part of its rules is a question with broader political ramifications than people might expect.

Playing With Toys

I've bought a Rubik's Cube and am playing with it at home. I'm getting frustrated, and after a while I decide to break it apart and reassemble it such that the sides are in the "solved" places. Have I cheated? 

We probably need some more context first. If I was in a Rubik's Cube tournament, or competing for the fastest record, I definitely cheated (as I violated a formal rule of the organization). If I need a solved Rubik's Cube to impress hot babes at my local bar, they'll probably be put off when they discover what I did (as I violated a social rule of Rubik's Cube). But what if I'm just messing with the Rubik's Cube for fun, or what if I'm competing in the game "who can break and reassemble a Rubik's Cube the fastest?" Well, now I haven't cheated at all. I've played with the object in exactly the ways that make me happy and I'm operating according to rules of my own invention. The Rubik's Cube is mine, goddamn it, and I'll play with it in whatever way I want to. Spin Master might wish they could stop me. They may design the cube to stop me from breaking it apart, or from exploiting specific hacks within the design of the cube to make solving it faster, or they may create a trap that goes off once I break it apart. You might think less of me for having broken it. 

But it's mine. 

If I bought Super Mario Bros for the Gameboy back in the day, that's my toy. I hook the cartridge into the machine, load up my game, and can now manipulate the pixels on screen according to the limitations of the object. On its own, without any social intervention, this is a toy. Once I have my toy, I can choose to play a game with it. Due to the function of capitalism and the cultural conflation of game-objects with the games-played, there is exactly one game I'm expected to play when I sit down to play Super Mario Bros. 

But let's think through the various rules that compose this game. It's trickier than you expect!

Some Possible Rules To Mario

"Mario cannot go left", "Jump on enemies to kill them," "When you get a game over the level restarts," etc.

Most of the time, when people described the rules of Mario to me, this sort of thing is what they brought up. All of these are, however, the materiality of Super Mario Bros., the byproduct of the physical nature of the data coded onto the cartridge and loaded into the console. You cannot choose to change these rules any more than we could choose to play Hover-Football. If you wish to change them you must change the arrangement of ones and zeros within the cartridge itself. 

If these are rules, then they are a fundamentally different kind of rule than the rules that shape analog games.

"Your goal is to reach the flag pole as quickly as possible."

This is absolutely a rule of Super Mario Bros… the game that most people play. I could play a game with my copy of Super Mario Bros. which doesn't follow this rule. It's an Internal Rule. 

"When myself and my older brother play, he gets to be Mario and I have to be Luigi."

This is a very common Social Rule. Nothing in the game cartridge forces it to be this way, but it's an expectation players will demand on and would influence the game if it wasn't true. It's a Social Rule.

"Don't use an external device to manipulate the data stored by the cartridge."

Whether or not you consider this a rule and what counts as "manipulating data" is hotly contested. If I'm playing on an emulator, am I "really" playing Super Mario Bros? Are people using arbitrary code execution really still playing Super Mario Bros? 

And on that note, are speedrunners playing Super Mario Bros?

The Toy and the Game (the point of it all)

Super Mario Bros, the product you buy from a store and then plug into a console, is not really itself a game. It is a game-object, something sold as a game, colloquially called a game — but without anyone to play it, no game is present. On its own, it's a toy. Or perhaps (as Patrick Lemieux and Stephanie Boluk would describe it), it's a piece of equipment. 

(We'll still call it a game, though, because that's a conflation English makes, and I'm not in the business of telling people things aren't games.)

If I pick up Super Mario Bros (the toy) I can now play Super Mario Bros (the game). The game and the toy are conflated in the cultural imaginary. However, one can be engaged without the other. For instance, arbitrary code execution is the act of playing an extremely different game upon the toy. I can play the game of Super Mario Bros on a piece of paper with a pencil without the toy present. 

It benefits the levers of capitalism to conflate the toy and the game. Toys are substantially more marketable than games, but games have substantially more cultural cache. Live-service multiplayer games like Fortnite conflate the distinction even further by banning people who take materially-permissable game actions that still reveal themselves to be a kind of cheating, for they go against the developer's intent. When we translate physical games into digital games, the rules we choose to make part of the game's materiality can give away a lot of our assumptions about which parts of a game are or aren't "real."

When a video game designer talks about the rules of the game, they will often conflate the material choices being made about the game object with the social and formal rules of the game being played upon that object. They're not wrong to do so! But I hope this is a lesson for analog game designers — we are not video game developers. We cannot so easily conflate the toy and the game. Instead, we must understand that the toy and the game are two different objects and the process of making one is going to be very different from the process of making the other.

An Aside About Chess and Simulations

It is easy to make the mistake of looking at the chessboard in Lichess and assuming it is uncomplicatedly the exact same game as Chess played over a board. People who do this will read the previous sections and come to me saying, "but Jay! Do you claim that a game of online chess has substantially fewer rules than a game of real chess? Isn't that absurd?"

Such a claim would only be absurd if you thought that Chess is purely the resulting description of its formal rules. The similarity between online Chess and physical Chess is entirely due to Chess's nature as a game that places a heavy emphasis on its formal rules over the materiality of the pieces. There are many differences between online and physical Chess, especially at a high tournament level. But still, due to the way Chess has been constructed, it is remarkably easy to translate its formal rules into a set of material limitations placed on digital infrastructure.

This is not true of other games which have been translated digitally. Magic: The Gathering Arena cannot support most "silver-bordered" cards, or even certain tournament-legal cards which work within its rules but would be too costly to construct the digital infrastructure to enable. The Madden series of videogames are openly and explicitly simulacrums of Football. I don't think anyone would claim that even an extremely top-of-the-line Madden game is the exact same game as a physical game of Football.

Towards Ungovernable Games

As a game designer, you are an artist with a very limited palette. You don't have much you actually get to work with! If I was to exhaustively try to define my palette of tools, it would be:

• An explanation of formal rules for the players to try to interpret and understand.

• The material characteristics of the book, the character sheets, the dice, the cards, the physical components.

• The images, the art, the references I make within the text to a broader culture of imagination.

• Those few games I run myself for others, which can in some fashion model for other people what I imagine the game to be.

And that's not much at all. If I was a video game developer, the materiality of the game could be the centerpiece of my creative practice — and perhaps I could get away with calling that materiality "the rules of the game." But I can't! As a designer, all I can do is rely on the book itself as the material and hope that the rules of the game are enough to wrap your head around. I don't have any control over what you do with the book and its rules once you get your hands on them. 

I think a lot of analog game designers would view this as a great source of grief. Sometimes I talk to my compatriots and I feel like they're all "temporarily embarrassed Blizzard devs," desperate for the chance to seize control of their players and ensure only Correct Play occurs. On the flipside, sometimes I encounter designers who are terrified by the threat of game designer mind control, who rail against the threat of coercive design.

You have no control.

If you make TTRPGs, you're not making Super Mario Bros. Be jealous of board game designers — at least they've got their boards! Most TTRPGs have no materiality they can depend upon. You have no complex arrangement of logic which can produce actions through inputs and outputs, no physics engine, no great machine, no way to ban the people who don't see your vision. All you've got are the rules you've written down, those fragile misunderstood things, modeled as they are inside fragile sacks of meat called brains. 

Does that scare you? Or will you rise to the call?