The Importance of Rules in Games

Pretty much every every game has rules of some kind, like Mario being able to jump on enemies to kill them but not being able to jump into lava, players dying in an online multiplayer game which face a respawn timer before they can continue playing, getting experience points to level up as you defeat enemies in role-playing games, etc. As discussed here (Fun.familyeducation, 2013), rules may not be very popular, and some people don't even want them around. But rules are critically important, and essentially are the way a game is designed to be played. They help give the game structure and meaning while also trying to make the game fun (if the rule is designed that way). Such as the bonus house rule in the board game Monopoly, as officially listed by (Hasbro, 2006), where if someone doesn't buy a property when they land on it, the property will then be auctioned off to the highest bidder. It makes the game more fun and frantic to play, while also adding another layer of skill and strategy, which is a good implementation of a rule being fun. This rule isn't necessary to play the game, but it's listed in the instructions if experienced players want to take the gameplay further to get a deeper experience from their product.

Rule are really not designed to be broken, in games and society in general. Doing so could have massive consequences on the game and possibly cause it to be a practically unplayable mess. For example, we broke the rules when playing the card game Bartok in class (as explained in my gameplay journal), where everyone had one chance to completely mix up the game's established formula. This quickly caused the game to become very chaotic, unfair and overall just not very fun to play as people kept messing you up by chance rather than skill. Rules can help enforce balance in a game and are there for a reason, and the fact we unanimously had a better time playing the more basic, but functional version of Bartok is evidence of that.

Rules in games like this also should be established to everyone before the game begins, as discussed by (Get On With The Game Kids, 2016), they can be discussed before the game begins or explained to the group playing the game. Or else if somebody is out of the loop with how to play the game, mistakes could be made. Which will both waste time re-establishing the game's mechanics, but also fixing any mistakes that happened. Likewise, the player who isn't confident on how to play the game will be at an unfair disadvantage the whole way through, and the entire point of rules in the first place is to make games fair and less frustrating.